Dice Tower Con 2019 in review, part 1

This was my first experience with DTC. Bob had attended last year and recommended it to me so I decided to give it a try. The con is a great opportunity to play new games and meet new gamers to play them with. In my specific case, I managed to get in 20 new-to-me games over the course of the convention. I hope to have the opportunity to bore you all by blathering about them all in this and future installments.

My only real criticism of the convention is that I would be completely willing to pay for postage and have them mail me my badge rather than stand in line for it. I do this at any medium-to-large con that gives me the opportunity. The con staff did their best with it but when you require 1,000+ people to all stand in the same line it is going to consume an unfortunately large block of time. Beyond that, the con was friendly and well-run. Everyone was helpful and knowledgeable. If your goal is to go and play a lot of games, Dice Tower Con is well worth your time.

The hotel, which is beyond the ability of the Dice Tower to control, was not always as efficient. The concierge desk had a greeter – who was never able to help me with anything, inevitably passing me on to the actual concierge. I have no idea what the purpose of this person was other than to make me ask all of my questions twice. The “computer” for printing boarding passes was a large touch-screen installation with a nearby printer. This allowed anyone standing nearby to potentially see everything I was doing. The sit-down restaurant in the main building was in theory open for all three meals, but in practice, it was closed for 4 hours in the afternoon. If you want a late lunch or an early dinner your choices are the outdoor bar in the pool area, the “cafe” with no seating of its own, or a pre-made sandwich/pizza counter in the convention center.

Enough of my #firstworldproblems, though. On to the games.

WEDNESDAY

We started out with the live Boardgame Breakfast and followed that up with standing in line. While you can get away with many things at DTC without a badge (as Tom Vasel has readily admitted) the one thing you absolutely need one for is checking games out of the library. If you’re local to Orlando – or at least local enough to drive – you can bring a supply of your own games and not have to bother with the library. For me, though, one of the great values of something like DTC is the ability to play games that I don’t already own. And for that, I had to collect my badge.
(As an aside I do want to rant a bit about bringing games to the convention. It’s not the games, per se. It’s the full-on pull behind WAGONS that some people apparently need to haul around the 15+ games that they brought along. The space in and around the tables in the main gaming hall was limited enough without having these Winnebagos of game-haulage taking up yet more real estate. Worse, all too many of the owners of said wagons fail to account for the space that they take up. Whether moving through the halls and aisles or stopping to look at something at a game table or vendor booth, the wagons can be a major impediment to everyone else’s ability to get where they’re going. (Okay, rant over.)

While roaming the aisles of the vendor hall I picked up a copy of the Imperial Settlers roll-and-write from CoolStuff. We gave it a go later in the day and enjoyed it. Like all roll-and-writes, the first few games are low-scoring affairs as you try to puzzle out what to do. The “rolling” portion consists of everyone getting the same set of actions and resources, which they can use on a variety of locations to get more resources or other benefits. The only real issue I can see with it is that later in the game the quantity of resources and actions to be juggled in a turn can be quite large. Some sort of resource tracking sheet would be helpful. Fortunately, a helpful person on BGG has come to the rescue.

We also stopped in the Weird Giraffe booth. I had backed the Kickstarter for Dreams of Tomorrow and wanted to see what it looked like in person. The answer is, very nice. Dreams is an interesting moving-rondel action selection game about the future sending back dreams into the present in order to change their history. We didn’t get a chance to play it but we did try Fire in the Library which is a fun push-your-luck game about saving books from a burning library – except for the times when NOT saving a particular book is a better tactical choice. Turn order is chosen. Going earlier in the order can bring more bonus points at the cost of a greater chance of fanning the flames and ending your turn without getting much benefit. And you definitely want some of those benefits, such as shovels and slingshots (yes, really) to help you mitigate the burning books. We’ll be returning to Weird Giraffe, but that is a story for another day.

Our first library game was Heaven & Ale. This is a tile-placement game about monks brewing beer. Scoring is an interesting blend of “lowest category is your score” and a mechanism for averaging the categories. Tiles do different things based on where you place them and what is around them when they activate. Tiles are bought from a central board in semi-rondel style. The game is straightforward while still presenting deep choices regarding what tiles you take and where you place them. Like Brass: Birmingham, though, it really needs a box insert that organizes the tiles and other counters based on how and where they are put during setup. Without it, the setup can be fiddly and time-consuming. It is also worth noting that it is a game that benefits from a higher player count. The box says 2-4 but it’s not as satisfying an experience with only two.

Next up we decided to give Great Western Trail a try. A heavy (BGG weight 3.69) economic Euro, GWT is a lot of fun and doesn’t seem as heavy as that rating would imply. Choosing when and where to develop the long, long road to Kansas City is the key. We put up signs for “players wanted” and “teacher wanted”, and before we had fully unpacked the game we had one of each. Dan and Pete, whose last names I neglected to record (an ongoing failure of mine – although thinking on it later I probably wouldn’t have posted them here even if I had) were fun opponents. As befitting a BGG top-10 game Great Western Trail has deep gameplay that rewards multiple playthroughs. If sprawling economic cube-pushers are your thing I recommend Great Western Trail without reservation. Just don’t expect to be good at it the first time you play.

To round out the evening we gave Space Base a try. Many thanks to Cindy, who saw us setting up the game and blew off dinner to join in and teach us how to play. Space Base is a card-buying, dice-rolling game that was described as “Like Machi Koro but better”. The game itself is a light, easy to teach “engine” builder (although the engine being based on other players’ die rolls can make real efficiency hard to attain) with a vague space theme. For me, the theme (space) is better than that of Machi Koro (Japanese shops) and so I would play Space Base instead – at least until someone makes a game of Japanese space-shops…