Wellycon 2010 (14 & 15 August)

As a Wellycon organiser I expected to play very few games at Wellycon 2010. But looking in my trusty notebook I was surprised to see that I played ten games over the weekend. Though people who know me might be surprised it wasn’t double that!

On Friday night Peter, Andrew and I went to St Pats to start setting things up. The Call to Arms guys had kindly put out 15 tables for us, but there was still plenty to do.

Saturday
I spent most of the morning on the registration desk and regretfully turning down requests to come and play various games.

Endeavor
Gynn was due to play in Jarratt's Endeavor tournament but was stuck deep in Small World when the other players were ready to start, so I took his place. I have never devoted enough time to get my head around all the buildings, cards and various strategies and tactics of Endeavor. I tend to play instinctively (though it is probably more accurate to say "randomly"). I was the only player to not start with a Workshop and concentrated on action tokens instead of resource tokens. I also stayed non-military which meant I was at a severe disadvantage against Antony and Henry who had two military buildings each and ended up dominating the cities. While at the end I concentrated on mining for good cards.

Antony 59
Henry  53
Ian    50
Silja  30

Beowulf
Is my favourite push-your-luck game. A game which also includes a good dose of resource management. I taught it to Alan, Rodney and Rhiana. Rhiana had terrible luck with her risks.

Rodney 30
John B 30
Ian    28
Alan   24
Rhianna 7

Nexus Ops
After dinner Minty, his son Sam, John and I played Minty's copy with my reference cards. John had no mines on his side of the board, while Minty had heaps of mines. Conversely this meant John started with a lot of Rock Striders. Minty missed out on the win by a bad dice roll, leaving it to John to finish the game.

John B 13
Minty   9
Sam     8
Ian     7

Extravagances
We ended the evening with Extravagances, Brian's free trading filler. This is a prototype of a Pit-like trading game. Themed around decadent Roman power brokers vying with each other to put on the most extravagant spectacles. There is a small deck of goal cards and a larger deck of resource cards. Everyone has a private goal and there are a couple of public goals. When you fulfil a goal you add it to your face down score pill and turn up or pickup another. Trading is free form and occurs in one minute blocks. Starting with very few cards and getting two more between each trading block. There is a penalty to being caught with too many cards.

There were 6-8 players, I don't remember who else played but I won by one point with 5 completed missions and 19 points.

Sunday

Zombie Dice
Wellycon tradition dictates that there is a fire alarm on the Sunday. Tradition also dictates that gaming continue outside. So half a dozen of us played the push-your-luck game of Zombie Dice in the drizzle while the alarm blared in the background. The aim of this dice game is to collect more brains than other players and stop before you get hit by three shotgun blasts. There are three colours of dice red, yellow and green, which have different ratios of brains, shotgun blasts and foot prints.

Given that it was a learning game, a push-your-luck game _and_ a zombie game we weren't taking it too seriously and I lost badly. The "all clear" came before we could start a second game.

Age of Steam
Once the early rush was over, Peter was keen on learning Age of Steam so we set up a game behind the registration table, so we could be handy to stop playing and sign people in. Andrew appointed John as his proxy from turn 2 but in the second half of the game Jarratt took over. I started with linking up and delivering a cube for 2, on the second turn I got Loco, linked up and delivered a cube for 4. After than I got to 5 and 6 fairly quickly and was delivering 5s and 6s for the rest of the game. Taking production to feed my habit as Peter was taking cubes from one end of my network and Jarratt the other. Jarratt made a big come back for the tie. Peter got to see what is possible with track building as we fought over the centre and south west. (Jarratt's game report.)

Andrew Rae, John B, Jarratt 130
Ian                         130
Peter Freer                 100

Metropolys
We pulled Skyler away from his War Game Supply table for a game. He was keen on learning Metropolys. I beat three newbies but only just.

Ian    34
Skyler 33
Art    31
Peter  21

No Thanks!
Towards the end of Wellycon we played fillers to finish off the day.

Peter  21
Ian    36
Rachel 39
Don    54

No Thanks!
John took Peter's seat, and I did badly.

John B 24
Don    26
Rachel 38
Ian    43

En Garde
After Wellycon was officially over I reminded Eric that he had promised (in a rash moment) to teach me this game. It turns out Rachel is a fencer (as is Skyler) but my card counting (pretty easy in a 25 card deck) helped me out.

Ian    5
Rachel 3