Games Convention: My gaming weekend

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, there was a three-day long gaming convention entitled MaricopaCon. It was the tenth one, so it was called MericopaCon X. I bought myself a badge and then it was game time. Although gaming started Friday at noon, I didn't go until I was off of work at 4. Then it went until midnight. On Saturday it started at 9 am, but I didn't get there until a little before noon, and then it went to midnight. Sunday it went from 9 am but I went to church instead and then went at about 1 and played two games and then went to my parent in laws' for dinner at 5.

Okay, you didn't care about any of that. You want to know about the GAMES that I played.

Potions of Azerland. Really fun. Never heard of it? That's because it was designed by a guy in Mesa and is launching on Kickstarter on Tuesday. By the end of the weekend I had played three entire games. And I . . . lost all of them. Anyway, the designer's name is Gray and I got his number.

Played a game of Texas hold 'em Zombies, where zombies attack you between each poker round. I, uh, was the first one out of this game. I guess I'm not very good at poker. Or fighting off zombies.

Captain Sonar. Played two games. In the first one I was the captain shouting out orders, and in the second one I was the person trying to figure out where the submarine was. My team won both of them.

Wingspan. Notice in the picture the cool 3D printed food tokens (I cached six rats on one of my birds). Also instead of cubes as your action tokens there were 3D printed birdhouses. There was also a bunch of expansion cards (the guy who owns it has all the expansions). We played a 7-player game, which you may think took a super long time, but the 7-player rules are that two players are taking their turn simultaneously, across from each other. So the time between your turns was actually not that bad. I came in second place, barely.

I played a three-player game of Ahau: Rulers of Yucatan. I taught the rules. I also came in dead last.

With the same two other people I played Ahau with, we all played Chief Judge of Zarahemla. Because the rules are very similar to Concordia, and because they have both played Concordia, it was an easy teach. I did not win this game.

Decrypto. It's like Codenames, only during the course of the game every player gets to be the clue giver, not just one. Not only that, but your team, each round, has a chance to guess your opponents' clues, so that every round you have to be careful to be clear enough so your teammates get it, but vague enough so that your opponents don't. I lost the game I played of this.

Camel Up. You guys know Camel Up. Played a seven-player game. I lost. But I was the first one to correctly guess which camel would come in first place for the entire race.

Orléans. This is my copy. I brought it to play, and I had several people tell me as I walked past them, "Orléans? That's a great game!" I got it for Christmas forever ago (along with Concordia) but Friday was the first time I ever played it. It was really fun. But, as you can probably guess, I lost.

So, in the end, I brought three games (Chief Judge of Zarahemla, Orléans, and Ahau), and ended up playing all three of them at least once. I played 12 games total, of 9 different games (one I played twice and one I played 3 times). And in the end I only won two of them. But who cares? I had a blast! It was so much fun, and I got the phone numbers of people there and hopefully we'll be able to meet up and play games some time during the week.