BGG Con Spring 2018: Visiting Dallas in May

BGG Con Spring 2018: Visiting Dallas in May

I got the chance to go to BGG Spring in Dallas for the first time at the end of May. My lovely friends from Phoenix, Ohio and Atlanta wanted to meet up somewhere in between all of them, and we all stayed at an airbnb near DFW Airport. I had an amazing time with these guys, and it was just what I needed to de-stress from a chaotic few months. We usually met up yearly for Friendship Con, which I’ve written about here and here.

My buddies from Friendship Con! They wanted to meet in Dallas this year instead of Phoenix and check out BGG Spring.

BGG Spring is a way chiller, family-friendly version of BGG Con. It’s a much, much smaller con comparatively, but it wasn’t lacking in any way. The BGG library was just as ginormous; the people just as awesome and friendly. To me, though, I felt like the focus of the con was on gaming itself, instead of the hot new games or learning the latest Essen release. They did have the Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres nominees for people to play. And the only line I waited in during the entire convention was on registration day.

We all arrived in Dallas on Thursday afternoon, and, after checking into the house, we immediately jumped into gaming. I taught them Glux, an abstract area-control game. You place circular tiles that have pips, and the next piece you draw from your bag can only be placed in open locations that many spaces away, according to the pips.

Playing some Glux and blocking folks from placing their disc.

The board fills up pretty quickly. The consensus: what seemed like a light abstract immediately started getting cut-throat. They enjoyed it.

We next played Goa. This is a new-to-me game but a classic from 2004 (ancient by board-game standards!), in which you’re competing companies dealing in spices, sending them to the new world, and investing money in the 16th century. There’s a bidding phase, in which you select which tile goes up for auction, and then an action phase, which is three actions per player. It makes for a very tight game to either improve your technologies or activate buildings tiles, and maximize your victory points. I would love to play this again, even if I couldn’t for the life of me remember that red is not cinnamon. (It’s apparently nutmeg, friends.)

I do love the bidding in Goa and the strategic placement of which tiles will go into play.

BGG Spring Day 1

On Friday, we arrived at BGG Spring at the Hyatt Regency. I checked out Castell from the library to teach. In this game, you’re gathering your team of castellers, folks who participate in a human tower, to perform shows all across Spain and collect VPs. This game is always so challenging for me when I’m building out my tower according to my stacking rules. In each round, different areas on the board will score, so you can either work toward the current round or focus on future shows. I like how all the scoring info is shown at the start of the game and how there’s many paths to victory — very point salad!

Getting ready for festivals and stacking my castellers.

Next up, we played Yamatai. The board is gorgeous and colorful, and players are racing to put their ships on the map to build palaces and collect VPs. It has an interesting turn-order mechanic; you pick a tile with its rewards, and the number on the tile determines your order in the next round. A tile that gives you a lot of resources will make you go later in turn order in the next round. There’s also rules on where you can start placing your ships each round. But to me, the entire game felt like I was just simply setting up the next guy to maximize his actions. I just couldn’t get any traction.

Yamatai is so colorful and pretty, with these cool wooden ships and buildings!

I then played Biosphere with Julie, Joe and Deb. This game had a super rocky start with a difficult-to-understand rulebook. It did, however, have a million dice, but not for rolling! We started this game around the same time my friends at the next table started playing Terraforming Mars, and they finished before we did! Biosphere is supposed to be a 90-minute game, in which you’re controlling groups of population across the board and certain numbered populations, displayed by pips on the dice, will go extinct in each round, but not before you populate and move across terrain. You also spend evolution points to advance your traits, and the first person to complete five objectives wins the game. We managed to get to four objectives before calling the game.

There are so many dice in Biosphere!

I also got a chance to hang out with cool Twitter folks while I was there.

It was lovely meeting Mason from The Five By podcast and his lovely wife, Megan.
It’s me and board-gamer extraordinaire Steph, who recently just joined the BoardGameGeek team!

My friends and I then went back to the house for dinner and played a game of Ponzi Scheme. Some readers know that this game stresses me out so much. My friends had been so intrigued by said stress that they wanted to play a game with me to understand the experience. Ponzi Scheme is thematically accurate: getting money now to make deals for industry tiles, and then paying back investors when the time has come. What stresses me out about this game is the secret negotiation for those tiles and trying to make offers people can’t refuse to acquire tiles, which is worth VPs at the end of the game. The guys ended up having a lot of fun playing this; I ended up in second place. Yay for not going bankrupt!

Ponzi Scheme seriously makes my hands all sweaty from the stress!

We closed out the night with some Ka-Boom, which, apparently, is not as fun with only three people.

BGG Spring Day 2

On Saturday, I met up with Julie and Joe again to teach them one of my absolute favorites: Lisboa. I’m always nervous about teaching such a crunchy game I love because I so badly want people to love it it, too, which then makes me anxious about teaching it the best way possible for the game to shine.

I love Lisboa, in case you haven’t noticed. That is all.

Luckily, they loved the game and said they both can’t wait to play it again. Success!

Here’s me with Julie and Joe. Julie is on Team Geek with me, ever since 2015, and Joe I met for the first time even though we’ve been Twitter friends for a while. They’re both super cool!

Joe then taught Viceroy to me, Julie and Rodney of Watch It Played. I knew nothing about this game except for the box art, but it’s turned out to be a neat puzzly, medium-weight game about bidding on cards, collecting resources and building your card pyramid. The blind bidding is fun in the game, and there are opportunities for getting a little backstabby, too. Thanks for hanging out with us, Rodney! Hope we can game again at another convention.

Here’s the three of us playing Viceroy with Rodney of Watch It Played. Thanks for teaching, Joe!

Afterwards, Nick, who didn’t attend BGG Spring but wanted to hang out while I was in town, picked me up from the hotel to visit Cidercade and play pinball. That place is pretty cool with all its games, and lots of yummy ciders on tap!

The Good Mariner and me playing pinball.

BGG Spring Day 3

The next day, Sunday, was our epic day of gaming, starting with Twilight Imperium 4 at 9 a.m. Nick joined us for the game at our airbnb, making our game a 5P, with all of us experienced players and Nick playing for his first time.

Here we are at the start of our Twilight Imperium Game. Of course I made the guys take a photo!

I managed to draw the Nekro Virus again, who I managed to win as in my previous game in April. The game went swimmingly for 6 hours, until Round 8, when four of us were in contention for winning the game in that round.

My friend’s copy of Twilight Imperium 4 is pretty tricked out — with fleet stands, playing mat and matching dice — and I love that we’ve played this game three times already this year.

At 6 VPs, I needed 4 VPs to hit 10, which I could’ve done if only I had landed an infantry in one of my last battles. Instead, I could only get to 9 during the Status Phase, of which I would’ve been the speaker and scored first. Toward the end of the round, Nick took a Politics action, that my buddy @mdornbrook took the secondary action. He then randomly drew one of Nick’s cards out of his hand to later play as the VERY LAST ACTION of the game and immediately win. It was quite possibly the most bonkers ending I’ve ever played of that game. Epic madness!

My buddy celebrating his epic win! What a crazy finish to a 7-hour game!

We then played my favorite, Battlestar Galactica, while we still had 5P. I started out as human and become activated at sleeper with 6 distance. My cylon buddy and I couldn’t recover from having jumped so far and ended up losing to the humans. Frak!!

Playing my absolute favorite! Where’s Helo? He’s still on Caprica. He’ll join us shortly — in the second round.

After Nick left, we played some Lovecraft Letter. I love the Lovecraftian world, and the twists in this version of Love Letter made it more fun than regular Love Letter, which I’m totally meh about it.

Played some Lovecraft Letter and tried not to go insane.

BGG Spring Day 4

And before we knew it, it was Monday. We checked out of our airbnb and headed back to the hotel to play some games before heading to the airport.

I played a 6P game of Ethnos, which is a solid gateway game that can accommodate a lot of folks.

Ethnos is a set-collection, area-control game.

Aldie then taught me how to play Passtally, a 3P Japanese game that’s slated to show up at the BGG Store sometime soon. Imagine Numb9rs but with route-building. You take two actions on your turn, either moving your route ends on the edge of the board or placing route tiles onto the board. When you run a route, the higher the pass-through, the more points you’ll score.

Playing Passtally with Bill and Chris Bryan. Aldie taught us how to play the game.

This game looks all cute and colorful, but it’s deceptively crunchy. And I’m glad it’s only a 3P because the downtime would be killer as there’s absolutely no way to plan your next move as the routes change with each turn. I definitely want to buy this when it becomes available.

Passtally is a cool Japanese game that will be sold at the BGG Store. Soon, I hope!

After a quick game of Tiny Epic Galaxies, my favorite game from the Tiny Epic series, and that’s not just because of the cute rocket meeples, we headed off to the airport to say good-bye one by one.

While at the airport, we opened That’s A Question, a game from Vlaada Chvatil and one off the BGG Spring giveaways. It has adorable squirrel meeples, but overall, it’s really like an Apples to Apples-type game in which you pose a question to another player and you get points if the rest of the players don’t pick the same answer as the askee.

Squirrels!! Look how adorbs! I have no idea how they relate to the game though.

Lastly, we played Shards of Infinity, a quick-deckbuilder I bought at the con that I’ve been hearing great things about. I like having the option to use some cards immediately, instead of waiting for that card to cycle back through your deck.

I then was learning how to play Tigris and Euphrates on the app and completely lost track of time, and we ALMOST missed my flight back to Phoenix. There was some freaking out, super fast-walking and hustling across airport terminals, but we made it with three minutes to spare until they shut the airplane door. Whew!

And just like that, five glorious days of gaming ended. I played 17 games while I was in Dallas. I had a great time at BGG Spring, and will now be forever spoiled from having lived in a house for the duration of the con. But I know it’s much easier doing that when you’re not a volunteer on Team Geek. Lastly, it was lovely hanging out with everyone and meeting more folks, and I can’t wait to see those who are going to BGG Con in November! Go Team Geek!

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