Dice Tower Con 2019 in review, part 2

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THURSDAY

Apparently coating French toast in coconut corn flakes and deep frying it is a thing. And, having gone to all that effort, regular maple syrup just won’t cut it. You need bananas Foster syrup instead. It is as horrifying (and delicious) as you think it is. Probably the best thing I ate during the entire convention.

We started out on Thursday with a stroll through the vendor hall. There will be games later, but it started out with the vendors. We had been there on Wednesday for a quick scan; today’s foray was more in-depth.

SOS Dino is a game of saving adorable dinosaurs from a variety of disasters. It was out of rotation at the booth so we did not get to play it. Still, adorable dinosaurs – and it did get a Kinderspiel recommendation so if you’re looking for a game to play with kids you might want to check it out.

Yokai is an expansion for Kanagawa that looks intriguing. I haven’t played Kanagawa yet so “looks intriguing” is unfortunately all I have at the moment.

It’s A Wonderful World caught my eye but we didn’t get a chance to play it until Saturday. More on this engine-builder then.

Safari Turbo is the start of a planned series of racing games with asymmetric driver powers, exotic terrain, and video-game-like power-ups. I’ve been on a bit of a racing game kick recently so this one caught my eye.

Our first library game of the day was definitely my fault. Once upon a time I had pledged the Kickstarter for Schrodinger’s Cats and given it to a relative who loves cats and science. Spotting it in the library I decided to give it a try. As we were setting it up, Cindy (of Space Base fame) spotted us and decided to join in. Schrodinger’s Cats is a card-based variant on Liar’s Dice with some asymmetric player powers. At three players the only thing I can say for it is that it plays quickly and that some of the puns are clever. The BGG hivemind thinks that it plays best at 5-6 players, and this feels right based on my experience with it. None of us really enjoyed the game at three. Perhaps it would be a better game with more players. The theme didn’t capture my imagination enough to try. If you like cats, science, and a six-player party-ish game you might like Schrodinger’s Cats.

Cindy came to our rescue with Fabled Fruit, complete with the Lime expansion. She also brought in her friends Yves and Nadine. Thanks to all three of them for including us in their gaming experience. Fabled Fruit is another creation of Friedemann Friese, the master of the pseudo-legacy game. The goal is to collect fruit that can then be turned into delicious beverages. The trick is that the array of beverage cards is also the playing surface. Players move their animals from one drink to another, performing the actions on them – or sometimes just collecting a fruit – until they have enough fruit to complete one of the drinks. If you want to land on a drink that already has one or more animals, you have to pay them off in fruit in order to do so. The win condition is a number of completed drinks based on player count. It is a nice light worker placement game with some additional twists as your play experience evolves.

We finished out the evening with Smartphone Inc, in the Hot Games area of the play hall. We were joined by Casey and Bonnie. While we were waiting for the previous group to finish up we tried to get a handle on how the game worked. It is a (mostly) fast-moving game of, well, making and selling smartphones. The “mostly” comes from the sometimes AP-inducing first phase of each turn. Each player has an identical pair of double-sided boards with a variety of icons for manufacturing, logistics, technology, and price. How you place them, one partially overlaying the other, determines what resources you will have on your turn. As the game progresses you can develop additional tech that provides more small tiles that can also overlay the two main boards. This is by far the slowest part of the game as the players spend a good amount of time flipping the boards back and forth and overlaying the small tiles, trying to come up with just the right arrangement for their upcoming turn. After that things go very quickly. Price is set first and then the rest of the phases are resolved in price order, lowest to highest. Each phase is just a matter of each player taking a number of tokens based on how they set up their resources and placing them on the board in price order, or resolving what the regions do again in price order. The resource phase is time-consuming and probably not for those prone to analysis paralysis. Based on one playthrough, Smartphone Inc is a very good mostly-Euro economic game with some interactive elements. It is best with a higher player count – the “retail” system that is used with fewer players seemed like an afterthought and felt unsatisfying to me.

At this point, I wandered off to bed. I’d been feeling poorly all day and decided not to push my luck health-wise. Pro-tip for convention-goers: watching out for your health is more important than any game you might have played.

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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.

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.

2 Replies to “Dice Tower Con 2019 in review, part 2”

  1. I would Love to hear more in detail on some of these games.
    Fabled Fruit sounds great.

  2. Fabled Fruit is a lot of fun. The ever-changing nature of it, evolving from session to session, is terrific. It is definitely a game I’d like to play more of. In the same approximate family but much smaller is Fortress. As part of the Fast Forward series (if you’re starting to get the idea the Friedemann Friese likes the letter F, you would be right) it doesn’t have a rulebook. You learn the game by following the instructions on the cards.

    As far as the games up at the top of the post, the only one we got a chance to play is It’s A Wonderful World, which is a very good engine builder. I get into more depth about it in the Saturday post. The rest I only know about from looking at the parts and pieces sitting on a table. I have added Safari Turbo to my list of “things to buy for further research” just because an asymmetric racing game looks like fun. We didn’t get to play it, though, so I don’t have any solid details about it.

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