Cabin Con 2021 - Part VII

 Cabin Con 2021 - Part VII

ONWARD! We near the end of the Cabin Con 2021 recap!!!

I like the idea of this meme, but the lack of punctuation makes my heart hurt.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Cabin Con was about two months ago. So I'm missing a lot of details. These are details I wanted to include in my recap, but I simply had so much fun that I never actually pulled out my Chromebook in order to take notes. I took pictures of nearly every game we played while I was there (after all, everyone else arrived a day earlier than me!) and I wrote down the titles of the games. But my desire to write this blog and share my gaming experiences with y'all is also a bit at odds with how I play games.

Not because I'm recapping them. I've been into post game analysis since being a football fan. Not a Giants fan specifically (which I've been all my life), but a football fan (which started in high school, really, where I would enjoy the sport enough to watch games other than those in which the NY Giants were playing). Since then, I tend to really enjoy the debrief. Sometimes more than the game itself! I get to connect dots that I didn't connect during the game, or see the big picture after focusing on each round. Anyway, the thing about debriefs and board games is that I tend to do it with friends immediately after playing. Then we move onto something else.

So recording a game while it's happening or right after completion really slows down a game or a game night. I struggled with this a bunch while running my Emperor Palpatine experiment with Star Wars Armada, as well as while play-testing wave 11 of Star Wars Armada stuff (the Pelta, the Venator, the Providence, and the Recusant). I tend to be thorough, which will be great while play-testing my own game designs! But REALLY slows down the action while I'm playing a game. So to that end, I'm trying to come up with new ways that will allow me to dig a little deeper into recaps for those who enjoy reading them! In the meantime...

Atlantis Rising. I was excited to play this one because it was made by Elf Creek Games. They're the company that made Honey Buzz (which I've been dying to try and I'm waiting on the reprints!) and also the upcoming Merchants of the Dark Road (which I pre-ordered). They're located close to St Louis, so I also feel a little personal investment in them. Anyway! The crux of the game is that Atlantis is sinking and the players must build our escape before that happens. I've mentioned previously that I really enjoy worker placement games, so I felt good coming into this one. Players place citizens to collect resources used to build a Cosmic Gate. The closer to shore workers are placed, the more rewarding the endeavor. Of course, the closer to shore a worker is, the more likely it is they get swept away in the oncoming tide before they can complete their task. But I'm sure everything will be fine, right, y'all?

It's a cooperative game, as all the players are working together to build the Cosmic Gate. In this case, especially while learning the game, I was happy to play a support role and go where I was told. I always had ideas about where I might be needed, but was happy to redeploy so other people could do the things they *really* wanted to do. More often than not, I deployed close to the shoreline. This cost me two workers, but any other time, we had a protective measure in place to ensure I'd be able to complete whatever I was working on. Unfortunately, I cannot remember which role I played, and therefore, can't remember what bonus ability I was using (as each player has a different counselor, and each counselor has a different ability).

I think we did a poor job of prioritizing resource collection because the choices and benefits are slightly counter-intuitive. I'd have to revisit it to be certain, but that's how I remember it. It's not really a flaw in the design so much as it adds a bit to the learning curve. That said, once we cleared the hurdles and had a better grasp on the game, we were able to get it on lock. We interrupted the game to eat either lunch or dinner (I'm pretty sure it was the former), and after the game, Suf pointed out that we had, for all intents and purposes, already won the game. It was really just playing out the rest of it. Which he was happy to do, but he was just as happy to call it a win and move onto the next game or try this one again on a harder difficulty. We all agreed that continuing play was a formality we were okay with forgoing, as we had learned the game, liked it well enough, and were ready to move on. I enjoyed it enough to be excited about exploring other titles by Elf Creek Games, but not enough to go out and purchase a copy for myself.

The same cannot be said about this next game that we played on the last night of Cabin Con: Cartographers. I was pretty tired by the time we hit this. I was also struggling a bit with rules fatigue, and so realized as we started to play that I had really only half-listened to the explanation of the rules. So I only sort of understood the rules going into it and had to ask a lot of questions. I often find such a situation frustrating, which often impacts my enjoyment of a game. Luckily, in this case, I enjoyed the game so much that I resolved to go out and purchase my own copy as soon as we were done playing!

In Cartographers, the players compete to sketch the most efficient maps. The game is played over the course of 4 seasons, and points are awarded to players who best follow the queen's edicts while sketching their maps. Each player gets a piece of paper and a pencil, and then cards are drawn that show different types of terrain (forest or farmland or hamlets or monsters or whatever!) as well as the different shape configurations in which they come. Different bonuses may be granted if the shape of the terrain is difficult to work around. But basically, it's Tetris on paper, and it's a lot more fun than I anticipated! In our case, if I'm not mistaken, our edicts were Sentinel Wood (in which we get bonuses for forest spaces adjacent to the edge of the map), Shoreside Expanse (in which we get bonuses for farm spaces not adjacent to water or the edge of the map; I screwed this one up royally, so I thought I was getting bonus points I never got - it was brutal), and Borderlands (in which we get bonus points for completing rows or columns of filled spaces). I can't remember the fourth.

In the end, I was closer to winning than I anticipated because I had quite a few stretches of contiguous territory that scored me big points with the Borderlands objective. But I just couldn't overcome the fact that I wasn't really scoring off of my other objectives the way I thought I was, and the monster placement on my map hurt me too. But I gotta say again: I enjoyed this game far more than I thought I would! It was a reminder of how less (components) can really translate into more (interesting gameplay). This game is deemed "A Roll Player Tale," and I've heard of Roll Player, but it just never interested me that much. Had it not been for Cabin Con, I don't know that I'd have ever bothered with this game, so it was probably my most pleasant surprise of our whole 2021 Con. Highly recommend; I literally went out and bought my own copy of this the day after I got back to St. Louis.

To close out Part VII, I want to touch on three games that are worth mentioning, but about which I just don't have that much to say. I'll start with Tsuro.

This is one my favorite palate cleanser games. It's short enough that I don't get much personal investment (and thus am not disappointed if I'm eliminated early), but it's fun enough that I always think it's worth playing. Each player has a cool little carved piece and a couple of tiles in their hand. Each tile outlines different paths, and when it is contributed to the board, it extends each of the paths to which it connects. When this happens, any player piece that is touching one of those paths is compelled to continue moving along the path on which they stand, following it to its current end. That may lead it to the edge of a different tile, or it may lead it off the board entirely, thus eliminating that player from the game. A turn consists of playing a tile on the board (a player can only play a tile in the space at whose precipice the player's piece stands) and drawing a new tile from the stack to replenish the player's hand. It's simple, it's straightforward, and there's tension when player pieces get so close together that a played tile affects multiple player pawns. There isn't a lot of depth to the game, but this game doesn't need it. I'm always happy to play Tsuro.

The second is Epic Spell Wars. My friend Phillip introduced me to ESW awhile ago. We work in the same office and can use a break from work from time to time, and ESW provided a welcome distraction.

I enjoy ESW well enough, but it's not really in my wheelhouse for extended play. I think a couple of hands of this game can be fun because of the wild spell effects that get chained together. But the game is incredibly swingy, and the only time I enjoy such a feature is if the game is so short that I don't mind being eliminated early or against all odds. Epic Spell Wars is just a little bit more of an investment and any wins I've had have felt unearned. Our first hand was a great example: I played a spell that earned me three artifacts (which bestowed huge benefits on me), and did damage to everyone else. I was the only one who benefited from the spell. Admittedly, the game swung hard against me shortly thereafter and I took a ton of damage from a spell that triggered, and then triggered again. So the argument could be made that was the balance of it. But for me, the game is fun enough for me to play a hand or two every once in awhile. In a gaming weekend such as this, I'm happy to play it because we've got lots of time in which to play games. But this is not the kind of game I'd break out during an evening of games because I'd rather spend the requisite time playing something else. Just my opinion!

Finally, I want to mention Archer Love Letter. It's like just about every other Love Letter game there is with very few rules changes. There's maybe one thing that makes it different than the original Love Letter? But Love Letter is a really fun little game with really simple rules centered around deducing what card each player has in their hand. The game has seen a lot of variations and different skins (I mentioned in either Part I or Part II that we played Infinity Gauntlet Love Letter), and really the only reason to play this one as opposed to another skin is that we get to quote Archer, and that makes us laugh. I won a couple of hands, but didn't win the overall game. Honestly, I rarely do. But I always enjoy playing it. Especially in this case with a group of people who also enjoy watching and quoting Archer. On a personal level, it's my wife who introduced me to Archer. So playing Archer Love Letter makes me think of her, which is always nice during a weekend away!

On that note, we're only 4 games away from the end! I plan on covering the rest of them in my next installment, which means that Part VIII will be the last bit about Cabin Con 2021, and we'll have to wait until next summer for a Cabin Con recap! I look forward to sharing the last bit with you, and hope you've enjoyed reading about Cabin Con as much as I've enjoyed writing about it. Good games with good friends, good food, and good drinks. I personally can't ask for much more than all of that when I take some time away from home.

**Just a reminder: if anyone reading this is interested in this most excellent group of adventurers and their exploits, you should check out their Twitter! They're the Champions of Valinwood! 

https://mobile.twitter.com/ValinwoodHeroes/status/1417585561817260038