yet another Gaming Friday

Last night’s gaming night was mainly social. It was just me, the host, and two rare visitors.

Game #1 was Puzzle Strike: Shadows. I fared better than I did my first time, ultimately placing second after a game that ran into a satisfying early end stage with conservative play from everyone. I’m ambivalent about my performance. On the one hand, I kept my damage down, and I had a shot at winning in the late midgame, which I took (as I should have), but my intended target had the countermeasure that I figured he had about a 50%-66% chance of having. On the other, I still focused too much on special actions over basic ones, and I didn’t leverage my starting character’s special abilities particularly well. (Two of the three went unplayed all game.) Oh, and I bought a 4-gold gem early, and although I felt like it wasn’t showing up often enough, I didn’t consciously realize I was never drawing it. I found it stuck in a deep fold in my shuffling bag after the game ended.

Game #2 was King of Tokyo, which Orbus bought for himself after enjoying my copy so much. The winner snuck up on victory points while everyone else was busy trying to knock people out.

Game #2.5 was an experimental game of Strut between me and Orbus after the other two guests left. It’s a Slapjack-style pattern-matching dice game I picked up a while ago. I didn’t expect it to be great, but it has a matching mechanic I wanted to see in practice and it was on sale. Every person has a hand of cards with dice combinations on them, like “three-of-a-kind” or “two 1s and two 6s”. Each turn, the active player rerolls exactly two dice, and the first player to play a card with a matching pattern scores it. Whoever empties his hand first wins. The core element is being first to recognize that one of your desired patterns is hidden in the roll somewhere, with a minor dose of deciding which dice to reroll for the best chance of getting a match. Those two elements seemed pretty solid. There are also reaction cards you can play against another player’s scoring, but they seem overpowered and add little to the game but chaos. The scoring system is problematic as well. It does two useful things — it allows players to have a manageable hand size of three without winning after playing only three cards, and it makes easy matches worth less toward winning than hard matches are — but it feels tacked on, and it’s strange to track points when having the most doesn’t make you win.

GDC

I spent most of the last week of March in San Francisco for the 2013 Game Developers Conference. Three coworkers and I flew out Sunday morning, early enough that I had the alarm set to 4:15 am. The flight was uneventful.

Our hotel was several blocks from the convention center, and about a third the cost of a closer one. There’s a good reason for that. We were near the Tenderloin, a famously dirty and dangerous low-rent neighborhood. It didn’t help that San Francisco has long city blocks.

Sunday was a tourist day. After an ersatz dim sum breakfast in Chinatown, we walked toward the waterfront. Two of us broke away from there to head toward pre-convention meetups, while my boss and I headed toward Fisherman’s Wharf another mile or two away. Although the views of Alcatraz and the sunning sea lions were enjoyable, Pier 39 — which is where Google Maps sent us — is ridiculously tourist-trappy, to the point where it doesn’t even have water fountains so you’re forced to buy a $4 soda. Thankfully, my boss’s sister and her boyfriend were able to join us briefly and show us more of the wharf, including a vintage arcade and nickelodeon museum. The night ended with a pre-event dinner at The Stinking Rose. True to its name, every main dish and appetizer was chock full of garlic. (Two thumbs up. Would do again.)

Monday was a lightweight day. The conference was open, but our booth’s room was open only Tuesday through Thursday, so our agenda for the day consisted of just registration and panels. The next three days were much the same as each other: wake, gather, eat breakfast, staff at least two people at the booth at all times from 10:00 to 6:00 while the others eat, rest, or attend panels, then break for dinner and afterward try to get into meaningful networking parties.

As it was a work trip, my panel attendance wasn’t as open or as free-range as I might have liked. After all, this is one of the premier annual professional conventions in my trade, and this is the first time I’d been to one. If I’d been there on my own time, I could see myself sitting in on three times as many and not focusing so much on how to make or sell free-to-play games. I’d have actually gotten to play a few of the International Game Developer Association award entries and tried one or two of the board games designed by video game designers. (Alas, Armada d6 was not one of them.) I did get to see the panel Ian Bogost helped give on the popular public view of video games and their scapegoating for violent behavior, but missed what turned out to be a powerful talk on the state of the games industry in regards to women.

Friday was another oh-dark-thirty ride to the airport for the flight back, equally early and equally straightforward. Light rail took us back to our downtown office in time for lunch, but we didn’t stay long after that. We were all bushed and ready to head home.