Cabin Con 2021 - Part II

 

Cabin Con 2021 - Part II

So I mentioned in my previous post that getting sleep during Cabin Con is important, and I stand by that. After all, it's harder to grok (understand) new rules/games if you're running short on sleep, and you're also much more likely to get upset or worked up about something that isn't worth it. That said, I had driven through the night to arrive a day and a half after everyone else, so I was already behind on games. I'd go to bed early on my first night, but I'd only doze for about an hour after I arrived around 4:30am so I could wake up, say hi to everyone, catch up, and immediately start playing games.

To be fair, I've never gotten a tattoo after too little sleep...

What better game to start off [my] gaming weekend than a word game on very little sleep!

But seriously, folks, Spell Smashers is fun.

I'm generally not a fan of word games because I find them really frustrating. I'm someone who reads just about every day, and I write too. My vocabulary isn't extraordinary, but I also don't think it's generally lacking. In spite of my previous statement, I struggle with word games. For whatever reason, I have difficulty seeing the words until they're either shown to me or someone else plays them, and then I get mad about it. But I came to Cabin Con expecting to learn new games, and I just figured that maybe this particular one wasn't my cup of tea. Plus, it was short, so I had nothing to lose, right? Except as it turns out, this is a clever little game that I enjoyed! Basically, each player is forming words in order to battle and vanquish monsters. These monsters have different abilities based on the adjective with which they're paired, and that makes them all the more dangerous, because their damage deals you "wound cards." Wound cards count against your hand limit and feature letter combinations with which it can be difficult to spell words. As you deal damage to monsters, you get coins, and if you defeat a monster, you get to keep it as a trophy. You use the coins to purchase new gear, potions, take on new quests...all the things an adventurer does. And these cards help you swap out letters, score extra points in niche circumstances, and each gear card is worth points at the end of the game.

One of the things I really appreciate about the game is that higher initiative is granted to the player with the biggest word. Which means that it sometimes behooves players to spell a word with fewer letters because it means they can punch a monster that has already taken damage, and thus poach the kill off of a player who made a bigger word. Also, while there are gear cards that reward players with the biggest word (I had a card that would do additional damage if I had the highest initiative; I was playing with Josh, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in language. So I was...well, you know, hosed), there are also gear cards that reward different element types used in a word (each letter has a symbol that assigns it an element, as these words are supposed to spells, after all!). And so it's not a matter of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer. Despite the fact that my words never got bigger than 6 letters and usually only averaged around 5, I ended up in a close second place because I had bought so many gear cards.

...

Although, as I write that last sentence, I start to question my memory and think that maybe I actually won this game instead? I don't think so. I think it was just a close second because my gear cards got me so many points. Forgive me: I was running on very little sleep and had driven through the night to arrive by morning. But the fact that it was so close when my words weren't really measuring up should say a lot about how different approaches to the game really can be rewarding, which I think is rare in word games! Also, even though the wound cards can have frustrating combinations of letters, sometimes, they're really what you need and you're grateful to have them! It's a game I'm not rushing out to buy, but if I see it on someone's shelf, I'll happily suggest we play it!

After catching up with these good folks, eating breakfast (delicious French toast that Ryan made, which was an excellent way to start the weekend!), admiring the board game stack, and warming up with Spell Smashers, we moved to playing The Taverns of Tiefenthal. Josh brought this one and seemed excited to teach it. At first, I assumed it was some kind of a worker placement game. For whatever reason, the art set me to thinking that, though I can't quite pin down why.

As Mike and Suf still had to punch a clock and do some work, and Drew was still crashed out, now was a good time to field Taverns, since its player count is 2-4 players. So it was Josh, Johnnie, Ryan, and me for this one. Basically, each of us is building a tavern with the goal of upgrading it in order to bring in more money and wealthier patrons and, eventually, nobles. Each player gets a modular tavern in which the pieces can be flipped in order to upgrade different features of the tavern. We each build a deck of patrons from which we draw, and we assign dice to various tasks. I'll be honest: the game sounded kind of ho-hum to me until Josh explained that we roll the dice and then draft them around the table. The game suddenly became much more interesting, because we weren't each just functioning in a bubble; we could actually impact other players depending on which dice we passed on or which ones we decided to keep.

I came to enjoy the game overall, but man, Ryan jumped out to a pretty big lead early on, and the rest of us knew we were basically vying for second place. I appreciate that the game moves fairly quickly because a bunch of things happen simultaneously (any time a game can effectively implement this, I am impressed, because turns can really be a time sink), and because the mechanics are fairly straightforward. Despite having never even heard of this before, I only had one or two fundamental misunderstandings that affected my play for the first turn or two. And that was likely more a result of my being tired than the complexity of the rules or the way Josh explained them. **As a quick side-note: it was great that everyone who taught a game this weekend more or less knew what they were teaching before getting into it. PLUS, added benefit of playing with so many teachers (I think 6 of the 7 people at Cabin Con had taught at one time or another!) was that these guys really know how to teach a game** I think my favorite interaction in the game was probably those "perfect draws" each of us would get from round to round, in which we drew an extra table, a great patron to sit at it, a bar maid to help us hit dice capacity (bar maids allow players to roll their own player dice in addition to the shared pool and then keep whatever was rolled). It's a really satisfying element of any game to build a machine and then see that machine function in some sort of optimal way. I appreciate that Taverns of Tiefenthal facilitated that for each of us, and not just the best player.

After Taverns, we opted for something a little lighter, since Suf was available for a little while before a meeting, which meant our player count was up to 6. But he also had limited time in which to play. I decided this was the right time to introduce them to Plague and Pestilence, which I have talked about previously here. It was an easy teach, and I think I had them sold once I explained the first part of the game was bolstering population points, and the second part of the game was watching everyone die after the Death Ship arrived with the plague. I think this game is generally a lot of fun anyway. But in a group like this wherein people are more interested in chaos than in winning (some of whom think that increased chaos means they're more likely to win anyway), it gets to be that much more entertaining. Suf in particular is notorious for this (I'm sure he definitely won't take this approach to Twilight Imperium later in the weekend. No way...). Anyway, lots of death and destruction was featured in this game. But ultimately, the best part of the game was watching players blame other players for actions they themselves had taken. For instance, Josh played a really untimely Crusade against Johnny, causing him to lose 10 Population Points (PPs). Any time Johnny leveled that accusation against Josh or played a card against him, Josh reminded Johnny that *Suf's village* had *actually* been the one to Crusade against Johnny's town. I know this sort of narrative, improv approach isn't for everyone. But I think it makes games a hell of a lot more fun (more on this to come with several other games, though none so much as Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes or Crokinole...). I definitely did not take this game. I got hit with a Pied Piper (which robbed me of 15 Population Points), and then couldn't do anything to stop a Major War, which wiped out most of my remaining PPs after I had been rolling high and losing a lot of PP every turn. I'm pretty sure Johnny ended up taking this one, and I was just happy not to be the first one out.

Lots more games coming up in future posts as I continue working my way through Cabin Con 2021!