Dice Tower Con 2019 in review, part 3

FRIDAY

We started out the day with two panels starring the lovely and talented Geoff Engelstein. The first, Designing Games as a Team, was full of practical advice. If you are planning to co-design a game at any point, or even think you might, track down the video – it’s probably on YouTube by now – and watch it. Take notes. Possibly re-watch it and take more notes. No, I am not kidding.

The second was more a “state of the industry” talk with Richard Borg (Commands and Colors), Richard Launius (Arkham Horror), Erica Bouyouris (Kodama 3D), Sydney Englestein (Space Cadets), and the inimitable Eric Lang (seemingly everything else) who decided to hang around after the previous panel. This was a great time with many interesting stories and insights. If you weren’t there it’s also worth tracking down on YouTube, although you probably won’t feel the need to take as many notes.

I had a little bit of spare time in the afternoon and was able to fit in a demo of Celestia at the vendor booth. I own Celestia, a quick little push-your-luck game of using cards to overcome dice, but hadn’t been able to get it to the table. It is a solid filler, doing exactly what it says on the tin, with a cool airship model to boot.

We also had an opportunity to stop by the playtest area and try out a gem-based liar’s dice variant called Thief’s Honor. The idea is that you secretly draw a set number of gems (of different colors) out of a bag, and then choose some or all of them to put in your hand. You then declare what is in your hand, and the other players must decide whether to go along or to declare that you are lying. If you are lying and they catch you, they can take a gem from your hand. If you’re telling the truth and they accuse you of lying, they get to take a gem from your stash. There are different quantities of the various colors, altering the dynamics of the bluffing. The ultimate goal is to use gems from your stash to buy “contracts” (victory points). It’s a clever little game with a fun tactile play experience.

After that, we hit the library. First up was Dune: The Dice Game, a print-and-play attempt at remaking the 1979 classic Avalon Hill game as a hybrid dice/board game. As with many dice games the core mechanic is Yahtzee-like in that you roll the dice with a limited number of re-rolls to mitigate the randomness. You can then use the results of the dice to move troops, engage in political intrigue, and collect spice – all while avoiding worms and sandstorms. Perhaps it was the fact that we only had two players, but I did not really enjoy this game. It felt as though there was too much “stuff” crammed into a game that ought to have been simpler based on the mechanics. The AH original had everything in it but it was also a much bigger game. This version just felt bloated.

At the same time, we had grabbed Hanamikoji, a neat little card game of area control. The art is quite nice and definitely true to the theme of Geisha trying to exert their influence via artistic performances. Between card drafting and hidden placement, the game is simple enough to teach quickly while the actual play experience has a satisfying depth. Like Celestia it is best thought of as a filler game based on play time.

On returning Hanamikoji and Dune to the library we had grand plans for the evening. We checked out Lorenzo il Magnifico and La Granja, intending to play both of them. Through no real scientific method, we selected La Granja to play first. The “Players Wanted” and “Teacher Wanted” signs went up while we worked our way through setup using the rulebook (on which, more later). We definitely picked the wrong time to play this, though. A couple of people stopped by and offered to answer questions at different points but did not stay as they were headed for dinner. La Granja is another big economic Euro (it was a theme for the games we tried to play at the convention as they can be hard to get to the table in our usual play groups) like Great Western Trail and Smartphone Inc. The mechanics of the game seemed appropriate to the style, and would probably have provided a good play experience – if we had been able to understand them. The rulebook for La Granja does a terrible job of explaining how to deal with the multitude of edge cases that came up during our playthrough. The end result is that we did not enjoy the game. Perhaps if a teacher had been present it would have been a better experience. Certainly, the rating on BGG implies that there is a very good game in the box. For us, it was not an experience that we want to repeat.

By the time La Granja had ground to a conclusion, we had pretty well run out of brain cells. Certainly we had run out of math, and so Lorenzo il Magnifico made his way back to the library unplayed. Fear not, though, as he would make a triumphant return on the morrow.