Tag: friendship con

Friendship Con 2023: Ark Nova, BSG and multiple Chudyk games

Friendship Con 2023: Ark Nova, BSG and multiple Chudyk games

Hello, friends! It’s been a busy few months (I feel like all of adulthood is saying this phrase over and over again but I digress). In between multiple trips and family coming to visit, I managed to get some gaming in. Most notably, last month I saw my friends in Atlanta where we met up for our annual Friendship Con. 

Upon arriving in Atlanta on a Wednesday night, we all went out for dinner at Ponce City Market. This place is so neat! It’s a big fancy food court inside a converted Sears building from the 1920s. I most definitely enjoyed this Thai iced tea popsicle from King of Pops. 

This mixed-use place in Atlanta has so many different food stalls and shops — something for everyone.

My friends in Atlanta surprised us with swag bags that contained this amazing Twilight Imperium 3-D printed war sun. Behold its gloriousness!

This war sun is ready to do some damage! It’s ginormous!

The swag bag, which had our names printed out, also contained the Critters of War board game and game and card component holders. Always a fun surprise! 

My friends who hosted Friendship Con this time around gave us these awesome goodies! Plus a war sun that I forgot to add to the photo.

The first game to kick off the convection for me was Air, Land and Sea: Critters of War. This was a fun 2P game where players use 12 of their 18 cards to try to win majorities in the air, land and sea theaters. Some cards are played face-up or you can use the backside of a card, which is the same for all the cards in your deck. The game is fast-paced and tactical, and you play 3 quick rounds to determine the winner.

We immediately opened Critters of War to play.

We then played Red 7. I can’t believe I keep forgetting how great this game is! The goal is to play all the cards in your hands first by beating a card that’s always been played. If you can’t do that, you can also play a card to change the rule in play so that you can somehow beat the cards that have been played. I really should add a copy for my collection. 

Thursday

The next day, I taught a game of Trajan, my favorite Stefan Feld game. It’s a point salad where your actions are determined by moving your pieces around a rondel, and if you end certain pieces in a space that matches the pieces where a Trajan tile is sitting, you can combo your actions. There are a lot of ways to score — from shipping cards, having points in the Senate to pick up end-game goals, construction and even area control. 

Love me some rondels and Trajan!

I then learned how to play Ark Nova. This game has been on my radar for a while but have never gotten a chance to play it. Friends, I LOVE THIS GAME. It satisfies many itches for me — puzzle placement, hand management and cute animals, and I especially enjoy the mechanism to trigger the end game, which is when your two opposing scoring tracks (prestige and conservation points) cross each other, and the biggest gap between those two points results in the winner. What a fun race! 

I’m building out my zoo in Ark Nova! Gotta get those conservation points!

While we played Trajan and Ark Nova, another group of folks were playing Fortress America. Old school! 

The other table was playing this classic!

I then played FlowerFall, a unique game by Carl Chudyk, who designed Glory to Rome. In this game, you are literally making flowers fall! It’s an area control of sorts, think Carcassonne, where you’re making the biggest continuous path of flowers with patterned cards that are at the mercy of gravity. It’s very hard to beat gravity. 

If you told me that Carl Chudyk made a gravity-based card game, I’d think you were lying to me.

We then played Scout, my favorite trick-taking game of late. The game has a twist though: once you’re dealt your cards, you cannot rearrange them at all. You can either use the numbers at top, or flip the entire hand over and use the cards at the bottom of the card, for which they’re different. It feels like Bohnanza in that sense, but you can take card or cards from the middle of your hand, and then make runs or pairs with the leftover cards as they slide together. Super fun and since it’s an Oink Game, it comes in a very small-size box. 

Scout is such a great game! Love how you’re stuck with how the cards were dealt to you.

We ended the night with my absolute favorite game ever: Battlestar Galactica. We played a 6P game, and us humans narrowly avoided disaster! The game ended really late, and there was a point that people were asking, “are they a cylon or just super loopy and tired?” I love this game so much. 

So say we all! The humans were victorious against the toasters.

Friday

On Friday morning, we played another Chudyk game: Bear Valley. This was a push-your-luck game where you’re trying to make a path in the woods and not run into the bar.

Is this Cocaine Bear the game?

I’m so bad at push-your-luck games because I tend to take it all the way to the edge, and unfortunately, the bear got me. You can also end up lost in the woods if you don’t plan your escape correctly. 

You don’t want to get lost in Bear Valley!

I then played a 2P game of Revive. Ever since I played this game a few months prior, I have not been able to stop thinking about it. I love the combo-ing of the actions, the hand management (in the sense that you can’t play your cards again until you refresh), and the multi-use cards, which you can tuck into your board from either side, so you can get different benefits. This game is so fun! 

Revive is a game that I want to play over and over again.

Next up was Tyrants of the Underdark. I hadn’t played this in years, but I remember when I first played it years ago I played it a lot. It’s a cool deck-builder area control set in the Dungeons and Dragons world (a world I’m not too familiar with). Cards enable you to send and move troops out, or send spies infiltrate the board for control. There’s also an action to promote cards, which removes them from your deck but will still score VPs for you at the end of the game. Just don’t do what I did and promote powerful cards too early! 

Look at my red army taking over! But alas, that didn’t last too long.

The rest of the evening was spent playing a few more casual games as some of my friend’s family came over: Giant Codenames and Just One. These are always a hit!

Akropolis is one of my favorite filler games.

We closed out the night with more Scout and Akropolis. Akropolis, one of my favorite games of 2022, is a quick and elegant filler game that streamlines drafting and tile-laying. Players are building out their cities with tiles they’ve drafted (that are shaped with 3 hexagons), and scoring each colored district requires acquiring the scoring tile for that same color. It’s a neat puzzle, whether you build up or out! 

Giant Codenames makes it easy for people to gather around a table and read all the cards.

Saturday

Saturday was an epic day of Twilight Imperium! We busted out our giant war suns, which definitely set the mood for this game. I played as the Yssaril Tribes, a faction I had never played before, but unfortunately, I got super pinned in the far reaches of the universe and wasn’t able to be as effective as I wanted to be. Our game lasted from morning to early evening. 

Look at how bonkers that war sun is! Seriously, one year I will figure out how to do well in this game.

After dinner, we played a game of Villagers. This game is so fun! I like to joke how it’s tech tree the game with cute artwork, and I don’t think that description is too far off. Players are drafting characters into their village, and some villagers can hold more specialized versions of themselves, which give better bonuses or powers. Sometimes though to play a specific person, you’ll need to unlock a technology for that card — if you have it, you pay yourself; if you don’t, the bank will pay the person who has it. As you build out your village, you can draft even more people and/or build more buildings. Scoring happens twice in the game, and then you calculate end-game bonuses to see who wins. 

The artwork in Villagers is delightful.

And if you’ve been reading along, we played another game of Red 7 to close out the night. Good times!

Sunday

Sunday was the last day we were all going to be in Atlanta. Friendship Con went so fast! We started the day with Dune Imperium and added the Rise of Ix expansion, which was my first time playing that expansion. It added airships to the game, and a new board where you bid on some really strong technologies. I thought about purchasing this expansion but haven’t gotten around to it yet. 

I played an expansion to Dune: Imperium for the first time.

Lastly, we played a final Chudyk game: Impulse. This felt like the most Chudyk game that we played all weekend (sorry, Cocaine Bear!). Impulse uses multi-use cards to explore, expand, exploit and exterminate in outer space, and the game comes with these little rocket ships. The game has a map of cards, and you seed the Impulse track with tech cards from your hand. The game is a race to 20 points. It was so hard to wrap my head around this game, but I feel like now that I’ve got a play under my belt, it’ll be easier to jump into. Shoot, it took me quite a few games to understand the flow of Glory to Rome and now can almost jump into any game without a problem. 

Exploring space and collecting multi-use cards in Impulse.

And with that, we had to leave for the airport to fly back home. I had a great time in Atlanta with all these people. There’s something so special about spending five days with the same group of folks, year after year after year. Lots of laughs, yummy food, conversation and, of course, gaming. Can’t wait for next year! So, which of these games have you played?  

Thanks for another fun Friendship Con!
Friendship Con 2021: Atlanta

Friendship Con 2021: Atlanta

My buddies and I try to meet up every year for our mini-convention affectionally dubbed Friendship Con. I couldn’t make it in 2019, and, for obvious reasons, a 2020 convention didn’t happen. Earlier this month though, we did manage to make plans and meet in Atlanta, where one attendee lives, and game together for nearly five days. And dear readers, after being cooped up in our homes and not playing in person for a very, very long time, the time in Atlanta was glorious. 

Driving in Atlanta after picking up some dinner.

I flew into Atlanta and arrived early Wednesday evening, and after a quick dinner stop at Hattie B’s for hot chicken — I love all things spicy — we kicked off our convention by hanging out and playing Glory to Rome. This game was the first of many Glory to Rome games during our time here, and it was great to get re-familiar with this game as well as trying it out at different player counts and petitions (either Republica Romana or Imperium Romanum). 

The sweetest part for me was that my friends surprised me with bachelorette party festivities that included matching pink and gold meeple T-shirts, cupcakes and balloons. I was so touched and super surprised! (Insert crying emoji here)

My friends are absolutely the best. Aren’t these T-shirts adorable?

Thursday

We then began Thursday morning with a game of Glory to Rome. If I remember correctly, I won this game, taking advantage of my Temple building, which expanded my hand size to 9 cards, vital to being able to follow others’ actions and/or spending cards to be able to do so. 

I then taught Fort, which started a little clunky because I had misread the rule on cards in your Lookout, but after that snag, the game went swimmingly, and we even played Fort again a few days later. I was excited to play it as a 4P, after only playing it as a 2P last year. Time between turns at 4P didn’t seem long, as the game keeps you actively engaged by following the leader’s action. 

I love the artwork in Fort!

My one friend loves to bake, so he made a bunch of yummy baked goods all weekend. These loaves were great with just butter or in a sandwich. We ate a lot of baked goods in Atlanta.

Fresh-baked bread! Warning, there are many food photos in this post.

Next, we played Rajas of the Ganges. This game is a great blend of dice rolling and worker placement. You have to manage your dice supply, which I failed to do, so you can take a majority of the actions, and I spent a couple turns collecting more dice to use on future turns. It also has a neat end-game trigger where you’re racing to have your opposite resources cross each other on the tracks around the board. 

Rajas of the Ganges is so colorful and gorgeous board.

The last game we played on Thursday was Xia: Legends of a Drift System. One guy taught us an intro scenario, with the game ending at 6 points. I knew nothing about Xia before this game, but I’m always down to try epic space games, and Xia certainly fits into that criteria.

I particularly enjoyed that players can upgrade and modify their ships however they want (provided it fits onto your ships with polyomino ship part tiles), providing a unique gaming experience for all players. Heck, even blind-jumping into a black hole didn’t end up being too bad. FYI, it was not me; I’m so risk-averse to that type of exploration. 

Exploring space and picking up cargo in Xia.

Friday

On Friday morning, I made a Filipino breakfast with chicken longganisa (sausage), garlic fried rice, dried fish and egg — also known as a longsilog. And the breakfast was complete with banana sauce to tie everything together. Sarap! (That’s yummy in Tagalog.)

A hearty breakfast to start off the Friday of Friendship Con.

After a quick morning game of Glory to Rome, I taught a game of Abandon All Artichokes. This is a quick card game that introduces the game mechanism of deck building. The artwork is just adorable, and the goal of the game is, by building out your deck each round, to eventually draw a hand of cards without any artichokes in them on your turn. 

Such a neat game! I’ve been playing this a lot on Board Game Arena.

The next game was one highlight of my weekend: Battlestar Galactica! It’s my absolute favorite game! I got a chance to play as Helo, my favorite character and was human for most of the game, until the one cylon revealed himself and gave his second cylon loyalty card to me because I was currently the admiral. We then scrambled to make the humans lose, and we succeeded in doing so. Fun times! #SoSayWeAll

I was totally human in this game until near the end when I got activated.

Next, we played Wavelength — a game I had only played on Twitter with the game account, and it was a lot of fun trying to figure out clues that would lead players to guess the range correctly. My favorite example was Bad Actor Vs Good Actor, and I was the clue giver. I had blindly spun the range, and it landed in the middle. You then cover it up and make others move the needle to the area on the spectrum where the range was. My clue was: Nic Cage.

There was a great deal of discussion between whether he was a good actor or a bad one, and people ultimately decided he was somewhere in the middle. They then moved the needle to the middle, and we scored 4 points! Such a fun party game. 

Wavelength is a fun party game!

I then jumped into a 6-player game of Acquire. This game is a classic, but at 6P, it’s quite bonkers. It’s very hard to plan your next move as any company can be created or fold before it gets back to your turn, so you just have to roll with it and hope that you get those majority payouts when someone merges with the casino chain you have stocks for. 

A classic version of the classic game of Acquire.

After dinner, I played a game of Dune: Imperium, a game I had been excited to check out. It’s a deck builder/worker placement, set in the world of Dune, and it actually features actors in the upcoming movie. Oscar Isaac, anyone? Yes, please!

While playing the game, I found it really difficult to get water, which thematically makes sense, but had an abundance of spice that I regularly sold to the market. The game has such good production quality, but in terms of recent deckbuilder worker-placement hybrid games, I enjoyed Lost Ruins of Arnak a wee bit more, a game we’ve been playing frequently online. But, I would definitely play Dune again if someone local had a copy.

Building my deck, and searching for water and spices in Dune: Imperium.

I then learned Fantastic Factories. This is also a dice rolling/worker placement game where your workers are the dice. You’re constructing buildings and factories that produce goods and/or victory points. I really liked the artwork on this, and there’s something very satisfying about getting the right rolls for maximum output on your cards. When I returned to Phoenix after Atlanta, I saw that Game Nerdz had this game as its Deal of the Day for $22, and I currently now own a copy. 

Enjoyed Fantastic Factories, a dice engine builder!

Friday’s epic game day ended with an equally epic dessert that my baking friend had made completely from scratch: a tarte tropézienne. The brioche took about a day to make, and the cream middle was just heavenly. It was the first time I had ever heard of this dessert, much less tried it.

The airy, sugary goodness of a tarte tropezienne.

Saturday

Saturday began with brioche French toast for breakfast, part of the same brioche batch from the dessert the night before. It was excellent. 

Yes to more brioche! This time in French toast form.

We then played a few games of Just One, one of my absolute favorite party games ever. It’s seriously so fun and easy for all types of gamers to play. I’ve introduced Just One to many different sets of friends, and hilarity always ensues.

Players write down one word to help the clue-guesser guess the clue, but if they write down the same word as another player, they don’t get to show the clue-guesser their word. Sometimes it gets really hard (in a good, funny way) when as the clue guesser you’re left with one or two random words that have no context to each other. Also, I think everyone really enjoys writing with dry-erase markers on the plastic nameplate.

Next up was Chronology. This is a chill filler where you’re placing event cards along a timeline in front of you. It’s good for trivia and history buffs alike, but it’s forgiving enough where you can kind of guess when these events in history took place if your timeline is very spaced out in terms of its dates. If all your cards are dated close together, well, good luck!

I then got a chance to play BSG again. Such a treat! Sadly, I ignored the cardinal rule of this game by Executive Ordering the person on my left, who I totally thought was human. He then did a Brig check to get himself out of the Brig, and then revealed he was a cylon. The person on his left was also a cylon, and us humans didn’t stand a chance after that, and they eventually wiped out our population to zero. Womp womp. 

All the human resources were in the red, and the humans eventually lost.

Next up was the Crew. So full disclosure: I played all 50 missions of The Crew on Board Game Arena earlier this year, and since it was all virtual, it added extra obstacles that you don’t normally run into when you’re playing the game in person. For example, remembering, sorta, what’s already been played during that mission, and asking simple yes/no questions that would take a minute in person but would take the course of one day online.

To be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of the Crew, but I played a few missions to see if I’d like it better. It’s still OK, but I appreciate how innovative it is in using trick-taking as a mechanism of game play, and not just the game play itself. And I can see how people familiar with trick-taking card games would enjoy this challenge. 

Completing missions via trick taking in The Crew.

We then busted out Metro X, a short flip-and-fill. You’re trying to fill in train stations on a Japanese transit map using cards that are flipped over one at a time. Completing train routes will net VPs, and empty spots will be negative points at the end of the game. I like how you can write on these plastic cards, instead of using paper sheets for each game. 

You can see that I did not full out all of my train stations. Alas.

After a few more games of Fort and Glory to Rome, which now everyone enjoys playing when there’s an hour in between games to end, we decided to play a 4-player game of Irish Gauge. At previous conventions, we usually play Chicago Express, and Irish Gauge has similar elements to the game, but as my one buddy put it, “It’s Chicago Express on crack.” Good times. 

Sunday

On Sunday, we again began our morning playing a game of Glory to Rome. And then we busted out one of my absolute favorite games: Lisboa. I taught a three-player game of this, and it was a success. I ended up winning my first game of this. Just because I play this a lot and teach it at conventions doesn’t necessarily mean I win games. 

Lisboa is one of my favorite games, even if your brain melts a little every time you play it.

We then parted ways on Sunday night to fly back to Phoenix. I packed up my stuff and games, including the neat swag bag my friend got all of us. I checked in my bag because I was unsure if TSA would allow me to fly with mega-tweezers, and I did not want my fantastic gift to get confiscated. My giant-tweezer collection grows! 

If you made it all the way down here, thanks for reading! Thanks million to my amazing friends who made Friendship Con 2021 in Atlanta memorable. I think Phoenix will be the location of next year’s convention. And in case you were wondering, we’re already talking about our plans for it.

The second-annual Friendship Con

The second-annual Friendship Con

My friends and I decided to host a second-annual Friendship Con last week, and I had so much fun. It was nice seeing friends who moved away from Phoenix and those friends I haven’t seen since last year’s event.

We played a lot of games, though sadly we didn’t get through all the games on our uber ambitious list. There were a couple sleepless nights for me (I am so not a morning person, and, not gonna lie, it was rough getting somewhere by 8:30 a.m.), but in the end, I got some good gaming in with fun folks!

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Friendship Con: Our very own gaming convention

Friendship Con: Our very own gaming convention

About six months ago, I was telling my board-game friends that I was going to BGG Con again, after having an awesome time last year. My one friend had this crazy idea to have our own convention, without the need for traveling and in the comforts of our homes, since they all couldn’t get away for an entire week to Dallas for BGG Con. I’m like, sure, let’s do this!

We decided to keep it as a convention of 5 friends, naming it Friendship Con! We took this event very seriously. During the planning stages, we voted on a list of games we all wanted to play, a schedule for said games, divided up who was in charge of learning the rules for a particular game, locations for gaming each day (we spread it out among 3 people, so that no one home would become overrun by us), and, of course, menu options. The host home would provide an easy breakfast, and then sandwiches for lunch, and then a quick healthy dinner. One of the cons that my friend had mentioned about going to BGG Con or similar events was that having limited access to cheap, healthy food because you either paid a premium at hotel restaurants or had to leave the gaming area to find other eateries, which resulted in less gaming time.

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