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The convention in question is Gen Con 2013, which took place August 15-18 in Indianapolis, Indiana. BGG had a booth presence at Gen Con for the first time, and we broadcasted game demos for all four days of the event via Twitch.tv. Those broadcasts will now be chopped up and placed on both the BoardGameGeekTV YouTube channel and the respective game and publisher pages so that folks not at the show (and not willing to scroll through the uncut tapes) can see what they missed. In addition, Beth Heile, John Knoerzer and I recorded 30+ game demos from the convention floor, and no one but us has seen the tapes yet, so despite Gen Con being over, there's fun stuff still to come on BGGN once Aldie processes those videos.
A press release from Gen Con, LLC notes a growth in attendance for 2013:
Quote:
Gen Con Indy 2013, completed August 15-18 at the Indiana Convention Center, experienced record attendance numbers and unprecedented growth. Weekend turnstile attendance of 159,364 and unique attendance of 49,058, grew the convention 20% from 2012’s record-setting 41,000+ unique attendees. These metrics show continued growth of more than 75% over the past five years.
"The Gen Con team is ecstatic about the attendance numbers for Gen Con Indy 2013, but there are also many other successes from this year's show to share," said Adrian Swartout, CEO of Gen Con LLC. "More than 12,000 gaming and entertainment events occurred at the convention, 360+ companies exhibited, the annual Trade Day doubled in attendance, and Sunday enjoyed record-breaking Family Fun Day attendance. It is hard to believe Gen Con Indy could experience a better year than 2012, but our exhibitors, sponsors, and event organizers guaranteed this was absolutely our best show."
Gen Con Indy accounts for more than $47 million in yearly economic impact to Indianapolis, a figure that has only been surpassed by the 2012 Super Bowl.
Pffft, the Super Bowl — do folks still watch that?"The Gen Con team is ecstatic about the attendance numbers for Gen Con Indy 2013, but there are also many other successes from this year's show to share," said Adrian Swartout, CEO of Gen Con LLC. "More than 12,000 gaming and entertainment events occurred at the convention, 360+ companies exhibited, the annual Trade Day doubled in attendance, and Sunday enjoyed record-breaking Family Fun Day attendance. It is hard to believe Gen Con Indy could experience a better year than 2012, but our exhibitors, sponsors, and event organizers guaranteed this was absolutely our best show."
Gen Con Indy accounts for more than $47 million in yearly economic impact to Indianapolis, a figure that has only been surpassed by the 2012 Super Bowl.
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As for individual coverage of Gen Con 2013, I tweeted pics and news items throughout the con, but I'll confess that my coverage was hit-and-miss since I also spent many hours in the BGG booth and therefore was nearly as nosy as I could have been.
Mr. Drive Thru Review Joel Eddy posted a GeekList of videos that he recorded and posted during Gen Con. With 25 videos on the first page, it might download slowly for you.
On Opinionated Gamers, Matt Carlson has posted a photo round-up that highlights board and card games from Gen Con 2013 with a separate report to come on the huge number of deck-builders being sold and demoed. OG editor Dale Yu posted his own report of his single day in Indy.
The blog I Slay the Dragon has long Gen Con 2013 write-ups from Jonathan Wolf and Farmer Lenny. The second report has a nice write-up on Carl Chudyk's Impulse, which was being demoed at the show but which I passed on checking out since I'm 100% committed to buying it the first chance I get due to my unreasonable love and passion for Innovation.
Pete Ruth at Superfly Circus has posted a 32-page downloadable Gen Con 2013 Special Edition.
As is its custom, U.S. publisher Fantasy Flight Games has posted recap videos for all four days of the convention. Here are direct links to each of the four videos on YouTube: day 1, day 2, day 3 and day 4.
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I got to try out a rough version of Jesús Torres Castro's Templar from Queen Games, and we suffered from a combination of tiredness (with one player practically lying across the table and playing mostly at random), non-final graphics (which made it a bit tough to see which valuables were available in which storehouses), and the maximum player count (due to Sleepy-Eyed Joe being invited to the table by someone else). Our game lasted long into the morning, only exacerbating the tiredness and slow play. I love the gist of the game and its hook – each player having a hand of role cards and not being able to play the role on top of each other player's discard pile – but a 120-minute game with a full boat was not the ideal first play. Three of us tried to collaborate in order to score lots of stuff, but since we hadn't grokked the flow of the role cards and the choke points in the layout of the abbey, we just couldn't score anything before the game was nearly over – then I failed to flip the switch on the final turn in order to score nearly as many points for just me while screwing over my one-time partners. Sorry, guys! Best to learn this with three players, I think, and ideally only with non-Jugheads intent of playing with their eyes open.
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In Renaissance Man, you're trying to be the first to create a pyramid of people in your personal display. At the start of the game, you have a row of five cards on the bottom of your pyramid in action row 1. On the first turn, all players simultaneously play a card from their hand and choose an action available to them in their first row of cards or their stored actions; available actions are shown by the large icons in the upper middle of a card. The actions are:
-----• Barter: Place a token matching the action icon on the card you discarded in the Barter section of your board; this stores an action for a future turn.
-----• Hire: Place the card you played on top of two cards in your pyramid, but only if the icons on the bottom of your card match the icons on the tops of the cards being covered.
-----• Teach: Place a token matching the action icon on the card you discarded in the Teach section of your board; if you have all four icons in this section, discard them and immediately place a Renaissance Man in your pyramid. This card can be placed on any two cards and can have anything placed on it, but it supplies no action.
-----• Recruit: Place one of your figures on the card on the Recruit board under the icon matching the action icon on the card you discarded; if you have more figures on a recruitable card at the end of the round (after all players have taken or passed on all available actions), then you either immediately Hire this card or add it to your hand.
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First turn of a three-player game, with my card down and action chosen
After this first action, if someone now has a card in his second row – that is, if someone Hired – then everyone can take a second action but only a stored action (via a previous Barter) or an action available to them in their own second row. A player can always pass. After everyone has run out of actions – e.g., if no one has reached the third row, all players can take at most two actions – then players claim Recruitable cards (if possible), then they can discard as many cards as they wish before refilling their hands to four cards. Players then begin a new round by choosing an action available to them in their first row of cards or their stored actions. When someone tops his pyramid with a 15th card, then the game ends at the conclusion of the round, with a tiebreaker coming into play if multiple people achieve this feat.
As you might guess from the write-up, everyone is playing simultaneously but interaction is minimal, with players interfering with one another only over Recruitable cards. For the most part, especially for the initial play or two, you're going to be staring at your hand, puzzling over and over again about what to play when, what to save for the future, and what to dump.
Why so tricky with rules so simple? As with Rubbo's Hey Waiter!, each card serves two purposes – with bottom icons that must be matched in order to add a card to your pyramid and top icons that provide an action, but only so long as the card in play isn't covered. That's where things get complicated! As soon as you make your first Hire, you cover one or two actions in the bottom row, losing them from your possible first-turn actions. Once you place four (or even three) cards in the second row, you might find yourself doing nothing on the first turn – unless you've made smart Barters that enable you to keep growing. The farther you progress in your growth, the tighter the cards wrap around you, restricting you from taking additional actions. This set-up can bind players who are close to winning while providing less developed players more options – but that doesn't have to be the case. In my second game, the winner left herself a path for growth up the right-hand edge of her pyramid and crushed the other three players. (The rules allow you to remove an uncovered card from the second or higher levels at any time, should you find such a move necessary for your future health within the game. You never want to admit that you wasted actions, but at the same time at least you can keep yourself from needing a single particular card in order to win.)
Boxing myself into a corner (and unsure why my action token is on the Ren Man – I was probably passing)
So what went wrong when learning this game? In my first session, the teacher told us that Renaissance Men gained from Teaching go into your hand, thus requiring you to Hire it on a future action. Wrong. The drawback of the Ren Man (i.e., providing no action of its own) is balanced by its ability to pop into play after a full Teach while supporting (and being supported by) anything. This was a minor drawback to play, slowing people down but not affecting anything too much.
My second session included someone who had played previously and didn't like it, finding everything too restrictive in terms of hand management and dead actions. Why? Because the teacher hadn't mentioned (or everyone had not heard) that players can flush cards at the end of a round. Yikes! Talk about a slow playing game! You need to be able to go fishing for cards, even going so far as to Recruit cards into your hand simply to throw them away. (Well, at least it seemed useful to me in order to shake up that board and provide fresh cards.) Our teacher in that second game messed up (at least) five rules – all of them minor as far as I can recall, but when a game has so few rules to begin with, every single one affects gameplay. One mistake, for example, was telling a player that he can Recruit in any order when actually he must Recruit from left to right (which can affect things if you're trying to Hire Recruits immediately). Another detail was that players simultaneously reveal the order of their starting five cards only after the Recruit board has been filled, thereby giving everyone a chance to Hire Recruits more easily in the early game.
What's the takeaway from all this? Regard convention write-ups and reviews with skepticism (even this one!) as there's a good chance that someone played in less than ideal circumstances and didn't experience the game that you'll find in the box, didn't play with folks who they know and enjoy, or both!
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That's it for now. Ideally I'll soon post overviews of the other games that I tried at Gen Con 2013. Just need to stay on that treadmill...
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