Got a shorter demo of this and I think it will be more fun and entertaining during the combat phases and the more you move around your planet and others. Each players tableau allows each movement to an adjacent space to perform the action landed on. The factions each player controlled were based on different mythologies and had different powers that impacted goals and actions.

We definitely played this one incorrectly! It felt really hard to produce wine, but it’s because we were taking the action of pressing the barrels with three sets of grapes once and not three times for each grape. I may want play this again to give it another chance, but I also didn’t like that the only way to really generate income is by laying off workers.

I was really interested in this one because the box art is so lovely and it sounded fun. This plays like a game you need to play more than once to really appreciate it. All payers take out the same few cards in the beginning and draft each at the same time to build and harvest the sweet ingredients to cascade into the cards played as cafes and satisfy the requirements. Any time there is a surplus of ingredients you can move your chicken the number of spaces from the left overs and use moving them back three spaces to receive eggs to help fulfill recipes as a wild card. I think I didn’t properly play the chicken and it was a game where halfway through I wanted to do something totally different. Looking forward to playing it again and getting a better feel if I like it.

I absolutely loved the concept of First Rat and I’m so glad I really enjoyed the game. You play a group of rats gathering leftover food cans and lightbulbs to build a rocket and make it to the moon made of cheese first. The movement is great because you can advance one rat up to 5 spaces or two rats up to 3 spaces (so long as they land on the same color space) It was lighter, but still had a lot of plotting involved on what resources and tracks to move up for points to make it to the moon first! They sold out of copies there or else I definitely would have picked this one up!

Not going to lie, taking Marrakesh out of the box was really intimidating. It’s a thick game that has an equally thick setup. Maybe because it was the first big game of the con I had more mental energy but I did a lot better here than I thought I would. Everyone plays a house in Marrakesh that secretly selects actions via specific colored cylinders (called Keshies) that then get tossed into a tower containing some obstacles so you don’t always know what’s going to come out or get stuck for a later round. Actions are taken to gain wealth and influence in different areas of the city for victory points to win the game. Despite it being bigger than I usually like, I could absolutely see myself playing this again!

We had been waiting to play a different queen game when this one became available and we sat down to kill time. It’s a lighter card management game that was a nice in-between option. The different card capabilities were interesting and the interaction with others playing cards made it feel more engaging that anticipated.

I LOVED Gutenberg. I chose it as my game of the con because I enjoyed it so much. The base game comes with the most beautiful wood printing press tiles that you use to fulfill printing contracts while you build your press and acquire ink. The coolest thing about the components is the gear tiles that interlock and all turn when you move the top. This unlocks different effects that you have to plan ahead for. Didn’t manage to find a copy at Gencon, but already bought it so it’s home shortly after we arrive!

In reading the description of Mechanica I thought I was really going to like it, but I think with 4 players it wasn’t as enjoyable. The copy and art here are adorable and the premise is that you’re building a robot vacuum company that will eventually overthrow humanity and the dark humor on the cards and tiles made it fun! The issue I think I had was in the way the tiles got pulled. The mechanism for buying tiles lives on top of the board to allow for tiles to fall off the “conveyer” and into the box, and then get used for a different scrap value which I really liked. With so many players everything got almost immediately bought and luck really ruined the entire play for one player. Would try this again but maybe as a 2 player.

Pampero was the last game I played at GenCon and I think I really need to play it again. I didn’t get off to the best start. I also don’t particularly enjoy first moves predetermined by whoever is teaching the game as a means of learning, but I do recognize it sometimes is the best method - not how my brain works. It’s very reminiscent of Smartphone where you’re building a product (in this case wind farms) to sell to regional customers. I liked the tableau balancing elements here and the map had a rich accuracy of the rural and coastal cities of Uruguay. You really have to manage your cards to make sure you can take meaningful actions which I didn’t quite master after one play!

Best thing about Shipwreck Arcana is that I had it in a shopping cart to buy ahead of my trip and put it off thinking the delivery wouldn’t make it. I’m so glad I waited. Recommended to me by a fellow game lover it was described as a mathy co-op I feel like a better descriptor might be numerical deduction. Every player get tiles from 1-7 and chooses from a bag two numbers, one to be played on the Tarot style cards that best fit the description of the two numbers (total is a multiple of three, one is higher than the other, when added together are even) and the second number is hidden. The rest of the group attempts to guess the hidden number based on characteristics of placement or comparison of other tiles. Had some codenames vibes for me and makes me feel like I will get smarter just by playing it!

If Starry Night Sky were out already I would have bought it. It’s a delightful exploration game where you discover whimsical constellations while satisfying goals through managing colored crystals on a mini tableau. It just is a beautiful light game I could see working well at the end of a long day when you want to relax but still mentally engage with something

This is the coolest box ever. The actual Terracotta Army is stored upside down in statue slots and they get pulled up as they are played which made this game all the more thematic. The goal of the game is to place and score your primary and supporting statues while using limited spaces on a changing wheel to gain resources and alliances to help you in specific actions. I loved that the wheel had a top turning component and a second turning component where the actions weren’t the same every time. This is a game that was ordered at the con to also arrive as soon as possible!