Gila MiniCon: Railway Boom, Raising Chicago, Ofrenda
Well, it’s officially the end of summer, and it’s even kinda cooling down in the desert here. And by cool, I mean the 90s, which, as anyone who has endured a brutal Phoenix summer can tell you, is a welcomed change. About a month ago, I enjoyed some slightly cooler weather, compared to the Phoenix area, by heading south to Tucson for a small gaming event we got invited to called Gila MiniCon.
My hubby and I arrived on Friday afternoon and immediately jumped into gaming. In Forestry, players take on the roles of forest stewards dedicated to sustainable forest management. Each of the four roles were vastly different, including one person who had an additional player board that played out like a puzzle to receive bonuses from actions, but overall, players have a harvester and a manager who can spend 3 action points to move, harvest, restore, tend the forest, build buildings and fulfill contracts. The game goes up to 10 rounds, so with so few actions, you need to do a lot of combo-ing to maximize your turn.
Next up was Railway Boom. This game, which I affectionately call Japan Rail, feels like it belong in the Iron Rail series with its auction/bidding mechanisms and network and route building. First off, the colors are beautiful. I do love the purples and blues, and cherry blossoms, but I know that isn’t for everyone. Thank you, Ian O’Toole, for that. The game is set in the Meiji era in Japan in the late 19th century and you are building railways between Shimbashi and Yokohama. It has two auction phases – one for locomotive and carriage cards, and the other for line expansions – and I liked being able to organize my train cards to produce resources however efficiently you want to. I currently have this game on preorder. Hope it arrives soon!
I then taught a game of Come Sail Away. I always love the mancala mechanism of this game, and it’s a fun puzzle to play in about an hour. You are trying to build the best cruise ship company by delivering passengers to their staterooms and entertaining them in various rooms on the ship. Watch out for those disgruntled passengers, though! They’ll cost you points.
We ended Friday night with a fun game of French Toast, which I freaking solved the word with one guess! Chris placed the clue at not clean, and I’m like, pig? AND I WAS RIGHT. I can fully retire from playing this game forever. Just kidding, we played a few more delightful rounds before heading to bed.
Saturday
We started Saturday with Wondrous Creatures, a game that I had only played online on Board Game Arena. I wanted to see how it played out in person and was not disappointed. This game is just beautiful and crunchy. It’s a good mix of having a lot of familiar mechanisms – multi-use cards, resource gathering, the race to claim objectives first – but the game isn’t overdone, which sometimes I feel more recent games have been doing by throwing in everything and the kitchen sink into their designs. The deck of cards are filled with … wondrous creatures, and the game box is designed to look like a fairy tale book. So darling!
I then played a quick 3P game of Trophichaos, this cute Oink game about selling fruit in a volatile market. One might say a chaotic market. The game comes with these colorful card stands for the fruit tiles, which you draw from a bag. On your turn, you can either pick a fruit from the market or sell half or all your fruit in your hand (depending on if you have an even or odd amount of tiles). Each fruit scores differently depending on which season you sell it. At the end of your turn, if a tile was taken from the market, you draw one from the bag, potentially drawing a tile that tells you to move the game marker forward – and possibly changing the season right out under you.
In Shall We Dance, players are trying to pair gentlemen and ladies on the dance floor. The game contains seven colors of dancers, with each color having ladies on half that color’s cards and gentlemen on the other half. As you’re trying to pair off people from your hand, your single dancers can also be swooped up by other players, which will give you a popularity point. In the end, you want to have the majority of cards for the different colors, as they’ll net you end-game bonuses. I talk about this more on The Five By Episode 176.
We then played Raising Chicago next. I love the historical theme of this game. In the 19th century, the elevation of the Chicago area was just a few feet higher than Lake Michigan, which resulted in little or no naturally occurring draining from the city surface. This created epidemics, and the city adopted a plan to install a sewerage system. They couldn’t dig down, so they instead decided to raise buildings. This game is all about that. Players are bidding on building projects and collecting resources. The person who wins the bid claims the reward and places their square building tiles onto a map. You earn more points based on location, doing the most work in a ward, and meeting the demands of the council people. It’s such a neat economic and tactile game! I love seeing the efforts of your city-building labor on the board!
I taught the next game. Daytime Minutes is such a quirky trick-taking game that takes you back to 2003 when your cellphone plan was limited, and only nights and weekends were free. Back in my day, I remember having to wait until 7 p.m. to make my phone calls so that it didn’t burn up my plan. <insert skull emoji here>. The game also comes with victory tokens that look like SIM cards. It’s a must-follow-if-you-can game, where the highest ranked card of each suit played in a trick wins, and that player must collect all the cards that match. But, each card burns through a certain number of minutes. At the end of the trick, if you collect more minutes than the active plan card, you incur overage charges and the hand ends immediately and lose a SIM card. The player who has also collected the fewest minutes also loses a SIM card. It’s a delicate balance between winning and not going over your cellphone plan.
The last game of Saturday was Neko Syndicate, this crunchy pick-up-and-deliver game about delivering sushi in neighborhoods and being the best cat clan. You create your own action paths like a tech tree to move fish around, and once you choose an action path, you have to follow it through the end. Sometimes you realize that may you should have put the rice-making action higher up so that you can deliver those nigiri orders. In the end, you get penalized for wasted sushi and empty card spaces in your neighborhoods.
Sunday
On Sunday morning, I learned how to play Ofrenda. This game was so cute and colorful but man, it was such a thinky puzzle. Inspired by the Mexican Day of the Dead, players are preparing their ofrenda, the altar to remember those who have passed away. You gather family members’ portraits and place them into your ofrenda, but each portrait has specific wishes, such as placing them next to other relatives, so as you fill out your ofrenda, it can get harder and harder to score those portraits. I enjoyed this game a lot!
Lastly, we played Wingspan Pocket. This is the pocket-size card version of the game Wingspan, and it scratches that same itch without having to play the original game. The resources for this game are printed on the backs of cards, so cards are either used as birds or resources in gameplay. You spend resources to play birds into your flock, and you get to activate all the birds’ powers along the row. It’s a swifter version of the game, as it ends when someone plays their sixth bird. They did keep the cute eggs though to place into nests. I love those eggs. They look like candy.
That game concluded our time in Tucson for this mini convention. My husband and I love gaming down here and visiting all the yummy food places nearby. In a few days, I’ll be heading down to Tucson again for RinCon for even more gaming. Let me know if you’ll be there!
