Origins 2010
This is a video from last year, but it gives you a sense of scale of the Board Room (which was downstairs in one of the Exhibit Hall this year (boo). Sorry the quality is so poor, but it does lend an appropriate sasquatch-film atmosphere to the three frames in which I walk past in my yeti hat at the 1-minute mark.
This year, Team Ithaca representation was weak, but we had a lot of fun with Dan, Amy and Zach.
New games played:
- Galaxy’s Edge Previously unknown to me, yet not a new game. We kinda liked it. The military control resolution is kind of brain-hurty and neat.
- Darjeeling Tea! Yay!
- Pack & Stack An all-too-eerily-accurate simulation of moving, including not being able to get the right truck from U-Haul.
- Steam Excellent new track-building, goods-delivering game.
- San Juan All the best elements of Race for the Galaxy and Puerto Rico, in one convenient package.
- Le Havre OMG too effing long.
- Race for the Galaxy: Brink of War Prestige can bite me.
- Nautilus Neat underwater exploration game with a a pretty board. Unfortunately, it just barely surpassed the fiddly-bits limit.
We never did quite manage to get into a game of Martian Rails. It was not available at Origins 2009, and we’ve been trying (in a half-hearted way) to get a copy for a while, though I’m deeply disappointed by the fact that the cities are drawn from fiction, unlike Lunar Rails, which awesomely uses actual lunar geography.
Acquired:
- Darjeeling, Assyria, Street Illegal and Dragon Parade (You get two randomly selected free games you get when you first visit the Board Room with your ribbon. This is the first time we got bumpkis in the Board Room raffle, which was a disappointment. :( However, Rio Grande Games provided free lunch and dinner for the Board Room, which was pretty extravagantly generous of them! Thanks, Rio Grande!).
- Powergrid China and Korea boards, RftG:BoW (at the Rio Grande Booth)
- Steam, Fredericus and Oriente (at the Mayfair Booth, the last two at deep discount)
- Suitors.
(Can’t wait for this week’s boardgame night: Origins Swag Edition!)
On the not-spending-all-my-time-inside front, I did manage to go running three times along the Scioto and Olentangy Greenways that follow the rivers through downtown Columbus. (Yay for Google maps, without which I would never have known that they exist.) The Olentangy Trail was especially nice.
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Not sure what happened with Team Ithaca, we all had other things going on.
Prestige makes RftG teeter on the edge of “too complicated”. It’s an awful lot to keep track of now.
So even when played correctly, Le Havre isn’t good?
Also, the captcha functionality is getting ridiculous.
Ben, Le Havre is good (IMO) but it’s just too freaking long. It needed to be a two-ish hour game rather than a four-ish hour game.
Le Havre loses all pretensions of “fun-ness” around the four hour mark, and becomes a grim slog. We should try the shorter-game variant.
And we played a juked-up copy of RftG with just the base set + BoW, which may explain some of my frustration with it. I was doing a lot of “ARGH I HATE THIS GAME! Why can’t I find a cheap military development?” when the answer was that, duh, all the RvI and GS cards were missing. So we’ll play it with an actual full set, and see how bad Prestige is then.
And every time I hear or use the word Prestige I want to make a very spoilery Nikola Tesla joke.
And if captcha saves me from deleting hundreds of spam comments a week, I’m all in favor of that. ;)
Reminds me of 8-player Arkham Horror, or Order of the Stick. Outstays its welcome.
I can see BoW not being very good as the only expansion, they’re supposed to build on each other as I understand it.
Also, Funagain has Martian Rails in stock if you don’t mind ordering from a giant-ish faceless-ish corporation.
According to my friend who owns Le Havre, four player is too many. Three is the sweet spot, he claims, because with four there’s too much downtime.
I’m not convinced, though. I think it may just be too long a game to be really fun.