This year continues to be busy, and my convention writeups are lacking for it. Here’s my quick notes for the last three cons.
DEXLITE 2024
The first “masks optional” Double Exposure convention since COVID. Attendance was fine, and fun was had by all.
Friday
Rebel Scum: A romp of a game about making pew! pew! noiseses while also bunching space fascists in the face. One player was really dedicated to the idea that her Amurai warrior was absolutely a pacisfist, which was great. I kept offering her bigger and bigger bonuses to resort to violence and she kept turning me down. It was great!
Scurvy Buggers: The best pirate game I’ve ever played. The Polymorph game system was fine, but it was really the amazing players (Jeff, Dave, Brennan, and Jeanette) that made this wild tale of back-stabbing, booty, and dark magic spring to life. My character ended up sacrificed to an Aztec serpent god!
Dragon Braggin’: I got a one-on-one playtest of the game. It doesn’t soar in two-player mode, but it doesn’t break, either. Brendan gave a very, very fun suggestion to improve the game.
Saturday
Rebel Scum: More space hijinks, this time helping a famous space racer defect to the rebels in the middle of a race. Absconding with him, and his daughter, under the nose of Baron Deathray had more a of a Mission Impossible vibe to it, with a detailed plan and stuff. Definite a fun and easy game to run!
Dragon Braggin’: Always a quick, punchy, and funny game. Testing Brendan’s “The Adventurer Who Never Was” variant was awesome.
InSpectres: It wouldn’t be a public convention without me running InSpectres, would it? This time they ran their franchise out of the back room of a ukelele store and faced the problems of haunted parking meters and a subway train that literally went to hell.
SummerDaze 2024
A beautiful weekend in the Poconos with fun people at another invite-only house con.
Friday
The King Is Dead: Always fun and easy to facilitate. I finally, FINALLY managed to become king … and was promptly assassinated.
Wanderhome: Is a very chill, bittersweet kind of game about anthropomorphic animals wandering the countryside and finding problems spawned by the last war. I played a turtle poet.
Topia Outpost Prime: With Dragon Braggin’ having such a smooth game design process, I was able to come back to my space station sci-fi game. Six players is probably too many for a one-shot, but they’re all so good, I wouldn’t give any of them up. They averted the crisis of a crewmember driven mad by a piece of Gate-tech and flying their ship straight for the station. We hit a few rough patches in the moves, but I think the game will be stronger for it.
Saturday
Mondo Fantastic: Bill White’s game in development provides oracular sword-and-sorcery fun in quick order. My buff fighter-type died by tackling the Matriarch of Assassins off the top of the Tower of Pain to save his wife from endless nightmares.
Numinous: A surreal game in development of reality gone weird, where you play both an impossibly-advanced AI who’s kinda like a Greek god, and the struggling individual who are their playthings.
InSpectres: We set our franchise in a rural area for something different. They investigated a hotel that was haunted by ghost beds. Later, a woman hired them to find out if her husband was really being abducted by aliens every Friday night, or if he was just cheating on her. Turns out, it was both: He was cheating on her with the aliens!
WonderFall 2024
Another of our invite-only house cons was a very chill, relaxing weekend with a handful of good friends.
Friday
Dragon Braggin’: I got my proof deck from DriveThruCards and got to play with that. Even my very condensed rules were very smooth and we all laughed a lot.
Raccoon Sky Pirates is much more fun as a player than as an unneeded facilitator. My raccoon surfed out of the living room on top of a flat screen TV!
My Father’s Work: A very, very overproduced board game. Playing three generations of a family of mad scientists, my grandson was able to complete the time machine his grandfather had begun.
Saturday
I got to introduce some more folks to the very clever and fun card game The Bears and the Bees
Topia Outpost Prime: The best playtest yet. I think the game is in a good place and I look forward to starting a more long-term playtest. This one felt very much like an episode of a ’90s space station TV show. They confronted the A- and B-plots of a Gate-tech infestation that provoked a strange reaction in the crew and also the smuggling of bliss-producing drugs derived from the blood of those infected crewmembers. Plus, there were obvious longer-term ramifications that could have been revisited in later episodes.
Companion’s Tale plays just fine with two players. We made an amazing map and told our tales of a hero pulled back and forth between the influences of two companions.
