We got home from Origins Game Fair today. As usual, we focused on games we don't already know, which means we expect some winners and some losers. This year, most of our pre-convention information about these games came from Board Game Geek (and, in one case, a fan among my readers). We also attended a couple non-games.

Origins has a ton of games, and you really want to preregister for them instead of taking your chances at the con. Dani winnowed the huge list down to a smaller number of candidates, and then we sorted those into four buckets: A (really want to play), B (looks good), C (would play), and X (nope!). I'm going to list the bucket we put each game into, so I can start tracking prediction versus reality. We had to do a second round of scheduling after we got locked out of some of our initial picks, so not all games have buckets.

Theoretically most games at Origins are taught. Some require experience (we didn't sign up for any of those). Some games were additionally listed as "learn to play", suggesting more active teaching and guidance. Some, but not all, of those are run by the publishers. We had one outstanding learn-to-play non-publisher experience.

Wednesday

• Keep the Heroes Out!: Cooperative game where the players are dungeon monsters trying to keep the invaders (heroes, adventurers) from getting their hard-earned treasure. Each monster has different abilities. It sounded like a fun concept and some of the mechanics were interesting, but a lot depends on random chance and it was hard to strategize. It's icon-heavy; there was a player cheat sheet (good), but it was not entirely accurate (bad). Thumbs down. (Bucket: A.)

• Pandemic: The Cure (it looks like we were playing with the Experimental Meds expansion): This is an abstraction of Pandemic, using six zones instead of a world map and role-specific dice to constrain your actions. On your turn you roll your dice, which tell you which actions (including role-specific ones) are available to you this turn. You can re-roll, but if the biohazard face comes up that moves the group along the infection track (and you can't re-roll that die). Diseases are asymmetric dice, with the number telling you which zone it affects. Curing diseases involves players collecting dice of the same color, replacing the cards in the original game. It's a quick game and we enjoyed it. We want to get it. (Bucket: C.)

Thursday

• Metro: The board made me think of Tsuro when I saw it. Players are trying to build train tracks connecting starting positions with a station. The edge of the board alternates starting positions and stations and there's a station in the center of the board. You're trying to make your tracks as long as possible and there's a bonus for connecting to the center station. On your turn you place a tile into the 8x8 grid; each tile has two track connections on each edge, and it's designed so that there's always a valid placement. It's a quick game; our teaching game was about 40 minutes. We both liked this a lot and want to get it. (Second-round pick.)

• Weather Meeple: A lightweight game about manipulating the weather. You're trying to use your weather cards (which can produce sun, rain, lightning, clouds, or snow) to "build" the weather systems for four "goal" forecasts. It's sort of an engine-building game (your cards and what they produce), with new card draws affecting which of your cards can produce this round, which you can mitigate with an action... cute, ok. I'd play again if a friend brought it over and wanted to, but otherwise, meh. (Second-round pick.)

• Dwellings of Eldervale: No. Just...no. Ok, I understand why it appeals to some; it's sort of worker-placement, sort of area-control, definitely monster-fighting, cards you can buy to gain abilities, sixteen different "factions" to choose from each with its own special abilities, variable dynamic board with special spaces... I should have taken stronger note of the game-runner asking us, at the beginning, to just go with it and if we aren't having fun don't let it show. The game has a lot of stuff, so you need a large table, and the con's options for that are bad, and the game components were already visually challenging even before that... Thumbs down. (Bucket: A.)

• High Frontier: Dani really likes the idea of Phil Eklund's games, which tend to be about biology and evolution and get very, very detailed. I noted the BGG complexity rating of 4.35 (out of 5) and suggested that maybe we split up for that session. He reported that the game has a lot of potential and he'd like to figure it out, but if he's going to burn social capital on getting a group together to figure out a long complex game, it's not going to be this one.

• Learn to play: Nassau: Rum & Pirates is a good game. It didn't need a second level, adding a seafaring phase after each city phase. 'Nuff said. (Bucket: A.)

• Foundations of Rome: Loved this. Players are building three types of buildings (residential, commercial, civic) on a shared grid. You each have a supply of buildings of different sizes and shapes. In order to build, you first have to acquire deeds to the land you'll need. Deeds come out for purchase in random order, so while your goal might be that big bank that requires four spaces in a square, you might have to start with a couple one-space houses or bakeries or whatever and then replace them as you get the land you need. (You can always replace to grow, but you can't subdivide.) Most buildings score based on what they're adjacent to, so there's a lot of player interaction. Our game took about an hour.

  The game is physically beautiful. You get a tray of three-dimensional, decorated little buildings, with clear indications on their tops about how they score. Based on the images at Board Game Geek, there's a whole fandom around painting those miniatures. The game is very expensive (over $300). I don't think it would be nearly as satisfying to play without the nice components, but we're not shelling out for that, either. This game might be one we look for at conventions. (Bucket: A.)

Friday

We got almost none of our first-round picks for Friday, so we ended up assembling this from still-available parts.

• Learn to play: Liftoff 2.0, run by the designer: Competitive space-program development starting in the 1950s. Players develop technologies (like orbital satellites, first-stage rockets, and capsules) and do research to improve their safety. You schedule future launches and do your best to develop what you'll need to a level of safety you're willing to go with, and then you roll the dice for each stage of the launch to see how you did. You gain prestige points from successful launches and from being the first to do things like put a man in orbit. Prestige begets better funding. Failures and random events can set you back, and you might decide to scrub a scheduled launch if your research didn't pan out enough (or you ran out of money to fund it). This is a remake of an older game I've never played. I'm interested in seeing the finished game (we played with a prototype and I gave some feedback on some vision issues).

• Town Builder: Coevorden: Tableau-building card game. Each card can be used as either a specific (proto-)building or a specific resource. To build a building, you buy its card and then accumulate the resources that will be needed to construct it. When you have all the resources, your building is built and you can use any special abilities it gives you. Buildings are worth victory points (harder buildings are worth more), and there are also some random goals like "have three civic buildings". It's a fairly quick game, maybe 45 minutes (box says 30-60). We chose it in part because of the publisher, First Fish -- we like another of their games. We bought this at the convention.

• Corps of Discovery: Lewis and Clark and Monsters. This is a cooperative deduction game with periodic specific goals. Players are exploring a map, turning over tiles to reveal things like water, food, forts, and threats. You are told some "rules" for placement like "water and food will always be adjacent", which lets the group reason about the not-yet-revealed spots. You need to collect certain resources at certain times, have food and water and a campfire at the end of the day, and gather things to improvise weapons for when the monsters find you. We both liked it a lot and want to get it. I do hope there's enough map variability, given that there are those constraints, to keep it interesting. (I mean, I used to accidentally memorize the eye chart at my vision exams before they introduced more variability. I didn't want to...) (Bucket: A.)

• We also attended two seminars, one on 19th-century science fiction and one allegedly on military logistics in ancient and medieval times.

Saturday

• Kingsburg: Each player has a province that you're trying to improve. The game plays through five years of four seasons; spring, summer, and fall are for production and building, and in the winter the monsters come out. By winter you need to have enough strength from the buildings you built or the mercenaries you hired. On your (non-winter) turn you roll three dice and can spend them to claim positions from 1 through 18 -- standard worker-placement rules, first come first served. You could use just one of your dice to get that wood on 4 that you really need, or you can combine them to get higher-value items. You need an exact match, so depending on how you rolled, you might not get what you were trying for. You can see what other players rolled, so you can reason about what they might take from you or what you can safely leave for later. We both liked this. (Bucket: B.)

• Learn to play: Canals of Windcrest: Sequel to Mistwind, which we like. Despite it being marked "learn to play", there was a large, fast info dump at the beginning and it looked like there wouldn't be a lot more, and there are a lot of moving parts, and I was not feeling good about it, so (after confirming it wouldn't mess up the table) I bailed. Dani played and reported that it's a good game but, yes, lots of moving parts that he only started to understand after playing. (Bucket: A.)

• Unpub: There is an area set aside for game designers to test-drive works in progress. For players, you can just show up, look around for something that looks interesting and has the "needs players" flag up, and go join. While Dani was playing Canals I wandered in there and joined a game called Toll the Dead. (This turned out to be thematically coincidental; see next entry.) This is a cooperative game with limited communication (made me think of Crew in that regard). The dead and also the destroyer are working their way up through the nine circles of hell trying to escape; the players have to stop them. Your tools: bellringers who do damage to enemies in the same space (maybe more) and then move, and variable special abilities. You roll dice and then allocate them semi-secretly; everyone can see if you're bringing in a new ringer and where, but most other actions are secret. (There's more to it, but I don't want to do anything that might impede the designer. For example, Origins has a no-photography rule in this room.) I enjoyed the game a lot and after we played the designer asked for feedback (general and some specific questions) and we had a good conversation. She's hoping to pitch it to a publisher, not Kickstart it, so there's no URL to follow right now but I did get a card so I can check back later.

• Inferno: A "soul management" game, the publisher says. Each turn has two places, below and above. Below, you are trying to guide souls to the correct circles of Hell, gaining infamy (victory) points when you deliver them. Above, you are placing workers in various buildings in Florence to get corresponding game effects. What you did in Hell restricts what you can do in Florence. Hell gets restocked when players use the Florence action to accuse someone of sin, which gets you benefits in Hell. There are scoring tracks (one for each circle) and you only get to score a track at all if (a) you have one of your markers there and (b) you managed to place a different marker there, the means for which were a little unclear to me. It felt like a very complicated game; BGG says 3.57 but I would have put it at 4+. I don't mind that I played but I'm not looking for another game of it. (Bucket: A.)

• Learn to play: Terraforming Mars: Ok, it's like this. I've been around games of Terraforming Mars. I've been around one struggling teaching session of Terraforming Mars that persuaded me to be elsewhere in a hurry. It looks super-complicated and super-fiddly. This session, though, was a delight. The person running it (just a regular gamer, not from the publisher) was excellent and enthusiastic. I now understand why some of my readers like this game.

  Players are each playing a corporation who are collectively trying to make Mars habitable. There are joint goals, like increasing the oxygen level and temperature, and you get victory points when you contribute to those goals. You also have other ways to get points. At its core everything depends on two things: what resources you have (and can generate), and what cards you choose to buy and later play. Card-management is probably pretty strategic once you know what you're doing; in this game I was playing more tactically, becuase how would I know if this card I can buy on turn 2 might be useful five turns from now when the temperature is high enough to allow me to play it? Stuff like that. Cards can give you resources, better resource generation, ways to earn points (I had "Pets", which collects points when people build cities), discounts on standard actions (like placing a forest tile), and lots more. Each round there's a card draft where you can choose cards to keep (for a fee). Playing them also costs money. Your corporation gives you some special advantages, which you should factor in, but sometimes the best cards just don't show up (or show up at the right time).

  Our session, with teaching and coaching and some discussion after, ran a little over three hours. With experience, it's probably a two-hour game, or maybe even shorter. (Bucket: B.)

Sunday

We were signed up for two two-hour games on Sunday (both in bucket A). The first one was a no-show, and we decided that the second one wasn't compelling enough to wait for and headed home instead. Playing games most of the day for several days is already pretty tiring (more for me than for Dani I think), and we didn't do a great job this time of padding the schedule with non-game (or non-game-in-the-room-with-the-enervating-fluorescent-lights) activities. One solution there -- at the cost of making the jigsaw puzzle more complicated -- might be splitting up here and there like we did this time. For example, I like RPGs more than Dani does, and I haven't played any at conventions.

I backed the Kickstarter for Kavango because it sounded like a neat board game, and it is in fact neat. The game came last month and we've played it several times with two, three, and four players. (The game supports up to five players.) I like the game a lot: solid game mechanics, flexible (you can always recover from bad luck or errors), simultaneous play to keep things moving, and a reasonable length. The physical components are nice in general but have some flaws.

The game evokes Wingspan and 7 Wonders. You are building a nature preserve; you need to accumulate the various things that animals eat so you can play those animals onto your board. Some of the animals are, in turn, prey for other animals that you will play later. Unique cards represent the animals and resources, all with attractive art that does not get in the way.

The mechanic is card drafting: you receive a hand of cards (resources, animals, and actions), choose and play one, and pass the remainder to the next player. You'll see some of the cards again; there are ten plays in a round (and 12 cards in a hand, so not all cards are played). To play an animal you must satisfy its food requirements -- for example, a grass and a fish, two trees, a grass and two small mammals. On one side of your board you have a "holding pen" of sorts: spaces for three cards that you can't yet play but are holding in reserve. As soon as you satisfy the requirements for one of these cards, it moves over. (Confusingly, your main board is called your "reserve" and this sidebar is called your "sanctuary" in the rules. That feels backwards to me, and we stumbled over it when learning and teaching the rules.)

Animals can also require levels of one or more of three types of protection: habitat, poaching, or climate. The first two are individual, the last shared. In each turn, after you play a card you can choose to spend money to improve any of those protections, which might enable cards to move onto your main board from your sidebar.

How do you get money? Each round (there are three in total) there are four shared research goals, and when you satisfy one you get both money and victory points. Most of these goals have a range of payouts, so you can minimally satisfy it and collect your payout or hold off until you can do more to collect a higher payout. It depends on how desperate you are for money. Action cards (that you can play instead of resources or animals) can also help you with money. You can buy the four basic resources if you get stuck.

In addition to collecting victory points from research goals, each player has a private (game-end) goal and there are three shared public goals that award points. Final score is your accumulated victory points plus the scores of all animals that you played onto your main board.

The game plays in about an hour.

--

In terms of components, my largest complaint is that the game is a table hog. The player boards are huge, and there are also several shared things that need to be available. I know they wanted to make the cards large to show off the art, but they could have scaled that all down 25% with no harm done. Granted, they'd need to adjust the text size on some occasionally-relevant already-small text, but it's doable.

The basic game comes with cardboard trays to hold the various cards and the money cubes. (A deluxe version offered better trays and cloth bags for the cubes.) The cardboard trays went together pretty easily but need to be handled carefully. The two that hold cards have open sides, so the stacks of cards will slide out if you're not careful in moving the tray from the box to the table. We found the tray for the money cubes to be too hard to work with -- hard to pick cubes out (which must be in two layers), hard to pack up, and hard to not spill in the box. We replaced it with plastic bags -- a pity, as the makers of the game have gone out of their way to avoid plastic in packaging. (The box is not even shrink-wrapped, but comes in a cardboard sleeve.)

The game components are otherwise of good quality: the cards are sturdy and attractive, the (many) different types of cards are labelled well so putting the game away is easy, and the double-layer boards for tracking protection investments make accidents much less likely. The "meeples" for tracking score are also pretty. The rulebook is pretty clear and reasonably well-organized, and the player "cheat sheet" cards (turn order, icon key, resource distribution and the maximum number you'll need, etc) are helpful.

We went to Gencon last week -- my first time, Dani's second (though the first was some years before the pandemic). As with Origins, our goal was mainly to play games that were new to us, and mitigate "game overload" with some other entertainment. Here's what we did: Read more…

We went to Origins Game Fair last week and played a bunch of new-to-us games (and a couple familiar ones). Some notes (not full reviews):

Wednesday

• Alhambra: The Red Palace (Queen Games): On your turn you can take money, buy tiles to expand your tableau, or take some special actions depending on conditions. I don't know which parts of this are the base game (which we've never played) versus the expansion. (There are soldiers who can be placed on your walls or sent to do tasks; that feels expansion-y.) Fun but not outstanding; I might look up the base game, which I've heard good things about.

• Empire Builder "pot luck": We did this last year too. There's a train-gamers club that runs a bunch of games. For this, they showed up with game sets (higher-end custom builds, not the games we own) for many of the "crayon rail games" (Empire Builder, EuroRails, et al), and interested people self-organized into games of whichever ones they were interested in. We ended up in a three-player game of Iron Dragon. We all had some bad luck at various times and the final score was way more lopsided than the board positions would suggest, but I had fun. (But sigh, I was one turn away from delivering that load of dragons for 66 gold, which might be the highest payoff in the game.)

Thursday

• Natural Chaos: two-player game with the feel of tic-tac-toe, rock-paper-scissors, and a capture/replace rule that adds complexity. Ok, not long, might not have a lot of replay potential.

• Lacluck's Revenge (?): This was a vendor demo. Cooperative dungeon-crawl game, simple mechanics (for what we saw, anyway), maybe aimed for a younger crowd? We played a prototype; there's a Kickstarter.

• Maglev Metro: We enjoyed this a lot and bought a copy. You're building a network, collecting resources (with preconditions), and building your "engine" to be able to take more/better actions. There are public goals and secret goals. The game is very nicely produced; in particular, each player has a stack of "track" tiles that are transparent other than one stripe, and they're all slightly offset from each other, so players can build in the same hex and you can still see everything. That's clever. Also, the boards where you're collecting pieces have slight indents so that you're not worrying about accidentally scattering things. Thoughtful physical production values, in other words.

• Wingspan with an expansion (name unknown): We played Wingspan last year, bought it, and have played several games with friends. This session had an expansion that added a "wildcard" resource type and some special rules around it, also adding cards and replacing the game boards to account for that. I don't think the expansion carried its weight, but the session was fun. I seem destined to win Wingspan at Origins and mostly not at other times. (I won the game last year and also this one.) This game had some very nice component upgrades; I don't know if they're commercially available. There was a much better birdhouse, which sent us looking online and it turns out Etsy and others can solve that for us. (I was going to try to build my own, but I don't have the right tools so we'll probably just buy one.)

We attempted to have a late dinner at Barley's, a popular pub across the street from the convention center that gives away custom glasses every year, but they were very crowded and understaffed so we bailed.

Friday

Beer for brunch is fine, right? We were there at opening time, after a morning seminar, and that worked much better.

• Seminar: Punish your players with landscape science: presented by a geology professor, a survey of how a variety of environment hazards "work" and how you might handle those effects as a GM. We talked about volcanoes, tsunamis, rip currents, a kind of landslide where a whole plateau moves (I forget what this is called), and several other things I don't now remember. Interesting food for thought; didn't take notes. Presenter's web site, includes a link to his book Landscapes for Writers and Game Masters: Building Authentic Natural Terrain into Imagined Worlds.

• Gems of Iridescia: Fairly lightweight worker-placement game: mine gems of four different types to assemble the components to buy ("restore") artifacts; public and secret conditions for scoring victory points. Playable; has rough edges. The game is not out yet; the session was run by the designer.

• Rolling Freight: Rail-building game with limited contracts and a random component. You have a pool of dice with different colors on the faces; those colors correspond to actions you can take and places you can build, so what you can do at any time depends on what you rolled this turn. You can buy a limited number of upgrades that either let you use your dice more effectively or give you more dice. In addition to building rail you're also trying to make deliveries, on as much of your own track as you can but you can use other players' track (and they get points for it). It feels like a good game in general (I'd need to play it a couple more times to judge it), but the board is difficult to see things on. Some board deficiencies might be things I could fix with the right stickers and Sharpies.

Saturday

• Brass: Birmingham: Outstanding. We had ordered it online before leaving the convention. This is an industrial/economic game: you're trying to build a commerce network, producing goods in response to demand from other players and figuring out what to build to use your limited resources most effectively. Where/what you can build is governed by the cards in your hand. Turn order is set by spending: bigger spenders go last in the next turn.

• Savage: A social game related to Werewolf/Mafia/etc but with better mechanics and a little randomness. Hidden-traitor games aren't my favorite, but this game seems to do it better than some others.

• Dwarven Rails (2024): a lighter-weight network-building game with investment in rail companies. This is a "cube rail game", a term I had not heard before but maybe it's meaningful to my readers. You're building a network, but more importantly, you're building to increase the value of the companies you own stock in, so player alliances come and go. I ended up winning this by half-again the next highest player (who I thought was beating us all), and I don't entirely understand how that happened. The game has a lot of potential but also some issues. Our session was run by the designer, so feedback was received.

We also went to a two-hour seminar that was kind of rambly and was plagued by technical problems, so I'm not going to say more about that.

Sunday

• Zhanguo: The First Empire: Complicated optimization game. It has a lot of room for strategy but was pretty overwhelming on a first play. (Having one teacher cover multiple tables was a tactical error on the part of the organizers, in my opinion.) Some of that might be "Sunday morning at the end of the convention" fatigue, some was definitely being the slowest player at my table, and a little was vision. Mostly, there were a lot of details to keep straight, and I admit to feeling relieved when it turned out the timeslot was an hour shorter than I thought it was (this will end soon). The game is very well-made physically except for one poor color choice in certain tiles.

Queen Games was running a limited special through the entire convention: present a coupon to get a (random) free game from their catalog. We've played and enjoyed several of their games, so this was interesting. People lined up for this before the hall opened and we didn't try (they limited the number each day), but on a whim, we stopped by Sunday morning on the way to our game, almost an hour after the hall opened, and there were only a couple people waiting and they still had games. They were down to their last ten and only had one option left, so we didn't get to see what the other games on offer were, but we now own a copy of Pirates, which looks light and cute.

Last month a friend brought over a copy of Flamecraft, which I recognized from our Origins A-list but it was sold out before we could register. The game is set in a town with a collection of shops, each of which natively has one good type that you can acquire there. You can play cards to expand a shop. If you gather the right combinations of goods, you can enchant shops to make them even better (and earn points). Shops have capacity limits, and as they fill up new shops come out so there's always stuff to do. It's a cute game with (mostly) good production values, and I'm glad we got to play it. One thing that I found suboptimal is that the layout is long and skinny, so no matter where you sit, you can't see everything without getting up and looming over the table. Maybe some people don't have that problem, but several of us did.

At Pennsic our camp has a gameroom (look, have you met us?), and somebody brought a copy of Equinox. This is a card game with betting and attempting to manipulate the outcome. There are eight magical creatures, one of which will be eliminated each round. You can place betting tokens on creatures; earlier bets pay off more, but if a creature you bet on gets eliminated before the end, you get nothing for that bet. For each creature there are cards numbered 0 through 9, plus there are chameleon cards (also 0 through 9) that can be played anywhere. On your turn you play a card from your hand into the corresponding "slot" for the current round. You can play over existing cards -- so if someone played an 8 on that creature you want to eliminate, you can play a "0" there. Turns continue until every creature has something for that round (so at least eight turns but it could be a lot more), and then the lowest-valued creature is eliminated and you go to the next round. Each creature also has a special power, which you can use if you play on it and you're the majority better. I played this a few times throughout the week and enjoyed it. I expect we'll buy a copy.

Yesterday two friends joined us for games and food and we played Point City, which they had just gotten from Kickstarter. (General release is next month.) This is from the same folks who made Point Salad and the style is similar, though Point City has more strategy. Two-sided cards are dealt out into a market; one side shows one of five resources (or a wildcard) and the other side shows a building. Buildings require specified resources and produce some value -- usually they give you permanent resources, but they might also give you victory points or "civics" points, which are variable scoring rewards. In a manner similar to Splendor, you're trying to build up permanent resources so that you can build other cards without first needing to get and spend the one-shot resource cards. On your turn you take two adjacent cards from the market, and if you take a building you must be able to build it immediately (you do not have a hand of cards). If you don't have a valid play, you draw two resources from the deck.

We played this a few times and liked it -- it's a nice, tight game that doesn't take a long time to play (though I disbelieve the claimed lower bound of 15 minutes, even for experienced players). We plan to buy this when it's available.

We went to Origins Game Fair for the first time since before the pandemic. We played games.

Wednesday

• Empire Builder "pot luck": this was a general sign-up, specific groups and games to be sorted out on arrival. We ended up in a four-player game of Eurorails, which I enjoyed. It took longer than usual; part of that was one player, but I think part of it was also some unfortunate card draws. (Fortunately, this was the only thing we signed up for Wednesday evening.) The game has gotten some usability upgrades since last I saw it: the goods chits are now colored with corresponding color-coding on the contract cards, and we played on a dry-erase map (single sheet). I asked about the map: that's something the folks running this did, not commercially available "but maybe later". (The organizers had a large art portfolio with all the maps.)

Thursday

• Hamburg: Nominally a city-building game (the veneer is kind of thin), the idea is that you have cards that can be used for different purposes: building (two stages), getting workers (needed for buildings), averting catastrophes, building walls, and (if I recall correctly) getting money. In each of eight rounds, the player with the most advanced position in each of five categories gets to check off an accomplishment (if not already met) for end-game points. There's not a lot of interaction among players. It was ok.

• Fortune and Famine: You're playing leaders in a fantasy setting and your goal is to maximize the grain you have stored by the end of the game. Each round you can bid on new workers: the two fundamental ones are the farmer (pay coins, get grain) and the merchant (pay grain, get coins), and there are several others. In later phases there are upgraded versions of workers, like more lucrative merchants. There are also wizards who perform one-time actions, some of which are attacks on other players, and there are thieves. Sometimes when you draw workers you get famine cards instead and all players lose half their unprotected grain. You can protect (store) grain, so it's safe but no longer available for spending. Each leader has a special ability; mine was being able to protect three grain and/or coins without storing, another was being able to ignore famine effects three times during the game, and I forget what the others were. It's a pretty light, fast game -- I'm going to guess 45 minutes once you know the rules. I enjoyed it enough to buy a copy.

• Familiars and Foes: A cooperative game in which you're playing low-powered familiars trying to rescue your witches and wizards from monsters. The session was led by the game designers, one of whom also played. It felt a little juvenile; I don't know how much of that was the game itself and how much was this particular session. (We were all adults, to be clear.) I felt it was trying too hard to be cute.

• Wingspan: I've been hearing good things about this game, and it did not disappoint! (We bought a copy on the way home.) Your goal is to attract birds to your habitat; each bird type contributes to your score and might have special powers that help either the game engine or your final score. Birds can lay eggs (usually needed to get more birds), and birds require the right food to be brought into play. On your turn you can draw bird cards into your hand, play birds, lay eggs, or collect food. Each round has an additional goal (like "birds in trees" or "eggs in box nests") that awards extra points. The game is well-designed (except for storage), well-made, pretty, and fun.

Having two "F-something and F-something" games on the same day was tripping us up all day.

Friday

• La Familia Hort: Players are competing to inherit granny's farm by building the most profitable plot. Each turn you can buy crops or farm animals, water and fertilize (limited options so you have to choose), and -- when a crop is ready -- either sell it or use it to feed livestock for income. There are also some tools that help you enhance the value of other tiles. You can only have six tiles at a time, though, so you're giving up substantial space to play a tool. The game was light, cute, and pretty forgettable, and did not consume more than half of its two-hour slot.

• Final Strike: Players are gladiators competing for glory points by killing monsters and their sidekicks. You have a hand of weapons (everyone starts with the same hand), which deal varying amounts of damage and can be upgraded for better weapons that sometimes have special powers. You're trying to deal damage but not so much that someone else can "scoop" you for the kill; the killing shot brings a lot more glory. This game was run by the designer.

• Gempire: Zarmund's Demands The novelty of this game is simultaneous play with actions recorded on dry-erase boards for simultaneous reveal. The boards were laid out well so you could easily see what your options are. I am now out of positive things to say about this game.

• New York Pizza Delivery Lightweight resource-allocation game. You're building pizzerias in different NYC neighborhoods to meet delivery orders and collect victory points and maybe tips. Ingredient cards in your hand can be used to match delivery orders, or you can use them to add permanent ingredients to one of your pizzerias (can satisfy an order without more cards), or you can discard them to improve your range. There is a "marketplace" of ingredient cards that, in our game, grew quite large and unmanageable. There are also event cards and other special abilities. I came away thinking "meh", though possibly with a better playing space and fewer players it could be fun.

Saturday

Origins has activities other than board games too. Saturday morning we went to a lecture called something like "why you don't want too much realism in your game". This was put on by a wargaming group, so this realism was about battle plans and stuff. The presenter was an Army logistics officer who talked a lot about the stuff that needs to go onto the map that isn't "pieces shooting or blowing things up" -- stuff that's essential to an army actually functioning, but not very much fun for most people to play out. I wasn't the target audience but I still found it interesting. Apparently it was immediately followed by a presentation about making games more realistic (drawing from experience in Desert Storm, it sounded like), but we had somewhere else to be.

• Mistwind (not published; that's a Kickstarter link): Players are competing to deliver goods to places where they're in demand, using flying whales (if there's a reference here I missed it) to navigate from place to place and building outposts to reduce costs. On each round you will play four of your five numbered tokens, discarding one at the beginning of each round. Each token can, in turn, be played in one of four places: a row of options that give you resources in different combinations, a row of cards that let you build outposts in specific locations, a row of action options (like building whales and outposts or taking the first-player position), and a row of cards giving special abilities or end-game scoring. The trick here is that each of these four areas has five numbered positions, and you have to play your corresponding numbered token. So you can only play one "3" position, for instance, among those four choices. That all sounds complicated and there was definitely a learning curve, but I was getting it by the end of the game and the next one would be smoother. We were playing a prototype and the session was run by the designer, who was taking detailed notes and asked us for feedback. I like what I saw and expect to back the Kickstarter when it goes live.

• Railways of the World: Rail-building and goods delivery. We've played this successor to Steam twice at past Origins conventions and had one good and one terrible experience (which seemed to be players not the game itself). This time was a good experience; the map for the six-player game is huge and the convention gave them a big round table, which leads to visibility problems for me. The bad experience (last time) was other players basically saying "you'll have to cope"; this time, in contrast, the other players were willing to move the map toward an edge and let me choose my seat to maximize what I could see, at the cost of others having to work harder, and people were happy to help with reading things I couldn't see, and it was all very friendly and positive. With six players there's a lot of contention for routes; each player also has a secret goal that encourages building in different places, which helps mitigate that. You have to look at where the goods come out at the beginning of the game and think ahead to where you might be able to deliver them and what track you'll need to build to do that. It's more forgiving than Steam and we now own a copy (which we will not play on a big round table).

• Obelisk: Cooperative puzzle-style game. You have a 5x5 grid of tiles, each with an exit arrow on one side, one of which is the monster-spewing portal. During the players' phase you can rotate tiles to build a path (one rotation per tile ever), build towers at intersections to capture monsters from the adjacent four tiles, mine resources needed to upgrade towers, and do those upgrades. During the monsters' phase, a random assortment of monsters (three different types, varying in speed and strength) emerge on the portal and start to move along the path. If you have a strong-enough tower when a monster passes by, you can capture it (one capture per tower per phase). If a monster escapes the board or visits a tile for a second time, the players lose. It's a quick game, maybe 20 minutes; we lost our first game, declared the second layout untenable from the start, and won a third game with effort. We bought a copy. This game, too, was run by the designer.

General

We had more gaps in our schedule than in past years, some by design and some by games running short. We planned for some of that and got a hotel room across the street from the convention center. That location turned out to be noisy, but the convenience of being able to go back to the room for an hour instead of finding a place in the convention center to sit and read was a big win. And the hotel room didn't have annoying fluorescent lights.

In the past there have been some "general game-store" vendors, but this year we didn't see that -- general vendors for trading-card games and lots of individual publishers, along with the usual assortment of auxiliary vendors (dice, art, t-shirts, special-purpose gaming tables, costumes, etc), but no general stores for board games. Fortunately, we have a local game store we can support, and they even had Wingspan in stock so we didn't have to wait.

We were on the fence about True Dungeons this year, and then learned they wouldn't be there -- dilemma solved. :-)

Attendance was a lot lower than what I remember from 2019 (and some vendors commented on this too). I'm guessing half?