As in years past, I find myself sitting by the pool this morning at Prezcon thinking about my experience so far. Yesterday, my first day at Prezcon 2019, was a lot of fun. I have seen several of my friends already and played boardgames with many of them. The drive to Prezcon was uneventful, even with strong winds that pushed my little FIAT around a bit. I played a surprising number of games for a Prezcon Monday: six, with two of them being new to me.
Driving down to Prezcon yesterday, I reflected upong what drives my enjoyment of the convention. It has taken me years to realize this, but a large part of the enjoyment is spending time with like minded people. This is also true for rowing. In both boardgaming and rowing, the activity brings me in contact with who enjoy breaking down an activity into its components and figuring them out. It also brings me into contact with people who, to varying degrees are competitive. For boardgaming specifically, this involves learning how a game works or learning deeper depths of the mechanics of a more familiar game. While I enjoy trying to win, the games I play, I also enjoy the interactions with players and the conversations after and between games. Prezcon provides the opportunity to have dinner with fellow gamers, chat with them, and share experiences about new games and new experiences with familiar games.
I played six games yesterdays: Scythe, Sagrada, two games of 7 Wonders, Azul, and Wingspan. There is also a tongue and cheek tournament for Rock, Paper, Scissors, but I don't really include that in the count.
Scythe: I played this for the first time, and attended most of the demo. I did exceptionally poorly in the game, but found it interesting and learned how many of the mechanics worked. My difficulty with the game is that I missed a key part of the demo where specifics for end game scoring was discussed. During my game, I tried to fake it by observing what others were doing. That didn't work, but I had fund and want to try the game again.
Sagrada: This is another game I played for the first time. It is a light and fairly quick game. It is a dice drafting game where one lays down colored dice on a board in a required pattern (to make a stained glass window pattern). There are rules concerning the numbers and colors of the dice in each placed tile. I enjoyed playing it, but I experienced little bits of frustration when I would forget about a specific rule on dice placement. I did respectably, only losing by about 10% (the scores were 49, 49, and 45). I think this is a game with wide appeal to both people who play a lot of boardgames and those are more casual in the hobby.
7 Wonders: I played two pick up games of this, and it is one of my favorite games. My copy of the game is well used -- the box is falling apart and needs, as my friend Matt said, "some tape love".
Azul: I recently learned this game and, playing for the third time ever, had my worst score (I made a serious misplay that resulted in getting stuck with the maximum penalty in a game round). This is another game that is relatively short and has wide appeal to include casual boardgamers.
Wingspan: I brought my recently purchased copy to play at Prezcon. I absolutely love this game. It has engine building mechanics which I enjoy, has a limited number of decisions to make during one's turn that speeds up play, and has well made game components. The game designers also put a lot of research and effort to fully develop the birdwatcher theme. Cards are beautifully illustrated, the flavor text provides short facts about the birds, and the mechanics feel right to what the birds actually do in real life. Playing the game with Prezcon gamers put the game through a kind of playtesting wringer. Small corners of the rulebook needed to be investigated for clarity (example: the use of a "wildcard" feature and its interactions with other parts of the gamee), and we identified one typo in one of the goal cards (the Photographer goal, for anyone familiar with Wingspan, appears to be missing information). The scores were also very different from the previous games I had played. In my previous games, winning scores ranged from 77 to 81. In this game, 74 was the lowest score, second was 95, and 108 was the winner. Players pretty much play in parallel (there are no "screw with your opponent" mechanisms), and everyone at the table did a good job in building the bird collecting engines. I expect to be able to get at least one more game of this in, this week.
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