Gen Con: Day 2 Report

I meant to blog regularly from Gen Con, but my full schedule meant early mornings and late nights. Between eating, calling home and playing games with friends, I didn't have much time for writing. So, I'll do my best to document my time at Gen Con after the fact.

Games
The day started at noon with yet another game of Arkham Horror, this time incorporating the King in Yellow expansion. Because of the extremely nasty nature of the expansion, our tactics immediately changed from the usual sealing of gates to intentionally waking up Nyarlathotep and punching him to death. This is the first time I've even encountered the Ancient One and not had everyone give up hope of winning. Our encounter with Eihort the previous night was an exercise in futility. Yet somehow we managed to beat the crap out of the Crawling Chaos and earn a win.

While my cohorts demoed Decent 2nd Edition, I fell into a demo of Blood Bowl Team Manager. Although the demo was very short, it left me with a good impression of the game. It combines elements of deck building and hand management that I love in a card game. Plus it has Warhammer races being goofy, which never fails to please me.

The day ended with a large group game of Castles & Crusades run by none other than +Stephen Chenault, the CEO of Troll Lord Games.

Not the best photo of the game, but the only one in which something awesome must have happened.

Because this was my first game of C&C as a player, I wanted to be a class that I've never seen at my table: the Wizard. I rolled up a level 5 wizard with completely random spells. This may have been a mistake since most of my spells ended up being about language and written words. These spells don't do much good in the middle of a grassland. Luckily, my Floating Disk did serve as a convenient elevator for our many chests of gold. Too bad those chests of gold had to be ditched soon after so that we had a chance to get away from the orc horde following us.

Steve did a great job running a game with at least 12 players without having it erupt into chaos. Everyone got a chance to shine (although the dice were much kinder to some) and he had an excellent scene of where characters where in a scene.

Acquisitions
I did a majority of my shopping on Friday since I had a large chunk of free time.

My first purchase was a bunch of weird dice from Impact Miniatures, who seemed to be the only vendor selling unusual dice in multiple colors. I especially liked their 7-sided die, which has a pretty brilliant design. I purchased the weird dice because a GM can never have too many in his dice bag, but having the unique dice in my possession made it easier to give in and purchase a copy of...

Dungeon Craw Classics! I'm not sure I'll ever run DCC over C&C, but the game is just too fun and strange to ignore. And $40 for a massive book seemed like hell of a deal. I purchased the level-0 adventure Sailors on the Starless Sea, which allowed for a cool dice bag to be included. This made me feel a little silly when I had just bought a dice bag from Crystal Caste. If only I had gotten my head out of my ass and bought DCC earlier, I could have saved some cash!

I also purchased a sleeve of 1100+ Magic: The Gathering cards. I'm not a collector but I like the idea of making cool decks and I just can't make anything coherent with the small sampling I have now. At only $12 for all those cards, I think I'll be just fine.

Cave Evil: The Grimmest Board Game of All Time

Holy shit, will you look at that art? That is the most metal art I have ever seen on a board game. There are some pretty brutal and grim board games out there, but Chaos in the Old World looks like Candyland next to Cave Evil. There is so much greyscale evil in the above image that I didn't even know I was looking at a board game for a while.

Cave Evil is a necrodemonic dungeon brawl board game (first printed in 2011) that takes place in a vast deeply subterranean cave-crypt necropolis. Players take on the role of Necromancers locked in a desperate battle to harness the power of The Pit, a chasm that connects to the realm of Shadow. The Necromancers must raise squadrons of creatures, demons and monstrosities to battle and do their bidding (players control 6 squads at the same time) through a maze of tunnels that can be strategically constructed or collapsed and are constantly evolving during game play in a process of brutal player elimination. Minions must mine and excavate or destroy opponents to gather up resources to raise their Necromancer's army. Resources come in three varieties and correspond to various types of creatures (130+ unique creatures are included in the game).

The publishers of Cave Evil are currently taking preorders for a second (and final) printing. They have reached the minimum of 420 preorders, so the game will receive a run of 1000 new copies. Ordering now will lock in the price of $75, rather than the $90 retail price. But hurry if you are interested! Preorders close on August 9, 2013.

Here is a look at the components in the first printing of the game:


There is a trailer of sorts for the game but it doesn't provide much insight into gameplay, so here is a special presentation of the teaser from me to you.