Category: Convention

My Top 12 Games From Boston FIG!

Boston FIG 2024 was pretty good! It’s the first time the event has been held in person for quite a while, and it was held at the Boston Cyclorama.

Fun Fact: The Cyclorama was used to hold a giant 3D painting of the Battle of Gettysburg. There’s a incredible history to this building, but this is a gaming blog. So instead of talking about the history of the Boston Flower Exchange, let’s talk about games.

As with previous write-ups, I’ll mostly be talking about the games I saw and liked.

Being entirely indie games, there were a lot of games I didn’t find fun, or didn’t particularly speak to me this year. I won’t be talking about them. There’s no value in ripping into a small project that’s just not for me. There were also a pretty decent number of games I didn’t get a chance to play, including a bunch of the award winners, so those also aren’t on this list.

In no particular order, here are some things I saw and liked!

Abracabattle

Abracabattle is a clever tableau builder where you build a set of spells to attack your opponent. Those spells trigger off dice rolls, and the last wizard standing wins.

I didn’t play Abracabttle at Boston FIG, mostly because I got a chance to sit down and play it last weekend at PAX Unplugged. My opinion hasn’t changed since then. I did, however, spend a fair amount of the show sending folks to Abracabattle booth to give it a shot.

Here’s my take from PAX Unplugged:

“Last year Abracabattle was a game with strong core elements, that didn’t quite have the right cards for its gameplay. Now, it feels like a full game, with a few reworked systems, new items, and a MUCH stronger set of cards. I’m really excited to see where it goes.”

TLDR: If you can play Abracabattle, you should.

Also, Abracabattle won the Best Game in Development award!

Cappy & Tappy

My notes for Cappy & Tappy read “Place Tetrominos to build routes for your friend, 2D platformer” and honestly, I think that’s all you really need to know for this one.

Cappy & Tappy Victory

It’s clever, it’s interesting, and I’d have stronger feelings on it if I’d played more. As is though, I’d suggest just going and playing the version on itch.io if you want to give it a shot.

I didn’t see this during my play time, but it looks like at higher levels the pieces have obstacles and boons on them?

Oasis Blitz

Oasis Blitz is a 3d platformer with the gimmick is the ability to do a sort of “dolphin dive” through dirt. It feels incredibly smooth, and if my description of the movement doesn’t quite make sense, their itch.io page does a much better job of getting the idea across with a few choice GIFS.

It gave me sort of Sonic the Hedgehog/Neon White vibes. If this sounds neat, I’d just go play the demo.

Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword

Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword is what you’d get if you combined Getting Over It and Deepest Sword. It’s an interesting, if somewhat frustrating mechanic. Unlike Getting Over It, though, Mushroom Kid’s Big Grass Sword seems more focused on sets of puzzle rooms, and less focused on being a rage game.

Rage Games aren’t quite my favorite, so I liked this change of pace. Controls felt a little wonky, but that’s probably to be expected with this genre.

Breaking News

The best way I can think to describe Breaking News is as sort of weird WarioWare style style game where you primarily interact by smacking a TV with your arrow keys. Frankly, it feels rude to try to simplify the mechanic to that extent. But the short version is that you are watching television, and by smacking the television different directions, you change reality.

See, that sounds more confusing then the WarioWare thing.

Regardless, it’s interesting, and quite weird.

Murder is Game Over

I have a sort of perverse fascination with RPG Maker from a technical perspective. The trade off of being able to make something very quickly, while being unable to get the engine to do exactly what you want is interesting. The result is that when I see full, completed projects made in RPG Maker, like Murder Is Game Over from HitherYon games, I’m always curious ask how they did it.

There’s actually a whole series of Murder is Game Over games. The game they had at the show was the demo for their most recent release, the Blackinton Curse. From what I understand, they’re a series of murder mystery adventure games.

Someone’s Y

I love social deduction games. I loathe word games.

Someone’s Y, a social deduction game about determining who at the table has the hidden role of being the dangerous not-quite-vowel Y, puts me in a bit of a bind.

The result is a game whose structure I enjoy, but whose mechanics I can’t really interact with effectively. I don’t do a good job when it comes to keeping track of letters in words.

It has a print and play version, and is part of a set of 6 other games from MILLRAT Studios. Even if this wasn’t for me, it makes me excited to see the other 5.

Between Realms

I’ve talked about games that demo well at conventions before. Between Realms is not one of those. In fact, it might be the sort of game that demos really badly. Its creator describes it as “Magic: The Gathering meets Everdell“.

It’s strangely themed, complex to play, and uses cards for everything, and I would have never heard about it if I hadn’t gone to Boston FIG.

I’m going to keep an eye on this one, because I think I’d like it better if I had more time to sit down and really play a full game of it. That said, trying to play it after a few hours of other demos, it kind of just fried my brain.

Starline Hill

Starline Hill is interesting. It’s a semi-abstract piece placement game about trying to create patterns by placing stars. Its selling factor is its unique manner of repopulating space on the board once you’ve removed your own pieces to score patterns.

I’m ambivalent on Starline Hill. I think it’s a very solid game, but it’s not a game for me. I would both play more it, but I’m not rushing to back the Kickstarter.

For folks who really enjoy abstract strategy games like Othello, Go, and Connect 4, I would recommend taking a look. There’s something very clever here. It’s just not quite my cup of tea.

Rock Paper Smash

Rock Paper Smash was actually the first game I demoed at the show, and it’s probably the one I’ve thought about the most since then.

The short version is that it’s Super Smash Brothers, but all attacks are coded to either Rock, Paper or Scissors, and when attacks clash, the winning item attack resolves.

I want to make two quick notes here. First, the game has been updated significantly from the version up on the Steam marketing page, and two, it’s much more interesting than its premise might imply. Many of the characters have unique movement abilities completely unrelated to the RPS mechanics.

It’s just a very fun, very clever little game, and I’m really excited to see the full release.

Co-Operatives Puzzle Room

Co-Operatives is a bit of an odd one. It was in the tabletop section, but it isn’t really a traditional board game. Instead, it’s a Boston based set of escape rooms. The catch is that the team is split and placed on either side of a wall, and each side has information the other side needs.

I had a great time playing through one with a set of very kind strangers, and would absolutely do another one. If you’re in Boston, and looking for something to do, here’s their website. This is the sort of thing I recommend if you like tactile puzzles and fiddling about.

Tumblesteeds

Quick disclosure on this one: I was helping demo at the booth, so I’m not exactly a neutral third party here. I’m not involved in development or anything, but I have playtested this a few times at the Upper Valley Game Designers meetups.

Tumblesteeds is a roll-and-write about filling up your pastures of horses before your opponents do. It’s an in-development title from Resonym, and while it’s not finalized, I think it’s neat.

Wrap-Up

This was only a small subsection of the games at Boston FIG. I didn’t get a chance to play a bunch of the final award winners, including Sent By The Gods, Sincerely, Robin, or Thar It Rolls. There were also some award winners like Skydiver that I actively did not enjoy. And that’s fine! Not every game has to be for me.

I’m hopeful that Boston FIG can continue to run events. It’s a good space for smaller projects, and to see things I’d otherwise never quite get a chance to look at.

PAX Unplugged 2024 – Day 3

Ed Note: I promise I’m going to add photos to this at some point this week, even if it’s not right now.

First, a few quick notes: Unlike my other posts, I’m not actually writing this on day 3. Unlike Friday and Saturday night, on Sunday I never got a chance to sit collect my thoughts.

So instead, I’m piecing it together after the show from the business cards I grabbed, screenshots on my phone, and other small notes.

Everything described here is something that happened, but there are also things that did happen that I forgot, because I am completely fried. Mostly in a good way! But still fried.

Morning

Despite being the shortest day of the show, Sunday is probably the day that I played the most games.

First I played Scallywagers, a pumped up version of Liar’s Dice. It’s interesting, but having picked up a copy, and gotten a chance to play some more, it’s tough to recommend. The game is trying to solve the question “How do you improve Liars Dice?” but its solution is a bit lacking. More on that in a future writeup hopefully.

The second game of the day, War of Beasts, was also an attempt to revise a classic game. In this case, the card game War. And again, their design prompt is more interesting than the final product. It might have been intended for kids. I played a few times, and it felt like luck was the primary deciding factor each time.

I also got a chance to see the current state of Super Battle Mon, which was exciting! I do want to note that I’m a Kickstarter backer for this game, so I’m not a neutral voice here, and I want this game to succeed.

That said, with 12pm approaching, it was time for food.

Afternoon

After finally getting a chance to grab lunch at reading terminal for the first time this weekend, I continued across the showfloor, and found myself in front of Dragon Dice, a collectible dice wargame.

I sat down at the Dragon Dice booth mostly because they had chairs. Starting up a demo, my opponent proceeded to have the single worst run of luck I have ever witnessed in a war game. Before I had even taken my first turn, my automatic counter attacks had wiped out a sizable portion of their army. The result is that I’m not really sure what to think of the game.

The next booth with chairs was a pick-and-pass drafting game called Pride of Ninja. I quite liked Pride of Ninja. The game has a couple twists on the standard pick-and-pass game. One is that you draft cards into slots either face up, or face down, and their are a limited number of slots of each type. Cards also care about if they’re face up or not during scoring, so there’s some interesting signaling there as well.

The last show floor game of the day for me was String Railway. I’ll be honest, I’m little bummed I didn’t get a copy of this one. It’s a game about trains, but the train lines you place are actual pieces of string. I wouldn’t quite call it a physical dexterity game. But when so many game are regimented by grids and sheets, there was something freeing about just trying to carefully place rope.

The last game of the day was Abracabattle. It was one of my favorite designs from UnPub in 2023, and the designer Josh Finkel was kind enough to show me the current version. There are a whole bunch of changes and improvements, but the big thing I really want to call out is how much better all the synergies and elements feel. Previously, snakes were the only card type that had synergies, and felt like they provided both a strategy. But now Cheese and Air card types are also incredibly fun.

Last year Abracabattle was a game with strong core elements, that didn’t quite have the right cards for its gameplay. Now, it feels like a full game, with a few reworked systems, new items, and a MUCH stronger set of cards. I’m really excited to see where it goes.

Breakdown

No, not that type, though I was feeling a bit like that by the end of the day. I mean the sort where you pack everything up, and go home. I helped some friends take down their booth, and it’s always fascinating to see everything come down, and get stored for the next event, and to watch a hall full of wonders turn into an empty expanse of concrete.

I also found random cookies in a cookie bucket. Are those the reason for my current state? Possibly, but I doubt it.

Missed Connections/Final Thoughts

There were a fair few things I wanted to try out, but didn’t get a chance to see. I’ve been very curious about Ironwood since I saw it last year. I love asymmetry, and it just generally appealed to me, but the wait time was always a bit too long.

Similar feelings about Gnome Hollow. There were only two tables, and while I’ve heard good stuff, it’s hard to tell if it’s marketing hype, or actual enthusiasm.

I never got a chance to really do any Lorcana either, even if I did pick up some singles.

Finally, I wish I’d gotten a chance to try more things at the night market. It was great to be able to get in, and even get the few items I did, but I would have loved to play more weird stuff.

Overall, this was a good if very, very busy PAX.

Save travels, and as always, more writeups to come in the future. If you want to know about those as they come out, please consider following me on Bluesky.

Mega Spring Meltdown 2024

The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and various parts of my body on are strike. Must be spring! Green Mountain Gamers Mega Spring Meltdown event was this past weekend, and so I made the arduous trip up to Lebanon, NH to take part.

As always, I’ll be talking about what I played, and a bit of what I saw. One small thing though first, if you like these write ups, follow me on Twitter and help me change the ratio of human beings to porn bots that follow me for the better.

The Event

Like other Green Mountain Gamers-hosted events, this was a relatively small event. It’s just a bunch of folks in a big room playing games. There are some small raffles, and a few “Play to Win” games, but that’s about it. It’s a nice cozy affair with no real lines or waiting, just games, chatting, and occasionally folks stepping out to get food.

The Games

I got through a pretty decent number of games, given that I showed up about four hours after the event had started. The first one was Parfum, a dice and action drafting game about creating perfume. It was fine, but I got a bit of a runaway lead early on, which did spoil some of the tension going into the latter half of the game. I like the systems, but do wish there was a bit more to do with them.

Parfum was followed up by another dice drafting game: Dice Miner! I generally like Dice Miner, and some day I’ll actually finish my write up on it. But the long and short of it is that I enjoy it, but do wish it had more types of dice to draft. That said, I was glad to show it to a few folks who hadn’t played it before.

What followed were the first of several games of Mottainai that I played throughout the day. Mottainai is very interesting and could be considered a follow up to Glory To Rome. It definitely will receive its own writeup at some point, but perhaps the most interesting about it is how alien it plays. I found I had a lot of success “looking for lethal” as it were, instead of trying to build out a large strategy.

I followed Mottainai with two games that require significantly less long term planning: Trio and Ghost Blitz. Trio is what you would get if someone looked Go Fish, and said, “Okay, but what if we made it good, and fun.” It’s a clever little game about memorization and deduction, and I’ve found that it’s light enough to play with non-gamers.

Ghost Blitz on the other hand is a genre of game I’ve traditionally been quite bad at: quick matching reaction speed. It’s simple enough to explain quickly, so here’s how it works. There are five objects, each a different color, and a deck of cards. Each card has two of the five objects on it, not necessarily the correct color. Whenever a card is flipped up, you need to grab the correctly colored object on the card, or if that doesn’t exist, grab the object not described in any way on the card (e.g. neither its shape nor its color pictured).

I did better at it than I usually do at these sorts of things.

Then there were a few more games of Mottainai, all of which I won fairly quickly, then the last “big” game of the day: Life of the Amazonia.

Life of the Amazonia is a sort of “not a city” builder where you acquire terrain tiles, and place animals on them to score points, doing both of the above via a bag-builder. It’s like a deck-builder, but instead of adding cards to a deck, you add tokens to a bag. It does have one really interesting quirk: you can’t split resource tiles. This had some really interesting effects around which tokens were the best to actually get.

Did I win? No. But was I close? Also no.

Would I have done better if all the rules for scoring points were explained to me before the game started? Probably not, but it’s a convenient crutch to place the blame on for my failure, so let’s go with that.

With that, it was time to clean up, and get out. Big thanks to Green Mountain Gamers for putting these events on, Resonym for prizes, and special shout out to the people who played a single game of Twilight Emperium for 9 hours.

Green Mountain Gamers – Winter Weirdness

It’s time for another event writeup! This time it was Winter Weirdness, one of the board game days put on Green Mountain Gamers (if you’re in Vermont or New Hampshire, and looking for stuff to do, maybe click that link). As always, I’ll be quickly recapping the day, what I played, and what I thought about it.

Morning

After arriving, we started out with a quick game of Tiger and Dragon. I’ve written a ton about Tiger and Dragon already, and it was my favorite board game of last year, so there’s not too much to recap there.

After that icebreaker, we cracked open a friend’s copy of Parks that he found at a yard sale for $5. This turned out to be an incredible deal, because Parks is great. It’s amazingly well produced, with beautiful tokens and art. But more importantly, it’s actually fun. The main mechanism is moving down an action track that you can’t go back on, while trying to get enough resources to visit parks and score points. I might do a bigger writeup on this game at some point, but I really enjoyed playing Parks.

I then played Glory to Rome. It’s still very good, and we used one of the expansions, perhaps incorrectly, but we used it nonetheless. This was probably my fifth or so game of Glory to Rome, and I really felt like it was starting to click, or at least starting to click enough that my engine turned on and outscored everyone else to win.

Witness the power of a ton of docks.

After that it was time for…

Lunch

Someone mentioned that there was a very good grilled cheese sandwich place nearby, so we went over there. The Meltdown did have very good sandwiches, with a caveat.

When I think grilled cheese, I think buying them from a really sketchy guy in a parking lot at 1:00 AM in college for like 8 bucks, because he’s the only source of food in a billion miles. That is my expected grilled cheese experience.

And while I have no meaningful thoughts on food itself (this is game blog, not a food blog) I do think paying a net of $25 for a single grilled cheese sandwich with fries is bit… much.

Great food, would probably pack a sandwich next time.

Afternoon

Heading back to the event, I cracked open a copy of Epic: Guardians of Gowana that I’d picked up recently, and played of game that. Despite taking almost of my life in damage on turn 1, I was pleasantly surprised by Epic. It’s a cool little expandable card game, with a neat resource mechanic where all cards cost either 1 or 0 gold to play, and each player gets a max of one gold each turn. It worked much better than I was expecting.

Then I joined some other folks for a game of Everdell. For various reasons that have nothing to do with the game itself, I’m unlikely to ever purchase, or have any friends who own a copy of Everdell unless I somehow manage to get it secondhand. That said, I’ve enjoyed it when I’ve played it before, so I wanted to give it a second shot. Everdell is a cute little tableau builder/worker placement game, and I had a good enough time that I’d probably want to give it yet another shot.

After that, I managed to get in a game of Space Lion, one of the games I’d brought to the event. I got my copy at PAX, and I’ve been trying grind out some more games before I do a secondary writeup on it. I did write about it pre-Kickstarter, but now that I’ve got a full copy, the game has been changed quite a bit. There’s a bunch of improvements to graphic design, along with some structural changes that make for a better play experience, but do remove some elements I liked from the… hmm. Prototype version? Beta? Not quite sure what to call it.

Finally, with it getting late, and the friend I got a ride with showing no signs of finishing up his game of Ark Nova, I sat down to play Three Sisters. Well, I planned to, but unfortunately we didn’t quite have time to finish the game out. I’ll try to get a full game in at some point, but I liked what I did play.

Wrap-Up

Overall, great time. There are two more events coming up, and I’m currently planning to be at both of them. Hopefully if you’re in the Vermont or New hampshire area, I’ll see you there, and if not, well, I’m planning to be at Granite Game Summit, PAX East and PAX Unplugged this year as well.

Autum Antics – Green Mountain Gamers

Two event writeups in as many weeks? I know, it’s a real rarity. As always, I’ll be talking about what I played and what I saw, this time at the Green Mountain Gamers event from this past Saturday.

Perhaps most importantly, if you’re in the New England area, and looking for more folks to play games with, go join the Green Mountain Gamers facebook page for notifications about the various gamedays and events.

Necessary shilling out of the way, let’s talk about the games.

Morning

The day started off with Bullet♥︎, the only game I own that requires emoji to be displayed properly.

This was followed up by a quick game of Tiger and Dragon with a few folks. I’ve been playing a fair amount of Tiger and Dragon, and I’m very bad at it, but I generally enjoy playing it. It’s also fairly light, and easy to teach so that was fun.

Half of that group then went off to play Lords of Vegas, while me and a friend pulled out a copy of Dragon Castle, and played that for the first time. I enjoyed it, I think they had slightly less fun with it.

Then we went back to an age old classic, Race for the Galaxy, otherwise known as “The game I cannot win.” I have 14 game losing streak in Race for the Galaxy.

Yes, I’m counting. Yes, that includes yesterday’s loss.

Afternoon

After a lunch break that involved eating a sandwich the size of my head, it was time for some afternoon games.

This started off with Aegean Sea by Carl Chudyk, the same fellow who made Glory to Rome. Now, I have a policy on this blog of not doing writeups on games unless they I finish them. So, there will be no full writeup on Aegean Sea. There will be only the following statement:

I think I hate Aegean Sea.

Aegean Sea has the questionable honor of being the first board game I think I’ve ever effectively rage quit out of, along with every other player at the table. I found the action system grating, it seemed like everything I made immediately got destroyed, and it was just one of the most painful games I’ve ever played. We played a few turns, no one was having fun, and everyone decided to be done.

So then I went and played Everdell, while my friends played Spirit Island. Everdell is a tableau builder with more expansions than card types, and has so many components that I’d consider it a bit overproduced, but that’s just me.

I mostly liked Everdell, and I’d like to try playing it a few more times. I think that may not happen (for various reasons), but if I do get to play it again, I’d like to try a few more expansions.

Then, after a mere 11 hours of moving cardboard, it was time to head out. I’m looking forward to the next event like this, even if I don’t know the date yet.

Ed Note: I plan on doing writeups for a few more of the games on this list at some point in the near future. When I do, I’ll link to them from here.