BGG.con

Carrie and I attended the annual BoardGameGeek Convention up in Dallas last week and had a blast. I met a lot of friendly folks, ate a bunch of sushi, and played a ton of games.

First, check out the library (or at least the M through S section). There were thousands of games available to check out:

BGG.con 2010 Library

Here’s one of my favorite games that I played, Navigador. This is a meaty game where you play a 15th-century Portugese navigator exploring the seas. The heart of the game is the multicolor wheel, called a rondel. Each turn, you must move between 1 and 3 spaces clockwise around the wheel and take the appropriate action (like building more ships, or purchasing a building). By limiting you to just three choices, this mechanic keeps your brain from being crushed by a gigantic decision tree each turn while maintaining a significant amount of depth over the course of the game. Good stuff.

Navegador

My top 5 favorite new games that I played:

1. 7 Wonders – Fantastic card drafting game that plays in 30 minutes and scales out to 7 players
2. Navegador – See comments above
3. Crokinole – Finally got to play this classic disk-flicking game (dates back to 1867)
4. Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer – Interesting take on the recent deck-building genre, time will tell if it holds up as well as Dominion over multiple plays.
5. Tobago – Wonderful ‘hunting treasure on a tropical island’ theme, with a great logical deduction mechanic.

On Friday, I attended Proto Alley, a room set aside for playtesting raw, unfinished prototypes. I got my new game, Starboard, played twice, and have several pages of notes as a result. The good news is that both playtesters agreed that the core idea is sound and there is a potentially good game here. The bad news is that there is a lot of work left to be done. My new goal is to have the next version of the game ready to rock in time for Protospiel South 2011.

Of course, no convention report would be complete without a photo of all the crap I picked up along the way (in my defense, the stack on the left was free):

The haul

Now, I just need to get all those games played. Time to start reading those rulebooks!