Candice's Gen Con 2021 Round-Up/Discoveries: Part 1

Gen Con 2021 was an awesome experience for me, although I'm sure my feet would disagree after clocking in 14,000+ steps on day one alone. It was wonderful to reconnect, hang, and play games with Eric, Beth, and Lincoln, plus I had an amazing time wandering around checking out new games.

• The PSC Games booth was my first stop on day one. I had the opportunity to play a quick (tense!) game of Paolo Mori's Caesar!: Seize Rome in 20 Minutes!. As a fan of Mori's 2019 release, Blitzkrieg!: World War Two in 20 Minutes, I was curious to see what he cooked up with the follow-up, and Caesar! did not disappoint.

The overall gameplay and setting differ from Blitzkrieg!, but they scratch the same itch in terms of being quick-playing, two-player games with tough decisions and tension driven by a solid chit-pull system.

In Blitzkrieg!, placing your chits on particular spaces on the different World War II theater tracks allows you to activate special abilities, whereas in Caesar!, you trigger special abilities by closing off regions on the map, similar to completing a box in the Dots and Boxes game many people have probably played as a child.

When a region is closed off, whoever has the highest influence value gets to place one of their control tokens in it. The interesting thing here is that closing the region off and gaining the special ability is independent from taking control of the region, and the goal of the game is place all of your influence control markers out before your opponent. However, the special abilities are very helpful, so there's a balance of knowing when to close something to snag a special ability versus trying to take control of the region, but ultimately it's ideal to do both if you can manage it. Rarely is that possible, though, so it makes for interesting choices.

There are a few other fresh new twists in Caesar! that makes it stand apart from Blitzkrieg!, but I dig both of these games. They did not have copies of Caesar! at Gen Con, but I was able to pre-order it (targeted for shipping in November 2021), and I'm looking forward to playing it more.

• I briefly checked out Kombo Klash, a new tactical, tile-laying and combo-scoring game for 2-4 players from designer "Nero" Ondrej Sova and Hub Games, the publishing company behind Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr and Adventure Mart.

• Waggle Dance is Bright Eye Games' new version of Mike Nudd's worker bees, dice worker-placement game for 1-4 players that's all about making more honey than your opponents, with this design having been originally released by Grublin Games Publishing in 2014.

• Shannon from Chip Theory Games gave me a gameplay rundown of burncycle, a co-operative, puzzly infiltration game in which 1-4 players command a team of robots using "creative action sequencing" to take down evil, human-run corporations. After checking it out in person, I'm pumped to get burncycle on my table and play it. Even though the components and art weren't final, I was still impressed, as always, with the component quality from Chip Theory Games.

Art and components not finalized

After I was already buzzing with curiosity and interest for burncycle, Shannon threw me another exciting bone (pun intended). Chip Theory Games is crowdfunding Too Many Bones: Unbreakable, a new standalone expansion for Too Many Bones in Q4 2021.

Unbreakable launches on Gamefound on October 19, 2021 as the final release in the Too Many Bones series, including at least two new Gearlocks, new encounters and baddies pack, a whole new narrative, and more.

• Grand Gamers Guild had a variety of new releases to share, starting with Richard Yaner's Gorinto, an interesting, Japanese, elemental, abstract strategy game for 1-4 players with scoring goals that vary each game.

For another take on the elements, Mythalix from designers Julian Gaine and Kyri Karaiskakis is an area control, battle game in which 2-4 players each command a mythical god with their own unique powers and abilities.

While I didn't get to play it, I did chat briefly with Marc Specter, owner of Grand Gamers Guild, about The Artemis Odyssey, a sequel to The Artemis Project and a reimplementation of Ad Astra from designers Bruno Faidutti and Serge Laget that is being crowdfunded on Kickstarter (KS link) for a targeted 2022 release.

• I stopped by the Cephalofair Games booth to introduce myself to Isaac Childres, who I had met digitally at Gen Con Online 2020 when he gave an overview of his 2020 hit, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. I happened to catch some players deeply engaged in a demo game of Frosthaven with the coolest custom Talisman Sabre Terrain 3D landscaping. It was very impressive and immersive thematically.

Box cover

concept art

• Eric and I met up with Jim Felli, creator of Cosmic Frog, at the Devious Weasel Games booth to play Felli's upcoming 2022 release The Mirroring of Mary King, a two-player game in which one person is a mortal contemporary woman named Mary King (Eric) and the other player is the ghost of Mary's long dead ancestor, a 17th century Scottish merchant burgess of the same name (me).

The goal of the game is to get the central tableau cards, representing an image of Mary, switched completely to your respective side (mortal or ghost), so we took turns playing control cards and special action cards to manipulate the state of Mary to our own advantage. I've conveniently included a photo of when I, the ghost player, had a moment in the lead before Eric played his cards right and ended up victorious in the end.

Prototype components

There was an interesting tug-of-war feeling throughout the game, and I noticed that you have to carefully think through the implications of what you do each turn to avoid leaving opportunities open for your opponent. I had some very thinky moments as I was constantly trying to put myself in good leading position while also defending myself from any of Eric's mortal antics. I appreciated that the rules were fairly easy to digest, but the decisions were often challenging.

From my experiences with his games, Jim Felli is a master at creating unique games, with the uniqueness coming from a combo of the theme and the gameplay mechanisms as they relate to the theme. The Mirroring of Mary King continues with this trend, and I'm looking forward to checking out the finished version in 2022.

•. At Smirk & Dagger Games, I checked out a demo of its upcoming 2022 release The Spill from Andy Kim, at the tail end of its Kickstarter campaign (KS link). In The Spill, 1-4 players work together to contain an oil spill — black dice dropped through a custom randomizer tower — and save the sea life.

Prototype components

Meanwhile, at sister company Smirk & Laughter Games, I had a great time working co-operatively with brave strangers to struggle through the puzzly, horror-themed tile-placement game The Night Cage from designers Christopher Ryan Chan, Chris McMahon, Rosswell Saunders.