Last month, I braved the hot, hot sun, like we do about this time, and attended Consimworld in Tempe. It was nonstop gaming for five straight days for me, even though Consimworld went from the night of July 11 and all the way to July 19. Cory Graham, who is a local, and Dan Bullock came out as usual, but we were lucky to have Brooks Barber, whose design Sykes-Picot just came out,  join in on the fun, too, as well as my local gaming buddy Mark, who popped into the convention when he wasn’t working.

July 11

We got to the Tempe Mission Palms, which is in downtown Tempe, for doors to open at 8 p.m. and we started with Rebel Princess. Such an awesome trick-taking game, with even cooler artwork, and it’s a game I played multiple times at Origins Game Fair, the convention I went to in June. 

We then played Winter Rabbit. It’s a semi-cooperative game set in the world of Cherokee folk stories. Each player takes on the role of one of the animals, and villagers are working together to gather resources for winter and complete tasks. You, however, cannot complete your own task so you have to rely on other players for that. You also have tokens you can place onto the board, but you also draw tokens to place on the board, and those areas will produce resources once it’s full of tokens. The mischievous winter rabbit is also in the draw bag and if you pull one out when a location is producing, then no resources are generated. 

Winter Rabbit was a 2021 Zenobia Award finalist and 2nd-place winner! The Zenobia Award is a competition and a mentoring program in which game designers from underrepresented groups develop and submit historical tabletop game prototypes. 

July 12

We started Saturday morning with a groovy game of Cosmic Frog. Players are 2-mile tall frog creatures – each with their own different abilities – harvesting land and gathering them in your gullet in order to store them in your inter-dimensional storage vault. Yeah, the premise is a little bonkers, but it’s nice to find a strategic game that plays 6 players in about 60-90 minutes. And while setup for the game is by no means quick, gameplay ramps up pretty quickly. It’s a fun puzzle swallowing up terrains in order to disgorge them in a specific order. But watch out, other frogs can raid your vault if they knock you to the Outer Dimensions. 

We then played our annual CSW game of Pax Pamir II. I know I say it at every convention when Pax Pamir gets on table, but it’s so nice to dive into a game that you already know how to play, and each game of it is always so different because of how the cards interact with each other, and how faction alliances are formed or broken. 

Next up was an epic 6P game of Game of Thrones! This game hardly gets on table anymore, but when we do, I remember how much fun the game is! The goal of the game is to capture 10 areas that have castles and strongholds – no easy feat when everyone is out to attack you. The crux of the game involves secretly assigning orders face down and then resolving each of them in turn order based on where you are on the Iron Throne, one of three tracks that can change based on bidding that happens throughout the game. In addition to combat with each other, you also have to worry about the wildlings attacking your lands. I played as House Baratheon and came in second place. Not too shabby!  

We then played this card game called Hollow. Players are trying to gather a specific set of cards based on their objective, either from the dirt or other players. But if you collect certain types of cards, your hollow husk card flips over and then you have a different set of objectives. Hollow’s artwork is somehow a combination of sinister and whimsy. 

The last game we played was Battlestar Galactica. So say we all! It’s one of my absolute favorite games, and even though us humans lost, the game was so fun with all the tension and finger pointing! I blame the loss on not being able to pick my favorite character, Helo, because I had to pick a support character before picking a military leader. The cylons drove us into the ground! 

July 13

On Sunday, I arrived at CSW a bit after lunch and we played Pax Penning. This game took pretty much the entire game to wrap my head around, and by then it was too late! Players take on the role of small kings, local chieftains and wealthy peasants who have been invited by the first Christian king of Sweden to participate in his nationbuilding. You’re also placing your influence into other player’s houses, while leveraging royal connections. You do this by rolling dice at the start your turn and checking for pairs, the pairs representing which options from the bowls containing royals you can use on your turn. Roll low pairs, and you can only access the low ones.

Similarly to other Pax games, the royal connections, which determine what action you can do, move along a quasi-bowl market, which circulates as players take their turn. The entire game is played on a cloth board, and there are gemstones that mark the influence behind your and other people’s shields. 

We then played Crisis: 1914, a card-building game that takes place in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinad and his wife, which plunged Europe into a diplomatic crisis that eventually turned into the first World War. The game is a card-driven tableau-builder for 1 to 5 players, where players are world powers trying to use diplomatic pressure to score prestige to prevent WWII from happening. I had played this a year ago and enjoyed it just the same! 

Consimworld does an opening ceremony on Sunday night, and it began with a nice tribute to the late Rodger B. MacGowan, an artist, game developer, art director and magazine publisher who has been active in the wargame industry since the 1970s. He created the popular C3i magazine, which will be restarting this fall with Rodger’s son at the helm. The CSW audience clapped upon hearing this. Eric Lee Smith was the guest of honor for the convention, and he went up and spoke about his decades-long career in the industry and a new project he will be starting. 

The last game of Sunday night was Spindletop, a prototype from Brooks on the origins of oil in Texas. Texagons are the bestagons! I do love that very cool map. The game is an economic euro, in which you’re dealt a hand of cards, and you play cards to take actions on the board, among them looking for oil, putting up derricks, creating rail lines or building production facilities, to ultimately sell oil and make a profit.

Cards are suited by color and number, and you can only take the action printed on the card in the area that matches the color, or you can spend multiple cards as wild. At the end of the round, two of your leftover cards will be used with five community cards in order to gain the best poker hand. I had an agonizing time deciding which cards to play during my round when faced with the possibility of getting a high-value poker hand, which may or may not happen when the river is revealed. Looking forward to seeing this game’s development!

July 14

Most of Monday was spent playing Congress of Vienna, a diplomatic strategy card-driven game. It’s the diplomatic struggle between France, and a coalition of Russia, Great Britain and Austria, along with their Prussian, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish allies. It plays similarly to the classic Churchill, an excellent 3-player game on WWII where players are Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. Congress of Vienna, though, feels like a 3 vs 1 throughout most of the game, until it no longer suits each individual other world power. It’s a tricky balance of working together to stop France while trying to push your troops across your fronts.

Each round consists of a strategic theater where players use cards from their hands to debate an issue. Issues that that pass will play out on the map in the next phase of the round. The back-and-forth negotiation added such drama to the game, as we all enjoyed trying — the key word here — to take down France. 

After that long and heavy game, we finished the night with two trick-takers. The first one was Schadenfreude, a delightful trick taking game where the second-highest card wins the trick. And the person who scores 40 first will trigger the end of the game, but the person with the second-highest score wins! I love this simple twist to an already tried and true mechanism, and it was so fun to play because you’re actively rooting for someone to zoom past you on the score track. When you collect tricks, if you have doubles of the same number card, they cancel out in scoring. So fun and a little diabolical! 

We ended the night with a fun game of Cat in the Box, one of the best trick-takers out there! Players are trying to win the number of tricks they predicted, but cards are not colors, so when you play the card, you assign it a suit and mark it on the main board. As the game goes on, fewer and fewer cards are available to play as other players have claimed them, and if you cannot play a card on your turn, you create a paradox. Like with regular trick taking games, you can announce that you do not have a specific colored card, which you then mark as well on your little player card. It’s such a fun puzzle — and during those last one to two turns, you can start panicking as you are basically hoping another player causes a paradox before your turn. 

July 15

Tuesday morning was a game of Fruit, which is Dan’s prototype that I’ve talked about in previous convention posts about United Fruit’s banana trade and its economic and political effects on Latin America during the period of 50 years in the early 1900s. This is my third time playing this game, and I love seeing the different iterations of this game. It’s much more streamlined than the first time I played it at Circle DC in 2024, and I had my best showing for this game! I love the secret priorities, which are ranked, and I have a much better understanding of how various actions will affect the government, and whether or not you want to turn it democratic or authoritarian. 

We then played Nemesis, a semi-cooperative board game where horrible things happen to you on a spaceship you’re trying to escape from. Meanwhile, each player has their own personal agenda, which may or may not be helpful to your cause. Exploring the nooks and crannies of this ship is important but also very dangerous, as you will more than likely make some noise, and a nasty creature pops up from the air van to take stabs at you. Nobody really wants to work together, but it’s clear that you’ll eventually have to. 

Our game of Nemesis was put on paused because dinner reservations and evening plans. For dinner, we ventured into Phoenix to eat at Beckett’s Table. The food was fantastic, and everyone really enjoyed what they ordered.

With our bellies full, we walked across the street to Undertow to have another immersive tiki bar experience. Each reservation is for 90 minutes, and there’s so many yummy drinks to choose from while you lounge in a cargo hold of a 19th century ship.

After dinner and our tiki bar experience, we went back to the convention to finish our game of Nemesis. Alas, the aliens proved too destructive and we were not able to escape. I also miscalculated and went into cryogenic sleep in the hopes that my teammates would steer our vessel to safety, but they did not.

July 16

Wednesday morning was a game of The Barracks Emperors. I could have never predicted a trick-taking game from GMT in the theme of the Roman Empire. The board is a grid where emperor cards are placed, and each player takes turns placing cards that surround those cards. When an emperor card is surrounded, the player who placed the highest card, like a trick, claims the emperor card. You gain points for collecting sets of emperors. At the end of your turn, you gain a card in the market based on the value of the card you played. The lower value of the card, the more options you can choose from. 

We played a quick game of Vibes, which has the most adorable artwork in the style of kids art class! Players take turns swapping their cards with someone else’s card. If nobody is picking you, you can raise your hand with a card in hand and play it in front of you before the active player swaps with you. You are trying to get all five cards in front of you to vibe, meaning they all have the same shape or all different shapes. 

We then dropped off Brooks at the airport for his flight back home, and I, of course, made them all pose for a photo. 

We then busted out Dan’s new prototype Andor, based on the TV show. It’s a card-driven 2-player game, in which the rebels are trying to ambush, infiltrate, recruit and sabotage empire forces as the empire is trying to build out the death star and jail rebel forces. Players simultaneously play a card to determine initiative, and then you get a certain number of action points to use on your turn in addition to the event that’s printed on the card you played. It’s very tense and would definitely love to see this out in the world. 

We had about 20 minutes to fill before my friend arrived, so Dan and I played a quick game of Let’s Make a Bus Route, a darling flip-and-fill about making a bus route through Japan. You’ve got tourists who want to see the sights, students who want to go to school, and elderly folks who need a ride. Players are using the same board, so if you start crossing another person’s route, that creates traffic, which is bad if you have the most at the end of the game. 

And now we’re at the last game of the convention: Dominant Species: Marine, another convention favorite. You are all sea species trying to survive and dominating in the ocean’s harsh climate and volcanic vents. There are a lot of actions you can take, but once you pass an action spot on the board, you cannot go to one above unless you recall all your pieces and start over. This makes the game so much more than your basic euro action selection game.  

And that was my time at CSW this year! We survived the heat, especially while walking around Mill Avenue during meal breaks, and I had a great time hanging out with friends and seeing gamers who I see every year. I appreciate the main ballroom is open 24/7, a much-appreciated convenience that adds to the chill atmosphere of this convention. I have some traveling lined up in the next few months, so my next board game convention will be SDHistCon in November. Hope to see you there!