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Time to wrap up the written coverage of Gen Con 2013 from yours truly and others around the Internet, but I still have dozens of videos to post on various game and publisher pages on BoardGameGeek, some of which were recorded via mobile camera while most are slightly edited versions of what was broadcast live from the BGG booth during the convention. Let's start with another round-up of reports from other writers on other sites:
• On Wizards of the Coast's Magic: The Gathering website, Nate Price shows a pic of Cardhalla, features cosplay Planeswalkers, talks about the Puzzle Hunt, and details one of the most amazing sounding M:TG events ever. An excerpt:
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The 20th Anniversary event is one of the coolest concepts for a tournament that I think I have ever heard of. Eight different tournaments spread over the first three days of Gen Con each filled one spot in a special tournament to be held on Sunday morning. This tournament would consist of one booster pack of every Magic set from Beta to Magic 2014 – eighty sets in all. The oldest of these packs would be opened individually and the contents drafted Rochester-style. The remaining packs would then be drafted intact, with each player selecting the packs they wanted access to when building their sixty-card decks. The ultimate prize at the end of this tournament was a set of eighty packs, identical to the ones used to draft in the first place. That's right, the winner of the tournament would get a Beta pack, an Arabian Nights pack, and even a Portal: Three Kingdoms pack. It seemed like quite a cool haul.
• Derek Thompson at Meepletown recaps his great, good and disappointment gameplay experiences from the con.• Matt Carlson at Opinionated Gamers wrote an overview of a dozen deck-building games that he saw at Gen Con 2013.
• Geek Dad has a round-up of Gen Con 2013 from three of its contributors who attended.
• Eric Teo from the Push Ur Luck podcast created a separate PULP episode for each day of Gen Con 2013, including day 0 before the show opened. I've linked to each episode here, and the links include a summary of what's on the particular episode: day 0, day 1, day 2, day 3 and day 4.
• The game review site Board To Death has a special page for videos from Gen Con 2013.
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Of course, you can't have a game without a winner and that honor went to Brendon Harbron of Indiana. Brendon won on turn 48 (of a maximum 62) with 25 total points. Brendon received a complete set of the core ten Catan products Mayfair Games produces. One other contestant, chosen at random, received a rare 10th Anniversary 3-D Treasure Chest edition of The Settlers of Catan.
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As you might suspect from the name, players cooperate a bit in 7 Wonders: Babel, working together (sort of) to build a tower. At the start of the game, players draft a hand of tower tiles – each with a power that affects all players. Each turn, in addition to playing a card, building a level of their wonder and discarding a card for money, players have a new option of discarding a card to build one of their tower tiles, scoring points in the process and putting the power into play. The more tiles you build, the more points you score, and as the tower grows, powers are covered and removed from play as new powers are added to the game.
If you've played Magic: The Gathering, you can imagine these powers as global enchantments (to use old terminology), with only a few being allowed in play at any one time. While you have only a little control over which tiles you draft, you have some idea of the tiles held by others and you can choose to use them (or not) based on whatever else you're doing in the game. I can imagine some players feeling like they're suffering from option overload, with four possible actions each turn and many of them hingeing on the results of prior actions and your cash flow, while other players will love the additional interplay among players, with being able to hobble others by playing something nasty for which only you are prepared.
What's interesting about the 7 Wonders: Babel expansion, though, is that contains a second addition to the game, and these elements can be added to the game individually or together, and with any combination of the Leaders and Cities expansions. This second element represents a treaty of some sort, with a randomly chosen treaty for each age; each treaty features both a cost, a reward and a penalty, with the cost applying to certain cards in the game. If you want to play one of those cards, you need to pay the extra cost; if you do, you claim credit for part of the treaty. If enough people participate in the treaty, then the treaty succeeds and everyone who participated is rewarded for their level of involvement. If the treaty doesn't succeed, then everyone who didn't participate suffers the penalty instead.
We played with this expansion as well, and it provided a new carrot-and-stick element that made you care more about certain cards than you normally would, shaking you off the familiar 7 Wonders paths in which you develop in particular ways and favor one area of growth over another. Now everyone cares more about particular cards each age, so do you fight for them (paying more in the process) or grab what others are bypassing?
Again, this is a first impression of an item undergoing development, so the final version of 7 Wonders: Babel could differ from what I describe above. Ideally, I've kept everything in my description vague enough that it will all be true once the expansion appears in print!
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