2014 Prezcon - Part 1

Well, another year has come and gone for my annual pilgrimage to Charlottesville, VA - home of Prezcon.  Prezcon is the first game convention I attended, way back in 2009.  Hard to believe this was my 6th year attending.  In 2009 my buddy Brian and I started on Thursday..in the last few years that migrated to Wednesday.  This year, our friend Tom had business meetings in Charlottesville on Monday and Tuesday, giving Brian and I the excuse to join him at the convention on Tuesday evening.  Which quickly turned to Tuesday afternoon.  Incredibly, the wives bought off on this.  We'll pay later, I'm sure.

The first game we settled down to was, like in previous years, Circus Maximus.  This year, GM Jake Jacoby had a surprise for us - instead of the typical oval, we were racing around a "cloverleaf" track, with a free-for-all area in the center.  Unlike the last several years, I decided to try being a "rabbit" - in other words, a light, fast chariot.  That was the idea, anyway - I had poor rolls on my setup, and ended up on the slower end of the lights, with not much in the way of stamina either (used for whipping to go faster).  I was also chosen to start on the inside lane, which meant I was the furthest back at the start.  There was not a whole lot of drama to the race as another light chariot got out in the lead and stayed there, despite the efforts of the heavies to smash him to bits.  The cloverleaf made for an interesting change, but I feel that it was to the advantage of the light chariots, as once they got ahead, it was not as easy for the heavies to get to them as it is on the oval, when they can slow down and wait to be lapped. 

Next up was Power Grid, an old favorite.  I'm always a little wary of the heavier euros as Prezcon, as there are some real sharks in the water, but I consider myself competent enough at Power Grid that I won't embarrass myself, and I could even make a good showing.  In this case, though, I simply played awful.  Actually, I don't think I was doing too terrible, but I was letting the leaders slip away, and I made the move to catch up at the wrong time, buying up to 12 houses, when the rest of them stalled at 11, which ended up killing me in turn order the following turn.  I finished in last place :(

For some reason, Brian, Tom and I decided to end our Tuesday with a game of Dungeon Lords.  This is a great game, but I hadn't played in a while, and it wasn't coming back very quickly.  Tom had never played, but fortunately Brian had played recently and got us squared away.  Again...a great game...but probably not one to start after midnight.  We were up to 2:30...starting off Prezcon with a bang.

Next morning...since we were there for a Wednesday morning for the first time, I finally got to play in the Prezcon Agricola tournament.  See my earlier comments about the euro sharks...and unlike Power Grid, I don't consider myself a very good Agricola player.  I was at a table with Tom, our friend Mike Senzig Jr., who'd arrived that morning, and Aaron Buchanan, the GM of Castles of Burgundy, and a very good euro player.  In the card draft, I tried to set myself by taking a lot of cards that helped with wood gathering and fence building.  I was doing OK at the beginning, I think, but I waited far too long to grow my family.  Mike was able to build a couple of extra rooms early on, and get to 4 family members pretty quickly, and then he was off to the races. 

Avast, me hearties!

Following Agricola, I played in the Merchants and Marauders tournament.  This is a game that got a lot of press when it came out a few years ago, and I snatched up early...but it had been a while since I had played.  In our previous plays, our group thought that the Merchants had a bit of an advantage...but what fun is that?  For the tournament, the GM lowered the speed on galleons, and allowed pirates to go into port after other players.  In my 3-player heat, we all went the pirate route.  One player had the misfortune of running into a Spanish man-o-war, which doomed him in his sloop.  I managed to upgrade to a frigate, and was doing well as a pirate, but won the game by delivering an in-demand cargo to my home port and stashing my riches.  With my win, I qualified for the final, but unfortunately, that conflicted with my first Lords of Waterdeep heat.  I enjoyed the game, but some of the nagging feelings returned - it can run a bit long, and there can be downtime while other players perform their actions - particularly in port.

Following M&M, it was time for my annual game of Formula De.  I like this racing game a lot, but I dread it at Prezcon a little bit, because the GM Doug Gallulo will run up to 10 players on a board.  That's too many, in my opinion.  Sure enough, in our race we had 9 players, although I was lucky enough to be drawn starting in 3rd position.  I grabbed the lead halfway through the first lap, but miscalculated on the back stretch, as I was trying to set myself up to use the 30-sided die coming out of the next turn.  I stayed in 4th when I should have gone to 5th, and was promptly passed.  2 turns later as I desperately tried to make up the difference, I spun out, and that was it.  This game can be unforgiving if you make one mistake, or get one bad roll.

I'm trying to pay my debts...

Wednesday night it was time for Game of Thrones.  By random draw, I ended up with the Lannisters - I should have asked to redraw, as I think in every game except for one, I've played the Lannisters, and that put me off from the get go.  The game progressed fairly normally for the first 2 or 3 turns, but the player to my right, as the Tyrells was clearly coaching the younger Martell player to his advantage.  The were putting a pounding on the Baratheon player, who was very young and pretty inexperienced.  Instead of helping Baratheon, I sensed blood in the water and tried to take my share.  I should mention that we had turned up several muster cards, but nothing had come up to adjust our supply yet.  I had captured a bunch of barrels on the board, but without the supply action, I could not take advantage.  The Tyrell player eventually took the land area between our capitals, and also The Reach, which contains two barrels - and he threatened to take Lannisport from me by using the Ser Loras cards which allowed him to carry his attack token with him.  I had to quietly accept my losses - and THEN the supply card came.  Of course.  By this point, with Baratheon effectively out of the game, the Starks, Greyjoys and Lannisters had essentially an alliance against the Tyrell-Martell block.  There was some baiting of the Martell player, accusing him of being a pawn for the Tyrells, which caused him to make at least one bad move, attempting to "prove" he was playing his own game.  In the end, the Starks made a play to clean up the last of the Baratheon holdings, the Tyrells turned on their Martell lackey, and used that Ser Loras card to attack the Starks.  In an equal battle, it came down to the draw of the "Tides of Battle" card, the Tyrell player got a +1 to Stark's "0", giving him the victory.  The game didn't end until 2:30...which was WAY too late for that to go on...

Next up...part 2 of Prezcon 2014

PREZCON - Part 1

Well, I figured I would talk some about my favorite annual convention, PREZCON ("The Winter Nationals") which happens every year about this time in Charlottesville, VA.  The con officially runs 5 days (Wed - Sun), but they have a "pre-con" on Monday and Tuesday (really, they should just tell the truth - the con starts on Monday).  This year, the con ran from Feb 18 - 24.  Prezcon is the first gaming con I ever attended, and this marked my 5th year.  Several years back I had really got back into gaming with some local pals including Paul Owen, Grant Greffey, Glenn Weeks and Brian Greer.  After hearing some of the guys talk about "Prezcon", Brian and I decided to give it a go, and we've been hooked ever since. For those unfamilar, Prezcon is a "tournament" style convention - they run tournaments for ~90 games over the course of the week...and each game has a number of heats and quarter/semi/finals depending on it's size.  There is plenty of open gaming, though...and this year Prezcon set aside a specific area for open gaming, which I think was a fantastic decision.

Brian arrived at my house promptly at 0800 on Wednesday morning, and just as promptly informed me his "check engine" light had come on and he needed to take his jeep to the dealer - car issues would be a bit of a theme this con.  We were able to drop it off and get on the road in plenty of time.  I did get flustered when we got close to Charlottesville by a mob of police escorting several black vehicles down the road - certainly not the President...the Governor maybe?  The motorcycle cop who came up inches from my window wildly gesturing for me to move over to the right flustered me enough that I missed the exit for the hotel (I'm counting that as a car issue).  No problem, we were able to U-turn and get back by about 10:45 or so.  I thought I'd see if we could check in early - the desk attendant saw my Virginia Tech hoodie and gave me the conspiratorial "I'll make an exception for a fellow Hokie!"  It's always good to get some Hokie love in the heartland of the enemy (UVa).  So we were able to bring in the cooler and games, and not worry about those for the rest of the weekend.

Circus Maximus

But enough of that...what about the games?  First up, at noon on Wednesday was Circus Maximus.  This Roman chariot racing game is run annually at Prezcon and WBC by an affable fellow by the name of Jake.  At the beginning you get to pick a light, medium or heavy chariot, and assign 4 points among driver, horses and endurance.  You roll some dice to randomly set your initial stats based on the points you allocated, and off you go.  Now, in 2012, I came in 3rd in this tournament, and narrowly missed competing for 1st when a light chariot scampered over the finish line before I could trample the driver, who was being dragged behind her horses.  I had found that the heavy chariots seemed to have the advantage, and here in 2013 I went that route again...and got exactly what I wanted when I rolled a relatively fast speed for a heavy.  I made an error by not giving my horses the whip off the start though, and a fellow heavy ran his wheel into my #1 horse on the 2nd turn.  It didn't kill my horse, but knocked my overall speed from 20 to 12 for the rest of the game, and from then on I was just hoping the leaders would kill each other.  It was not to be, and I finished in 5th place or so.  It's a fun game, and I still need to break out Circus Minimus, the little paper and chit game I bought a few Prezcons ago.  One other note...my good friend Tom Snyder showed up about 15 minutes late for Circus Maximus...I gave him a copy of the key to our room, and then didn't see him for several hours.  Turns out he had to take his car to a garage due to hitting a large pothole on his way to C-ville, which threw it out of alignment.  The car curse continued....

Formula De

Next up was Formula De, the F1 racing game, run by Doug Gallulo.  Formula De has been reprinted lately as "Formula D" - same game mechanics as far as I can tell...at least for the basic game...Formula D adds a way to cutomize your cars, including using some pre-packaged drivers in almost a role-laying type scenario.  In any case, this racing game uses different size dice to roll for movement as you track through your gears...a 4-sided for 1st gear, 6-sided for 2nd, etc...all the way up to the "golf ball", a 30-sider if you can manage to get to 6th gear.  The key to the game is the corners...every corner on the track is outlined in red, with a number next to it indicating how many times you have to "stop" in that corner.  This, of course, means people have to really watch how they manipulate their gears.  You have certain stats on the car - brakes, tires, engine, body damage etc, that you roll for at certain times to see if you crash or not.  We ended up with exactly 20 players in this heat, which was unfortunate (in my opinion), as the GM opted for 2 10-player games.  Now, the game can handle 10, but if you start much further back than 6th place, you have your work cut out for you.  I must have had a terrible day in qualifying, because I started in 10th place (random die roll).  In the 2 lap race, I never passed more than 1 or 2 people, and in the end I finished 6th (due to some other folks crashing).  However, props to Liz, the young lady who started next to me in 9th place...I believe she finished 3rd.  The other unfortunate aspect of a 10 player game was that it put us over the 2 hour time block for the game, which meant I missed out on the start of Merchant of Venus. 

Carcassonne

We didn't play with the dragon...

Since I missed out on Merchants of Venus, I decided to sit in on the 7:00 PM heat of Carcassonne, the classic tile laying game.  I'm glad I did.  It was a very close game, in which my buddy Glenn was involved.  I managed to pull out the win with the very last tile I pulled, which allowed me to sneak into a high value city that several other players were already in.  This, along with a later 2nd place finish would be enough to get me into the semi-finals (more on that in a later post). 

Game of Thrones

One of the attractions for the year's Prezcon, was the addition of several new games to the agenda.  One of these was Game of Thrones (2nd Edition).  I love the source material, and I love this game.  In my very first trip to Prezcon, the first game I played was Brittania, and while I enjoyed it, I have since decided that 5-hour monster games are not for me at a convention.  I happily made an exception for GoT. 

Ned...if you only had another support token...

Game of Thrones has been compared to Diplomacy in that you are constantly making and breaking alliances during the game.  I drew the Lannisters as my house (I'm always the Lannisters...next time I'm refusing).  My friend Brian was the Baratheon's and Tom drew the Martells.  A fellow by the name of Ryan (who we would game with more in the con) drew the Starks.  A gentlemen who's name escapes me drew the Greyjoys, and the GMs son, Farrin, drew the Tyrells.  The Grejoys tried to mess with me right off the bat, but I promptly threw them back into the bay, and then explained to the inexperienced Greyjoy player why it would be better for us to be allied for a while.  That alliance lasted...until the last turn of the game.  I spread into the heartland where I was able to capture enough "barrels" to give me maximum supply for the entire game...which meant I could field more/larger armies.  Voting went well for me early on as I was able to secure both the Iron Throne and the Raven.  The Tyrells, to my south were a little unpredictable.  I left the Greyjoys to skirmish with the Starks, while the Baratheons and I met on the field of battle a few times.  It became apparent that no one was going to win the game by capturing 7 cities early, so I set in for the long haul.  Unfortunately for me, at the beginning of the last turn, on the 2nd to last card draw of the game, we had to vote for position along the 3 influence tracks.  Critically, I lost position severely on the raven track, which meant I couldn't play "star" tokens.  This killed me (literally and figuratively) on the last round, as I didn't have enough actions to support everything I wanted to do.  In the end, the Martells pulled out the victory, and I finished 2nd due to tiebreakers.  We headed off to bed at 1:30 in the morning, after a 9:00 PM start.  Later in the con, I had the chance to fill in in the final game, but I was tied up with other games at that point.  Still...great game, can't wait to get it back to the table. 

Well, my intent wasn't to do a separate blog post for each day....but I'm running long already.  So, check back later for Part 2....