It's only one short month until this year's Gathering of Friends, the annual invitation-only boardgaming event that I will be attending for the second time this year. I was SO excited to attend last year that I wrote a whole bunch of articles for boardgamenews.com prior to going (here, here and here), and wrote a follow up article afterwards as well. Almost a year later, I have a different, somewhat subdued take on the event.
Let's be very clear that by subdued, I mean I'm not as crazy about going as I was last year. But I am still really excited, and am looking forward to this more than any other gaming event (as much as I love Essen each fall, it's clear to me that it will be a significant amount of work prior to and at the show for the foreseeable future for me). At The Gathering, I get to play games for 10 days straight.
Last year, I played more than 100 games over the 9 days I attended. While I had brought some of my prototypes with me, last year was much more about relaxing and meeting new people than it was about business. This year that will shift slightly, but not too much, as I have a couple of games that are all contenders for this fall's Essen.
REMOVED due to me being very very secretive.
Both of these games are in the final stages of playtesting, but due to being a small publisher, only one of them will make it to print for Essen this year. I'm trusting the good folks at The Gathering to provide the feedback I need to make the right choice.
And I'll be bringing a bunch of new AoS maps with me, one set which might make it for Essen as well. However, that might hinge on the new printing and/or edition of Age of Steam being available. If there is a new AoS, I'll definitely publish one of the new sets. If not, it's possible but not certain.
Outside of that, the only other prep I have to do for the Gathering has been a lot of fun: I'm just finishing up a Smarty Party (tm) "Gamers' Expansion" of which I will print only two copies: 1 for play at the Gathering, and another for the Prize Table. So far I have 48 Cards, which is about 25% of a standard Smarty Party deck, enough for about 4-5 games. It's a lot of fun for gamers, and a lot of gamers really like Smarty Party, so it should be a good fit. After the Gathering, I will post a PDF of the cards on the Bezier Games site and on BGG (probably on the Smarty Party page, although maybe since it's an expansion, it should have its own page...).
At The Gathering last year, I played a whole lot of games, but I played more Ultimate Werewolf than anything else. By Far. Here's the list of games I played:
Games with * were first time plays, including probably 7 or 8 of the prototypes. So of the 102 games I played, only 19 were new.
I'm hoping to play as many games this year, but expect to play less new ones (my playing history on BGG shows that as the years progress, the number of games new to me decreases, and will continue to for some time until I run out of old games that interest me which I haven't played).
I'd like to play more Tichu and less UW, but I know how hard it is to resist the call of the moderator. Or to resist being called to moderate. I'd like to play more AoS (not my maps, but other ones). And I want to play more fun party games (but not too much Catch Phrase, which is okay but not great). And I want to make sure I try more prototypes. I know I got in 8 or so (that weren't mine), but there were a lot of games that where there last year that I missed: Cuba (I wouldn't have bought it at Essen had I played it first), Race for the Galaxy (I *would* have bought it at Essen if I had played it), FF's Felix (bought this anyway, glad I did). I'm really glad I played Zooloretto (not a prototype, it was just released), as I HATED it and didn't buy it and am irritated that it won the SdJ (Yspahan should have won, or even Pillars).
I'm also hoping to go out to eat more. Last year I was so caught up about losing game time that I NEVER went out to eat. I just ordered in and occasionally went out and grabbed a sandwich or burger or something, and pretty much ate only 1 or 2 meals a day, with lots of snacking. That said, I will have a car and my GPS, so I'll be able to take folks out to pretty much anywhere easily.
It was interesting to read a recent thread on the Geek about how you get invited to The Gathering, and shortly thereafter a note from Alan mentioned the most obvious way: meet Alan and chat him up, and unless you're a cave troll, you very well could get an invite. It's a lot less exclusive than it seems, and probably the only reason it's invitation only is so that there aren't any folks there who disrupt the flow of the event; in the 9 days I was there last year I didn't meet a single person who I didn't think should have been there. Everyone was there to play and have fun and it showed.
Well, it's 5+ weeks and counting, and I'm excited about going. Maybe moreso than I first stated at the beginning of this entry. But still not as bad as last year... :)
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1 comments:
Well, you can count on one of my friends picking up an AoS expansion for me at Essen, if you publish one (and someone I know is going to Essen, which is likely).
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