13th - 16th August, Brighton

After being to Furrycon North in Sheffield, I was really keen to go to 'the main event' in Brighton.  However, being out of work meant that I couldn't justify the enormous hotel bill that it would entail.  In the end I allowed myself to go as long as I didn't stay at the hotel - I figured I could try to drum up some floor space from someone else's room, or sleep in the car.  I also had an old friend who had moved to Brighton some years ago and I was sure that, if I looked pathetic enough (a natural talent of mine), he would let me stay there.  So, loading up the car with clothes, food, sleeping bag and a good selection of games, I headed South for Brighton on Saturday morning (saving myself at least Friday night's accommodation problems).

As always, one thing and another meant that I didn't get as early a start as I'd hoped, but it was positively smooth compared to the morning I went to the last Furrycon.   The journey also took somewhat longer than I had planned, but I eventually arrived in Brighton and it didn't take long to find the hotel.  I was also spared the car parking nightmare from last time by not staying at the hotel and parking in the nearby multi-storey.

I had arrived late enough to miss the Silly Drive, one of the best features of the last Furrycon.  But it wasn't too long before I found a group of people to play something and I was soon tearing about at the sedate pace of a paddle steamer in Mississippi Queen.  Actually, my pace seemed to be somewhat more sedate than everyone else's as I seemed to spend a lot of time at the back.  I think it had to with being the player most keen to ram the other boats...   It wouldn't be so bad, but, as there were beginners playing, we weren't even using the Black Rose so there was no benefit in being last.  I made a good attempt at catching up but was rammed out of the way at the end to make sure I finished last.   Drat!

Most of us stayed on to play Ave Caesar, another race game - although the best one I know.  We pulled in a couple of others, including Gianni, who was over from Italy for the Mind Sports Olympiad and was fitting this convention in as well.  I did a little better at this game - managing to come fifth out of six!

Gianni explained to me that, being a Mind Sports Olympiadist (?), he preferred very abstract games, so the two of us tried out one of the new Goldsieber 'lovely wooden' abstract games - Caprice.  Players take it in turns to add shapes to one of six positions on a board or to move one already on the board - the shapes come in about 4 or 6 types and can only be stacked up to four high.  Before starting, each player draws four chits from a bag, each showing one of the shape types.   After five of the stacks are four shapes high, players arrange their chits in order and then score points based on how many of each particular shape is in the correct position in a stack.  Too abstract for my tastes, really, but the aesthetic qualities of the game make it a pleasure to play anyway.

Sometime around here, Gianni and I headed off into the depths of darkest Brighton to find something tasty to eat.  On our return, we found a few more players and I took the opportunity to pursue my mission for the convention and introduce another group to Nicht die Bohne.  This excellent card game went down well, especially among the hardened gamers.  I continued the tone of the day by finishing well down.  Still, as long as I gain converts, where I actually finish is unimportant (yeah,.. right).  Also playing in this game was Alan Harvey, a previous member (founder?) of my local games club from before I joined.

Gianni headed back to London for the night and I got involved in my first game of Torres, another rather abstract game, but one I felt more at home with.  I tend to regard this game as a kind of Tikal-light as it is by the same authors (Kramer/Kiesling) and uses a similar kind of action points system.  In this case, though, I think they have got the balance better as there are less things to do with your action points and less points available.  You are always torn by wanting to do more things than you can afford to, but I find the decision making considerably quicker than Tikal and, as the situation changes less between your turns, you can do more thinking during other player's turns.  The game involves building up towers (literally), both in base area and height, around the board, with neighbouring towers not allowed to touch face to face.   The towers don't belong to any player, and can be scored by any or all players during one of the three scoring rounds.  Players score for each tower they have a playing piece ("knight") in and the score they get is the base area of the tower in board squares multiplied by the height of that player's highest knight in that tower.   There are also bonuses to be gained by having a knight in the tower occupied by the king piece.  And to add to all that, there are action cards that allow special moves that aren't allowed by the normal rules.  There is a definite satisfaction in this game in finding the way to the top of a tower painstakingly built by someone else or in building up the height of a tower and successfully keeping everyone else off.  Having said that, victory probably goes to the player who forms the greatest number of successful partnerships with other players on individual towers - making sure that the partners vary from tower to tower!  Even if you do badly, as I did, there are still enough times when you get the opportunity for a good move to keep you coming back for more.  I bought a copy.   'Nuff said.

Next up, I met up with Stephen Tavener and joined in yet another abstract game - and one of those old games that Stephen always seems to come up with - Five Straight.  This is another of those games descended from Noughts and Crosses.   This time you have to get five pegs in a line.  To make it more difficult, the holes are numbered from 1 to 100 and you can only put a peg in a hole if you have a card with a matching or lower numbered card - this makes the low numbered holes difficult to play to for building lines or blocking your opponents lines, and makes the higher numbered cards difficult to use effectively (or even at all sometimes).  To make matters easier, though, the four players play as two partnerships - and I got partnered with Stephen, whose experience at the game outweighed my ineptitude and led to my first win of the day (albeit a joint win).  Another enjoyable game with more tactical depth than you might think on first hearing the rules.

So then I met Nick Harrison and Rod McDonald, who I had met at Furrycon North.   They were keen on giving Tikal a try, so I decided to give it another go despite the long-windedness of my earlier attempt.  We only got part way through the game as it turned out, although I'm not sure why (one of the hazards of writing this report nearly three months after the event...).  Perhaps it was because I was winning a game on my own for the first time that day and the others needed a break to get their heads round the concept.  It may have been because Rod wanted to go to bed as he wasn't involved in the next game and it was pretty late by then.   No-one had picked up the large hints I dropped about needing somewhere to sleep and my old friend wasn't answering the phone number I had for him, so I was hoping to get really tired before sleeping in the car.  Anyway, I think I played Tikal long enough to know what it is I don't like about the game.  I think most of the delay comes when trying to spend the ten extra action points that players get during a scoring round.   This is also the least explicable part of the game in terms of the theme and weighs against careful excavation of temples as you don't even know whether you will score for them.   So I'm now keen to try the game with scoring occurring as soon as someone gets a volcano tile rather than after an interminable search for extra points by each player.

To wind up the day (night), I finally got the game of Lost Cities with Nick that we had almost had in Sheffield.  This is another of those game that should need no introduction by now.  The main thing about this game for those considering buying it, is that it has an extremely high hit rate (people who like it : people who have played it a few times).  At the price, I suggest that, if you don't know it and you occasionally or often play games as a pair, you should buy a copy.  I also managed to win this game and would have continued my winning streak except that it was after 4am and Nick wanted to go to bed.

I figured I was tired enough to sleep in the car by this stage so I headed off to find it.  Tip number 1 : don't try to sleep in a car if you leave it in a well lit car park.  I tried fitfully sleeping for a while but the lack of comfort and the light made it just about impossible.  By the time I realised that it really would need to be dark to sleep, it was light outside as well, so eventually I just got up again.  I spent some time wandering about the sea-front among those who had slept on the beach and dozing in the rising sun, and before I knew it, it was time to back to the hotel again - tired, but still in gaming mood.  I resolved that, if I couldn't get in touch with that old friend, I would find a Bed & Breakfast for that night so that I would get enough sleep to be able to drive home safely on Monday.

So, I started off Sunday with another game of Ave Caesar and by this stage I had stopped recording how well I did.

I had been chatting to Theo Clarke of SFC (that's almost a very distinctive sounding name he's got there...) and he had been saying how keen he was on Dry Gulch and wanted to try a bit of a variant to make it play more smoothly.  The only thing I really knew about the game was the comment from someone at Furrycon North about how, if nothing else, it was at least well named.  Still, I'm always prepared to give something a go when someone has faith in it, so I joined in.  The game is set in a 'Wild West' town and involves you buying building cards and using resources to build the buildings on them.  Each building employs a number of people (counters) from your family and as soon as you have a certain number employed, you have won.  The change that Theo had made was similar to the one I want to try with Parts Unknown - that of getting new cards at the end of your turn instead of at the beginning, giving you time to think about what to do with them without everyone else waiting.  All in all the game was ok, especially once we had discovered the joys of arson on other players' buildings, and I would probably play again.  I would take some convincing to part with hard cash for it, though.

At this point, still unable to contact the old friend, I headed off to make sure I had somewhere to sleep that night.  After being told by a number of guest houses that they had no room (it was August in a sea-side town, remember), I found a room in the cheaper part of town for £25 - considerably less than the £60 a night that the hotel wanted.  I went and got the car and then spent a couple of hours watching the Grand Prix on the TV.  Whilst doing this, I managed to miss out on Reiner Knizia's semi-freeform game that happened at the same time.  Knizia had been listed to attend the convention but his name badge had remained resolutely on the registration desk all Saturday and I never saw him anywhere.  Still, as long as I get to play games, that's all I really care about - oh, and having somewhere to sleep.

I returned to the hotel and joined in a game of The Great Balloon Race.  This is the first time I had come across the game and I fell for it right away.  It is in the same camp of race games as Esels Rennen, Honeybears and even Heimlich & Co, where you try to keep your interests secret.  There are eight balloons in varying colours and each player is given a card in secret, each of which shows three of the balloons - as soon as your three balloons have crossed the finishing line, you have won.  On rolling the die you can move any balloon, but only in the direction of the arrow on the space it starts from - so you try to move your balloons on to forward pointing spaces and other balloons on to backward pointing spaces.  There are other spaces like lightning that burst a balloon and send it back to the start and a kind of space that causes the balloon to stick there until it is knocked loose by another.   If a balloon lands on a space occupied by another, that one is bounced onto another space - leading to some quite tactical bumps.  And that's about all there is to it - quick and fun with a tasty amount of bluffing.  The only down side to the game is that it is very difficult to tell which is the red balloon and which the orange on the cards.   This was suitably demonstrated by Nathan, who pointed out the problem before we started, only to be berated by Theo for having such wimpy eyesight.  Nathan then asked Theo to use his manly eyes to tell him whether the balloon on his card was red or orange and he was assured that it was orange.  Trouble was, at game end, it turned out to have been red.  I guess the cards need marking to avoiid confusion.   Despite that minor flaw, it's certainly moved onto my buy list.

Meeting up with Gianni again, I introduced him to Kontor.   I don't think this two-player game caught on as well as it ought to have: it certainly seems to have enough depth for me (so far) and, although I would have made it with smaller tiles rather than larger cards, it is very aesthetically pleasing.   Perhaps it has something to with the amount of attention that Lost Cities commanded in the two-player market.  The theme is that of building up a Dutch harbour by adding land and water tiles to build island docks in the harbour.  Once each island is completed, it is awarded to the player who has the most control of three commodities on it and at the end of the game, a point is given to the owner of each of the five largest islands to determine the winner.  So you are torn between completing an island while you are in control at the risk of it being too small to count at the end, or of letting it grow larger at the risk of your opponent gaining control.  Cards are played simultaneously, with an index number determining which gets laid first, so allowing you to edge in ahead of your opponent to scupper their plans.  Some cards require your opponent to pay to place their card and, if they have no cash, they forfeit their turn.   The only way to gain cash is to play a water card and it is definitely advisable not to get too low on it as you will give your opponent a big advantage if you run out.   Some cards are marked with a ship and  allow you to move the ship around the harbour, allowing it to destroy an island card, but only if it is also a card marked by a ship.  And there are various other special cards which I won't go into but which all add to the opportunities for 'pulling a fast one', with the only proviso that completed islands cannot be altered.  If you do buy a copy of the game, don't forget to visit the author's web site for a host of variants and scenarios.  While playing Gianni, I made a bit of a mistake and set the maximum area too small, so stunting the play somewhat, but it was enough to get a flavour of it.

Next, we found a couple more players for another of the Goldsieber abstracts, Siesta.  The game is played on a squared grid and there are three types of pieces: suns (yes, multiple suns), shadows and roofs, these last being in the players' colours.  Each turn a player must place three pieces of any type as long as they score one or more points.  You get points by having one of your roofs between a sun and one or more shadows, with a bonus for a sun, roof, shadows, roof, sun sequence.   And suns may not come into contact with shadows or other suns.  And that's about all there is to it.  There is a lot of scratching heads looking for optimal moves, but it still moves along fairly well.  There isn't a downtime problem either - you need to watch other players' moves closely as you might score points when they place their pieces and they may not notice it.  Much better than Caprice, I thought, and I toyed with buying it before deciding that one really abstract game was enough for the moment.

At this point I went off with Gianni again for more to eat and to see him off to the station again for his return to London, and eventually Italy, where he has some trouble finding opponents near to where he lives.

I returned to the fray for an introduction to Apples to Apples.   Carol Johnson and, to some extent, the rest of the SFC crowdlet were quite obviously well into this game as they seemed to be playing it at every opportunity.   It is also good for taking large numbers of players.  Each player gets dealt a hand of cards with nouns on them - such as potatoes, terrorist attack or Bill Clinton (spot the difference :-) ).  One player at a time is in charge of the other (green?) pack of cards which contain adjectives.  That player turns over the top card and the others try to find a noun (red?) card that they think goes well with the green, and places it face-down on the latter.  The player of the green then goes through the red cards and chooses a winner, at which point the player of that red card owns up and takes it back as a scored point before the pack of green cards is moved on to the next player and the process begins again.  This game is a lot of fun and you have to watch the way other players play when they have the green cards - some players will try for textbook matches between red and green cards, whilst others will pick whatever seems the funniest combination.  The only place where it really falls down is in the language.  It is fine if you are American, obviously useless if you are German, Italian, French, etc, but also pretty bad if you are British.  Occasionally we needed guidance from Carol (who I think has been to America before) as to what particular words actually meant, such as 'Sappy', and all the cards that named people or places were very American biased.   Another excellent example is 'Cow Pie': in Britain this is a big pie that comic-book character Desperate Dan eats, but in America it's what you step in when you walk through a cow field!  A useful word of warning there for any of my British readers who may be due to visit America and eat at one of its many restaurants.  With a bit of luck Rio Grande will bring out an English-language version soon.

Anyway, after a couple of games of that, it was back off to my room for the night and the deep sleep of one who is really tired and could do with a deep sleep...

I don't seem to have too many details of play for the Monday - perhaps it is a combination of me getting up late with the fact that things finished early because it was the last day.  I know that I did manage to continue my Nicht die Bohne mission by getting in a couple of games.

I also joined in a game of Robo Rally that Stephen Tavener had just got started.  Stephen's involvement means a number of important things as he is 'Mr Robo Rally' and is also descended from a long line of robots and industrial machinery.  Firstly he has a whole host of official and unofficial boards and his cards are lovingly protected in CCG sleeves.  Secondly, I have learnt from him that it should only ever be played on a single board with checkpoints dotted around to cause maximum traversal of that board - this leads to much more interaction than when played in the 'one lap of a big board' manner.  Thirdly, and this was a new one for me, he had a timer system going to keep play flowing along - as soon as two players declare they have set up their cards ready for this round the timer is started, and everyone else must get their cards set up before it runs out or they must play them at random - this is a big incentive to get a move on.  I fell foul of that rule on my first turn due to joining the game late in the second or third round and still trying to get an idea of the board layout when the timer ran out - luckily the random selection of cards turned out to be about as good a move as I would have made anyway (no, that isn't always true...).   Anyway, this all tends to turn the game from its natural tendency to dryness into something involving a lot more mayhem and fun, with robots having to shut down left right and centre to repair the heavy damage they kept receiving.  I will always try to play this way in future.  Strangely enough, I actually won.  It probably had a lot to do with starting later and being behind everyone when major carnage was taking place and then sneaking past while they were all trying to repair themselves.

After this I think it was time for the 'prize giving', where everyone who has brought in a game or two for the prize table gets to take one or more home, with the order of choosing determined by how well you had done in games over the weekend - so I was going to get quite a late choice...  At Furrycon North I had been disappointed by some of the prizes that people had brought in, so this time I brought along something that I just wanted to get rid of.  The thing is that I ended up with a Games Workshop game that was on my 'wanted' list and I felt a bit guilty about what I had put in.  I have decided that the best way to resolve this is to take something next time that I would have happily swapped for what I got this time, and I can determine what to take for the time after that by what I pick up then - voila, conscience cleared.

The final act was the obligatory buying session from the SFC stall, picking up a couple of older games that were going cheap as well as my one full-price indulgence, Torres.   Then I headed off to retrieve my car so that I could load it up with the games I had taken and head off home.

Actually, first of all, still having had no luck on the phone, I decided to go and check out the address of the old friend.  He had moved on some time ago and I was given a new address.  Heading off to the new address, I found he had moved again and these people didn't have the next address at all.  So I am still trying to get in touch, with no success.  In case anyone reading this knows him, his name is Tony Rose and he works in London on something to do with energy efficiency or some such.   Fingers crossed.

Anyway, the journey home went well and all was fine until I noticed the next day that I had mislaid my notepad  (a paper one - not a small computer).  This is the notepad that everyone is used to seeing me with in which I note the games I play and who I play them with, much to the paranoia inducing suspicion of many an opponent.  It is the source of information for reports such as this and all of the games club night details.  This was a big loss as I was well behind with the club pages and could not hope to recreate the information from memory.  Desperately, I phoned the hotel, who promised to look into it but couldn't help immediately.  Next I tried SFC, and here is where I must give a large commendation and heartfelt thanks to Sally Meadows, who had remembered seeing it loaded with the SFC stuff and had thought, "That looks like the grubby notepad that Trev uses" and, probably, "What a daft git he is for forgetting it" (artistic licence being employed here).  Not only did she remember this, but she dug it out and sent it to me so that I got it a day or two later.   Thanks again Sally.

And also, thanks to all who played: Kevin McGowan, John Bickell, James Pinnion, Claire Tripp, Ben Brown, Gianni Cottogni, Alan Harvey, Sarah Robinson, Barrington Beavis, Lyndon Gurr, Timothy Hunt, Stephen Tavener, Chris Dawe, Chris Dearlove, Rod McDonald, Nick Harrison, Gerald Udowiczenko, Pam Shooter, Richard Munday, Jennie Munday, Tym Norris, Theo Clarke, John Breakwell, Nathan Richards, Sally Meadows, Brenda Rozario, Andrew MacAlister, Sue Breakwell, Carol Johnson, Paul Norris, Peter Card, Bethany no-name, Marcus no-name, Chris Boote, Steve Spencer and Howard Goble.  See you next time, folks.

Cheers.

Trev.