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Consimworld 2025: Congress of Vienna, Pax Penning, Spindletop

By Meeple Lady | August 6, 2025 | Comments 2 comments

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.

The gang’s all here: Dan, Brooks, Mark, Cory and me.

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.

Avoiding princes and their proposals in Rebel Princess.

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.

Sorta working together for the winter in Winter Rabbit.

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.

The psychedelic game that is Cosmic Frog.

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 artwork for Hollow is 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!

So say we all! I hate those freaking toasters!

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.

This game was so hard to wrap my head around — until it was too late!

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!

Avoiding starting World War I in Crisis: 1914.

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.

Rodger B. MacGowan passed away earlier this year.

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.

Debating all the issues in Congress of Vienna. The left side is the map with all the army units.

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!

True to its name, you’re rooting for your opponents to score past you in Schadenfreude.

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.

Trying to avoid paradoxes in Cat in the Box.

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.

Exporting bananas in Central American ports in Fruit.

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.

In space, no one can hear you scream — except the aliens.

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.

Had a wonderful dinner at Beckett’s Table!

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.

The gang before our first round of drinks. I will not say how many rounds we finished at.

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.

You should be proud of us for finishing up our game after all our evening festivities.

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.

Dan created a tense 2P game in his prototype Andor, based on the TV show.

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.

Picking up tourists and seniors in Let’s Make a Bus Route.

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.

Trying to dominate the ocean floor and make my opponents go extinct.

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!

Origins 2025: Cross Bronx Expressway, Rebel Princess, Hot Streak

By Meeple Lady | July 10, 2025 | Comments 1 comment

Last month, I flew to Columbus, Ohio, to attend Origins Game Fair for the first time! It’s by far the biggest convention I’ve gone to – at almost 20,000 attendees – but even though it was large, the convention was easy to navigate and get around in.

The open gaming area on Saturday at Origins.

I stayed across the street from the south entrance of the Columbus Convention Center, so all I had to do was cross the street to enter the building. And that was totally convenient, as it was hot and humid during my time there, something this desert dweller was not at all used to.

My hotel, the Canopy, as well as a bunch of other hotels, was just across the street.

Wednesday

I flew out from Phoenix and arrived in Columbus on Wednesday late afternoon and immediately hit the open gaming room after getting my badge. The convention center had plenty of space to game, whether in the ginormous open gaming space, which had both open tables and tables for scheduled games, or just all the little tables and nooks found around the convention center. I never had any trouble finding a place to sit, game or charge my phone.

Lots of cute photo ops around the convention floor!

I met up with Amanda Panda, and we saw this giant gummy bear in the open gaming area, and I had to take a photo with it. (Please excuse my frizzy hair from the humidity.)

The booth was selling Rummy Gummies, a little card game where you’re trying to make a Rummy-style set of matching color gummy bears. But there are also gummy worms in the deck, which activate if too many are discarded, making you do things like trade hands or go in the other direction.

I picked up Rummy Gummies to play with my nieces.

The next game I played was Rebel Princess, the first game of many played during this con. It was such a hit with every single I busted this game out! Rebel Princess is a trick taking game where you’re a princess trying to avoid proposals from princes and a frog, who is the absolute worst. The game goes on for five rounds, with rules that slightly change each round, and you play this like a normal trick-taking game but you don’t want to collect any of the prince suited cards or the frog, as they will give you point — and you don’t want any points. Unless you’re gunning to be the Rebel of the Ball, then you want all them, and it will subtract to your total points.

The artwork in Rebel Princess is just delightful. Watch out for that frog though. He is the worst.

We then borrowed Panda Panda from the convention library. The goal of the game is to collect a very specific combination of cards, which are lettered from A to G, with the A’s having 10 cards in the deck all the way to the G having one card in the deck. On your turn, you can play a card or discard a card, which may trigger the passing of a card to an opponent. You win if you start your turn with a completed set. I ended up buying the game in the vendor hall when it opened on Thursday.

This cute card game has you building out your hand of cards to be exactly like one on the cheat sheet.

Next up was Fork, a very adorable trick-taking game where you simultaneously play cards in a trick, and, depending on the hierarchy of the animals, you may be able to win cards for scoring. The hierarchy order is is Foxes, Owls, Rabbits and Kale. On your turn, you pick a suit to be played, and then everyone plays their cards. The player who then played a fox can score an owl or rabbit. If an owl survives, it can score on a rabbit, and so forth. Any leftover kale also scores points if it doesn’t get eaten by the rabbit.

Fork is a cute trick-taking game where your animals can eat other animals or be eaten.

I hung out with these cool people that Amanda Panda introduced me to on Wednesday as we played all the previously mentioned card games. And Jamie Daggers hung out with us and painted at the table!

(From left), Cosmic Ben, Amanda Panda, Jamie Daggers, me and Dicey Vim.

Thursday

At the crack of dawn on Thursday (OK, 7:30 a.m.), I met up with Tim Fowler and Patrick Hillier for coffee and 3P cribbage out on a patio at the convention center.

It’s always good to see Patrick (we usually see each other at Granite Game Summit), and I finally got to meet Tim in person!

I am very rusty at the scoring for cribbage, most especially in the morning hours when my brain hadn’t quite woken up yet to math, but I was able to hold my own in the end as white! The scores were so close!

Look at that photo finish! Patrick ended up beating us.

I then met up with Corey (idontknowrules), an old friend who had used to live in Arizona but had moved away to Ohio about four years ago. We miss you, Corey! That morning, Corey, his friend Jon and I had all signed up to play Fort Circle’s First Monday in October, a game about the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. I got a chance to take a tour of the Supreme Court in March during Circle DC, but did not get a chance to play with the designer then, so I’m so glad I got a chance to play it here! First Monday in October was among the many scheduled games offered by Armchair Dragoons in the open gaming area. I spent half my time time there during the con learning historical games.

Kevin Bertram of Fort Circle is teaching us First Monday in October.

The game recreates SCOTUS history from 1789 to present day, and players are advocating for the court cases they want to win and shaping the philosophy of the court, which are represented by four tracks: commerce clause, equality and liberty, free speech, and executive power. Players take three actions per turn, and actions include placing their clerks on cases on the docket track, encouraging justices to retire, supporting judicial nominees or moving up the robing room, which offers benefits during your actions. I really enjoyed learning about the history and made agonizing decisions between furthering my philosophical goals versus the court cases coming through. We all enjoyed the constant push and pull of the court, and bringing down the hammer when you were the last person to take a turn in the round!

We’re influencing the makeup of the Supreme Court of the United States!

We then had lunch at North Market, a cool indoor market with food vendor stalls, that was across the street from the convention center. Lots of yummy options! I ended up getting a Philly chicken steak from Marlow’s Cheesesteaks. The sandwich was so ginormous that I ate it over two meals!

North Market is one block away from the convention center. Lots of food options!

After lunch, we hit the vendor hall, which had board game companies selling games as well as all the cool nerd-adjacent gear such as dice, shirts, puzzles and artwork. The local bookstores even had booths there! I always love people watching, seeing all the different stalls and shopping, of course! I visited the Molly House booth and took this awesome photo with a local drag queen who was at the booth!

Two fancy ladies at the Molly House booth!

That evening, I finally got a chance to play Hot Streak. Omg, this game is such a riot! It’s a racing game about school mascots who run down a field, and the players make bets on who they think will win, place or get knocked down. The game also involves seeding a deck of cards that will provide actions for specific mascots. It’s chaotic fun — we all laughed so hard! It’s hard not to when you’re rooting for a hot dog!

I then got a chance to learn Weather Machine from my favorite game designer Vital Lacerda. This was such a beast to learn! You are scientists who are tampering with the weather by collecting research data, conducting experiments, publishing papers and developing prototype machines to eliminate extreme weather. Like with any Lacerda game, it’s an intricate and complicated series of small steps to be able to finally do one grand action, and hope it scores points or an objective. My brain just about melted— and we probably should not have started learning it at 8 p.m. — but I enjoyed the brain burn and would definitely play Weather Machine again.

I think Weather Machine from Lacerda’s most complicated game, and this is coming from someone who loves Lisboa and can teach it on any given day.

To end Thursday night, we did a quick game of Mountain Goats, a quick push-your-luck game where you’re trying to get your goat to the top of the mountain by rolling a group of dice. You can divide your dice however you want so that an exact total of one or more dice will move your goat up its matching path. The goat meeples were too cute, but I think at 3P, the game felt a little long for what it was.

Friday

Friday morning, I signed up to learn Littoral Commander: The Baltic, which was being taught in the Armchair Dragoons area. The Baltic game pits Russia against the U.S., and we played the short scenario that included 3 actions per side for 3 turns. It was my first time playing a game in the Littoral Commander system, and there were so many decisions for those few turns, such as outfitting our ships with various technologies and managing resources for battle. Since we only had 3 turns in our game, we didn’t have to worry about using our powerful guns too early in the game, but ultimately, the dice failed the U.S. and we lost to Russia.

We tried fighting off the Russians in the Baltics but we were not successful.

Next up was Power Grid: Outpost, which is a version of one of my favorite games, Power Grid, but this time in space! If you know the base game, this will be easy to pick up because it is similar with a few interesting twists! First up, you have a player board where future power plants and worker shelters sit. Secondly, there is no resource market, but instead just a market for workers. You need workers to power your plants, and if you’re later in turn order, those workers can get very pricey because you’re hiring them each round, unless you have a shelter that can house them in space.

You need to make space for your power plants and shelter by placing these pieces on the main board.

Each planet functions like a city in the regular game except it can additionally house one shelter or one plant. These wooden pieces are removed from your player board and placed on the main game board, so that you can put a plant or shelter card that you won during bidding onto your player board. If you cannot put a wooden piece onto the main board, you do not have room to build a power plant, and thus cannot power cities.

Powering planets in space in Power Grid: Outpost.

We then played two more games of Rebel Princess, one at 3P and the next one at 4P. Each game has been so different based on the round cards and the variety of princess powers. At this point, I had purchased its expansion at the vendor hall, which included even more princess and round cards, as well as some special promos they had including the Carmenisa tile, which has a shiny metallic mirror on it.

Friday night, I met friends at Land-Grant Brewing Company, a beer-garden type place that had food trucks and great beer. I had the watermelon ale, and it was so refreshing! Good times hanging out in the fresh air with friends!

Such a fun brewery and outdoor space. There were three food trucks there that night, too!

Saturday

I started Saturday teaching two games, the first of which was Dune: Imperium. This game is such a solid deck-builder combination and worker placement game, and I am always down to teach it. We didn’t play with any expansions as there was one new person playing it but the game was still a hit!

Dune: Imperium is a solid blend of deck builder and worker placement.

Next up, I taught Arcs, one of my top 10 games of 2024. My two friends had never played Arcs before, and even though it so clearly states in the rule book that you shouldn’t play with the Lore and Leaders cards in your first game, I didn’t listen to it … and I think it created a lot of unnecessary chaos and a little bit of frustration. So listen to Cole, folks! Anyway, there was one point where I had no more ships on the board because they were all on my opponent’s boards and the warlord ambition had not been declared a that round. I eventually got them back, but there was no way to catch up to the person leading by a lot. Everyone still enjoyed the game though, but they definitely said they will try it first without the Leaders and Lore cards next time.

Battling it out in space and declaring ambitions in Arcs.

I then met up with Jason Carr to learn Microverse, a card-driven space 4x game that plays in about 60 minutes. Can you believe it? The game is played with a deck of cards, which have one of four actions on them: Build, Colonize, Explore and Mobilize. Players play as different factions, with a home planet on their side of the universe. On a player’s turn, they can play one or more cards to generate resource points to use toward an action. There’s also a Senate phase after each person takes their turn in a round that changes up the rules for that round. I got annihilated when an enemy traveled seven distance and attacked my home planet. I gotta defend my home turf better! Would definitely play this again, and with such a short play time compared to other 4X games, it would not be a problem to get this on table!

The last game on Saturday was Cross Bronx Expressway. I have been trying to learn this game at the past few historical game conventions I’ve been to, so I was so happy to get in on a demo with Jason. First up, look at that cover! Definitely the coolest board game cover I’ve seen on a historical game. The designer, Non-Breaking Space, had a personal connection with the graffiti artist BG183 and was able to use his artwork for the box.

Look at that cover! I don’t think I’ve seen a GMT game this size that’s done a horizontal cover.

The game follows six decades of south Bronx history from the 1940s-1990s, and how urban development negatively affected the Bronx population. It’s a 3P game where players take on the roles of Private, Public and Community institutions, as they try to save the city from bankruptcy and protect the vulnerable population. At the end of each decade, a census is tallied to determine which factions have achieved their objectives — and at what cost. It is such a rich gaming experience that highlights how quickly people can fall through the cracks and neighborhood problems can compound in the blink of an eye. I cannot say enough great things about this game, and I’m so looking forward to when my copy will arrive. You can still preorder this game on the P500!

The Cross Bronx Expressway board showcases the different neighborhoods in South Bronx.

Sunday

Unbeknownst to me, as it was my first time at Origins, the convention also offers all sorts of panels for people to attend. I started my Sunday at the “All About Self-Publishing” writing panel featuring Sarah Hans, Cat Rambo, Aaron Rosenberg and Laura VanArendonk Baugh. I particularly enjoyed how they started the session by collecting questions from the audience in order to know what types of topics to cover. It was a great discussion about some ins and outs of self-publishing. I wish we had more time, actually to talk more!

The panel included (from left) Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Cat Rambo, Sarah Hans and Aaron Rosenberg.

After the panel, I returned to the open gaming area for the Armchair Dragoons Sunday raffle. You received a raffle ticket every time you played a game that they had set up on the schedule, and there were so many prizes! Alas, I did not win anything in the end, but that’s OK.

Lots of raffle prizes from Armchair Dragoons!

I then met up with Nathan Fullerton, who taught us a demo of his game Journey to Skyhaven, which will be published by First Fish Games.

Nathan and I have run into each other at the last four conventions I’ve been to!

Journey to Skyhaven is a card-driven cozy herding game where you are hiking across terrain while trying to have the most sparkling, content and plump little creatures when you finish your hike. When you play a card, you move a certain number of spaces while using up stamina. Playing cards in a certain order can combo some victory points or net you some resources to continue your trek.

This is the prototype for Journey to Skyhaven, which will be published by First Fish Games.

Lastly, we played one last game of Rebel Princess with three people. It was good to end the convention on a high note with such a fun game!

The last game at Origins! Like Cinderella, I had to leave the ball (and grab my luggage) to go home.

I went back to my hotel, grabbed my luggage and headed off to the airport. In the beginning, I was a little nervous heading to this con by myself, as my husband had to cancel last minute (and he’s actually been to this convention before), but I was able to easily slip into games and meet up with some friends and make new ones! It was also great seeing people I’ve gamed with at Circle DC and SDHistCon and play historical games with them, and I finally got to meet Armchair Dragoons in person!

Armchair Dragoons had a whole bunch of historical games scheduled. Loved hanging out in this area!

And for those wondering, I did do some shopping at the vendor hall. The Rebel Princess expansion was not the only game I bought! And I totally had to buy the Origins dice set as it had the cute little Origins mascot Crit on them!

Overall, I played 18 games, including a couple repeats of Rebel Princess, which I do not mind at all. I have since taught my local gaming group the game, and they all enjoyed it. Did any of these games tickle your fancy? Or have you played any of the games I purchased at the convention? I have yet to get Galileo Galilei on table, but hopefully soon! My next convention is coming up! This weekend, in fact, is Consimworld, happening right here in my backyard!