Sunday, August 31, 2008

 

GenCon UK Day 4

Gencon is a lot shorter on Sunday - finishing at 4pm so everybody has time to go home before returning to the daily grind on Monday - so I wasn't expecting to get too much out of the day. I signed up for the archery and swordsmanship training at the Medieval Tented Encampment - at £5 a session, I'd be a fool not to.

The first three days of the convention I spent indoors while outside was warm sunshine. Come the fourth day when I'm outside, it starts to rain - much to the dismay of the other people joining me for the archery (hi, Rei!). We managed several sets of arrows at the straw garland with a range of ancient and modern bows; when the rain was just way too heavy we had a history lesson on archery (removing arrows from your body would appear to be pretty gruesome stuff).

The sword-handling session (just me attending) was free as the instructor was a little worse for wear (blisters on fingers from previous days) and cut it to around 20 minutes. Showed how much the stunt people must train to get the stage fighting to work - I found it really hard just remembering the single parry I'd just learned, let alone a string of moves. Fun all the same (and no rain).

Afterwards I whiled away the time playing "Ingenious", "Kung Fu Fighting" and "Shadow Hunters" (twice).



Ingenious - yet another of the 100s of Reiner Knizia games - is a colourful, tactile game with an interesting scoring system. You place figure-of-eight-shaped pieces to score points by extending lines of colours; these points move the corresponding wooden cube across your score card; at the end of the game when there are no spaces left on the board, the losers are the players with a cube that has a lower total score than the winner's lowest cube. So - just like in "Bucket Brigade" that I played on Saturday - concentrating on getting one colour with as many points as possible is not going to win you the game. A lot of Knizia's games are like this - they are not "race as fast as possible to the end" games.

Kung Fu Fighting from SlugFest Games was great fun - playing cards to beat the crap out of the opposition in Hong Kong cinema style. Employ a stance; make an attack; make the attack harder/faster/wilder; big up yourself with awfully dubbed accents. I'd buy this but I don't know that many people who would get into the game's background enough.



Shadow Hunters took a little while to get used to what the winning conditions were and why everything was the way it was. The players need to need to work out which type of character (bad guys, good guys, neutrals) each of the the others are playing so that they can kill the right ones. Interesting way of dealing damage - the amount is the difference between the roll of a d4 and a d6 which gives the following range:





The rest of the day was spent on lunch and shopping for stuff I didn't need.

Every week it seems my gaming buddies show off yet MORE dice they have just purchased on some shopping trip. I look at them with concern in my eyes - "surely you have enough dice already?" They giggle madly in reply (or at least I imagine they do). I have a laughably small dice collection by modern standards - less than 50 before today and a third of those have been freebies picked up from conventions in the last few years. A few date back 30 years to a box of Gamma World I owned at some point in the past. These are easy to spot - the faces aren't all exactly the same shape and the edges/vertices are showing impact wear - modern dice last forever.

So there I am with time to kill in the trade hall - this is like going food shopping on a really empty stomach. I've already checked every table several times in the last few days so there isn't going to be much that will catch my eye ... except some Chessex Lotus Speckled Dice at the Squash Goblin stall. The colours of the dice are more vibrant than the images off the web - nice bright orange and green (my favourite colours).



I carefully select just the ones I need - 4d6 for character creation (even though I just use the fixed elite rolls these days anyway) and 2d8 (for damage) - so that I don't spend too much money. I'm not poverty-stricken but I think it is important to focus on buying only what you need (I have enough d4s; nobody uses d12s; my d20s have remained unchanged for decades).

And then I bought the Gargantuan Black Dragon for £10.

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