My eighth Airecon, and the event's tenth anniversary. With images;
cc-by-sa on
everything.
I stayed in a new hotel this time, the Inn on Cheltenham Parade,
which is about ten rooms above a Timothy Taylor's pub.
I had a smoking balcony.
The breakfasts were good too. (Not buffet, but delicious.)
As for the games, we started with
PUSH
and then moved on to
Tobago with the
Volcano.
I fell into a burning ring of fire…
Poutine, the first of several.
It was very clear that the venue was trying to bolster the profits of
its own horrible food vendors: they'd refused permission for half the
usual food trucks (including the pizza vendor that was the only one to
stay open till official closing time in previous years), they'd moved
them from the feeder road to a remote hall (and then required them to
carry everything from a car park rather than driving in to unload, and
failed to provide adequate power)… and they shut that feeder road on
spurious safety grounds, so that everyone who wanted food had to take
a long and complex route up and down several flights of stairs. Which
they did anyway, because the in-house alternative was just ghastly.
Look, guys, this is Harrogate. If I want an expensive sandwich I can
walk outside and get one, and it'll actually be a good one, not your
generic pre-pack that a supermarket would be ashamed to charge half
the price for. Your bag searches were always pointless, and now
they're explicitly for food and drink. Your job is to provide a venue
and charge enough for it to make a profit, not to charge a cheap
headline rate and then hope to make it up from monopoly prices for
sub-British-Rail-grade food. Everybody can see what you're doing, and
it makes you explicitly the enemy.
Anyway, back to the games, with
Courtisans (I
did terribly)…
New to me, Skull
Queen: your
four pirates are moved up and down the score track based on the
highest card played in a trick, but can fall off the end and score you
nothing. I enjoyed it at the time, but not as much in retrospect.
Tinderblox
Sunset
in which there was so much fumbling on the first turns that the last
player nearly won without having to do anything.
And Faraway,
definitely not one of my better plays.
On in the morning to Sea Salt &
Paper
and That's Not a
Hat, a
memory game. (I suspect the correct mental model is two overlapping
cycles, the left-passing and the right-passing cards, but when a card
is replaced it might jump from one group to the other. Not really to
my taste, though.)
A new to me push your luck game, Flip
7, which I may
well buy at some point.
Then Zoo
Vadis, which is
probably the great game everyone says it is but somehow it doesn't
quite catch me. If there were an initial market rate for favours to
give a guide price, would I like it better? Hard to say.
On to Charcuterie: The Board
Game,
in which you're drafting food items and trying to build specific
combinations of them, with constraints on how they fit. Fun, but I
don't think I'd buy it. (Also in my life crackers and dips aren't
charcuterie, but apparently this is US usage.)
More
Tinderblox
Sunset,
played very slightly more competently this time.
A larger game,
Rock Hard:
1977,
a little slow with five players but still good fun. I continued my
streak of doing terribly.
Since we'd got to four players, a round of Yokai
Septet,
which ended with a tiebreak.
A couple of rounds of
Landmarks (in
which I was the only person other than the cluegiver to know what
Wattpad is).
More PUSH.
And then the first of several games of Imperium:
Horizons,
To finish the evening, Roll to the
Top!.
After more Sea Salt &
Paper
in the morning, we moved on to Steampunk Rally Fusion: Atomic
Edition,
which is having a bit of a renaissance in my gaming life.
Several games of Compile: Main
1 through
the day between other things. Not loving it yet, but definitely liking
it.
More
Imperium:
Horizons.
The Great Beetle eats the sun!
Xylotar, a
trick-taker in which you don't get to see the value of cards in your
hand, just get a hint from their position. Looking forward to trying
this again.
And one last game of Imperium:
Horizons
(with the Cultists—who are very strange, and I want to play them
myself).
I love this convention, but the venue is clearly trying to put the
pressure on for more money now that the show is too large to move
easily.