This weekend was the first post-pandemic return of a little game convention that’s been happening twice a year for years near me. It’s Friday and Saturday but I only went on Saturday. Played games for about 12 hours straight, which I haven’t done in quite some time.
Cut for too long write ups of a game day: Concordia, Welcome To… Halloween map, Blood on the Clocktower, Point Salad, Canvas, Just One, and Deception: Murder in Hong Kong.
Games!
Concordia - someone was sitting at a table reading the rules when I arrived so a friend (not the game library ones) and I who have played it a lot agreed to set it up, teach, and play. A couple other people joined before we were done with teaching - one fairly experienced and one who had played once before - so we had a full 5 players on a base game setup. It was a good game with people going for a variety of strategies. I pushed the lower cost goods - never building a cloth city and only building my first wine on my next-to-last build of the game - and pulled off the win. I had 94 with the next highest at 89.
I then suggested a game of Welcome To… on the Halloween map packs I had brought as that was one of the things I most wanted to do this weekend. Some people agreed and others peeled off. Then some who had agreed got offers of a game they were dying to play while we were setting up and new people walked by and asked to join. In the end, we had 4 players with only my friend and myself being leftover from Concordia. Welcome To… was one of the first roll and writes to make it big and set of the recent craze for them, I think. You get cards with numbers and “powers” that you use to fill in your suburban streets. The Halloween map let’s you circle ghosts and candy corn when you fill in certain houses that you can claim for “tricks” (special powers) or “treats” (bonus points) when you get enough of them. It was a fun little addition to the regular game. My friend won this one with 96. I had 76.
After that, the friend I’d been playing with had to leave. I was checking to see if the friends who provide the game library were near the end of their game (they were not), when someone came recruiting for a game of Blood on the Clocktower about to start up in the big entry hall. I decided to join in. We played the basic Trouble Brewing set. There was a very talkative kid (maybe 10 or so? Storyteller’s child), a couple of very quite pre-teen or early teen girls who I was worried weren’t having any fun and were overwhelmed, and a handful of adults - some experienced and some new to the game - who all seemed to get into the dynamics of the game ok. I was a villager - the empath - and knew one of my neighbors was evil. I was next to talkative kid and one of the quiet teens. Neither of my neighbors were killed in the first day or night so no new information second night. Village killed talkative kid the second day so I was looking forward to new information but I was killed by the imp that night. I shared what I knew so far and the village focused in on my quiet teen neighbor as a possibility and she was executed. It was too little too late as she was the minion (scarlet woman) and the imp managed to get away in the end.
After that I was finally able to hook up with my game library friends and everything else I played all evening was with them. They had a spare copy of Point Salad they were looking to sale to someone who wanted to play it first so we played a quick game on their opened copy. It’s a light little card game where you either take two vegetable cards or one “recipe” card from the display on your turn. End of the game, all your recipes give you ways to score points based on the vegetables you have. That’s it. I got second with 58. The person who wanted to try the game to maybe buy it got first with 66 and immediately bought the other copy.
Then it was Canvas, a very pretty card game that’s heavier than Point Salad but still a light game. You pick plastic see-through cards that you sleeve three of together to create a “painting.” There are icons on the bottom of each of the cards and you have different possible scoring conditions in place based on what icons you have where for that game. I’d never played before and enjoyed it. Got second by one point. Winner (game owner) had 41 and I had 40.
It was getting late and we were running out of steam at this point so we played a few rounds of Just One. This is a party word game. One person holds a card out with words on it so they can’t see it but everyone else can. They randomly pick a number to pick one of the words on the card and everyone else secretly writes down one word to try to help the person guess the mystery word. The writers show each other what they wrote and anybody who wrote the same word as anybody else has to get rid of their word. Only unique words not written by anyone else are then shown to the guesser who has to try to get the word. We went around the table a few times playing with 7 people so 6 writers each time. The guesser didn’t get the word 2 or 3 times I think and we mostly got all the clues through. We sometimes lost two clues when there was a match. Once we lost four clues when two different pairs of people matched so the guesser only had two clues out of the possible six and they still got it.
I was debating heading out, but someone suggested one last game of Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. I’ve never played this and wanted to try it, so I decided to stick around even though it would likely be midnight when we’d finish and I had over an hour drive home. I’ve heard this described as a blend of Mysterium (silent clue giver with limited options for cryptic clues) and Resistance / Werewolf / Mafia (hidden traitor and social deduction), and yep, that’s pretty accurate. We played with a few investigators trying to solve the murder, one murderer, and one accomplice who knows who the murderer is and what they are trying to hide but isn’t themselves guilty. We ended up having to deal out the roles three times. First time someone came by and asked to join after we had roles but before we had done anything in the game so we added a player and second time one player saw another player’s role card as they put it down after looking at it. I drew the accomplice on the first and third draws and the same person drew the murderer every time so it ended up exactly where it would have been all along. For the investigators to win, they have to correctly identify the murderer, the weapon, and the incriminating object. Each investigator gets one official guess they can use at any time and all they are told is yes or no about the entire guess, so no knowledge of a part of it is correct or not. I thought my murderer and I were done for because his weapon was a blender and one of the silent clues was that the location was a kitchen so everyone focused in on that from the start. I played into that and agreed that everyone was right there and just got people to guess the wrong things for his incriminating object for two people’s guesses then started saying maybe we were wrong about kitchen meaning blender and we should look elsewhere like someone else had a glass of orange juice as one of their items. Pulled it off and used up all the guesses so the murderer and I won.
After that, I needed to get going. It was 11:30, so it would be between 12:30 and 1 am by the time I got home and I needed to get to bed.
Never played a game anything like this. On one of the rounds where I was chairman, I was so entangled with 2 other players that I have to broker an agreement with us 3 in order to make the Company survive (and for us to earn money!), otherwise Player 4 will be in an advantageous position by default.
