Granite Game Summit was this past weekend, so I took some time out my busy schedule of being unemployed and playing Switch 2 to spend 6-8 hours a day playing board games. I’ve written about Granite Game Summit before, but it’s been a bit, so here’s the quick refresher.
Granite Game Summit is a local board game convention down in Nashua, New Hampshire. The focus is almost entirely on playing board games, as there’s an 800+ game library, and attendees also bring their own games to loan out for the weekend in a public game library. It’s a great time, and an excellent chance to try out stuff you might be on the fence about buying, or require a real life side-quest to get a copy of.
While there is some other stuff like a flea market, raffles, and side events and trivia, I’m there to play board games! So that’s what I’m gonna be talking about. Even if I do want to offer a small shoutout to their really cool achievement system they had this year, I thought that was neat.
Anyway, I showed up late Friday, and sat down to play a few quick games while waiting for a friend to finish some playtests. This included playing a bit of Super Battle Mon, and also some Push. I’m quietly ambivalent on Push, and I suspect that I’m unlike to ever give it a full review, if only because I don’t think I’ll play much more of it.
Next up was Hot Streak. Now before I talk about Hot Streak, I do want to quickly attach a photo of myself after I played Hot Streak.
As you might guess, I did not win at Hot Streak, and perhaps that influences my thoughts here, but I’m actually fairly lukewarm on the game. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how they love Hot Streak, and that was the experience for everyone else who played it but me, but despite my face of failure, I’m not hugely compelled by the game. I think it’s fine, and I’d play again if other people wanted to? But I don’t know that I’d suggest it to anyone again.
Also we played Flip 7, a game where you try to flip up seven cards, and also do other things, but I played a lot of other, better, push your luck games this weekend, so I’m not going to bother talking about Flip 7.
Anyway, having lost my life savings in Hot Streak, I went out to get some burgers at a Five Guys, went back to my hotel, and played some Pride of Ninja, and I lost again. I’m going to blame the fact that we played the advanced set of cards, instead of my lack of skill at drafting.
Saturday opened with game playtesting! Specifically Card City Critters playtesting!
Max and I brought our newest puzzle for the game, and some of our starter decks to show and test things about the game in the designer ally. We got a lot of great feedback, and also our newest puzzle was received much better then some of our other puzzles have been so far.
As a side note, if you want to stay up to date on the status of Card City Critters, join us over the Card City Critters Discord, where we’ll be recruiting players for playtests, and posting updates on the game, or to join the game’s mailing list here.
Self promotion and playtesting aside, this was followed up by playing a few other designers games, but nothing I asked folks for permission to talk about on the blog, so nothing to say here about that.
I don’t remember the exact series of events that occurred next, but I do playing the following, in some order: Quacks of Quedlinburg (Loss), Terraforming Mars (Loss), Megaland(Win), Deep Vents (Win), River Valley Glassworks (Loss), and Moon Colony Bloodbath (Yet Another Loss).
For Quacks, Mars, and Bloodbath, I don’t have anything of much note to say right now. That said, I do want to quickly direct folks to the Dan Thurot review of River Valley Glassworks because it’s both better then anything I could ever write, and I generally agree with it. Megaland and Deep Vents though. These two I have some thoughts on.
First up, Megaland. I liked Megaland, and I really like how its push your luck element is all players pushing against the same “luck”. I wish the buildings were a little more exciting, but that might have just been the nature of the pool we pulled. Still, favorite push your luck game of the weekend.
Deep Vents thought. Oh Deep Vents.
Deep Vents has a very solid core idea. It has also has a graphic design that renders most the games tiles virtually unreadable unless you already know what they do, and a theming that just feels awful. Sorry. But the games deep ocean theming and mechanics make absolutely zero sense, and actually made the game harder to play. This might be the only time I suggest that a game should be turned into a war game, because Deep Vents is not about building a carefully configured ecosystem, it is about using Giant Squid to (and this is a bit of colloquialism) wreck peoples shit.
There’s a interesting game here, as long as you can put up with incoherent theming, questionable to bad iconography, and some painful decisions around what the games resources are named.
Sunday was a bit of a nice slow day. I lost at Race for the Galaxy. This was the first time I played since 2023, and brings my total losses up to 15 in a row! Hooray!
Fortunately, I then got to teach some folks games, and we ran through a quick game of Brightcast, which I won, and a game of Dustbiters, an 18 card Mad Max themed car(d) game, which I lost. I need to do a Dustbiters writeup at some point, but I like it, and I’ve already talked about how much I love Brightcast at length in the Brightcast writeup.
Then I got a chance to play some Compile. I like Compile, and I think a lot of its systems are really clever, but there are also some weird edges, and I haven’t played enough to decide if I think they’re brilliant or frustrating.
I finished out the weekend with a round of Bomb Busters. We… blew up. I thought Bomb Busters was neat, but not my favorite co-op deductive game I’ve played recently. That’s still the Lord of the Rings trick taking game.
Anyway, weekend complete. I had a good time, I played a lot of games, I am now going to lie down in bed and play Pokopia for 4 hours, or until my Switch 2 runs out of battery.