| Stuff to Do

- Go to Big Sur

- Come up to Aptos to get our year passes for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, then go the the aquarium, then drive the passes back up to us. :) ~ 60 mile round trip, but the drive might be worth the savings at the aquarium!

- Take her to your old stomping grounds, UCSC!

Gonna be up in Monterey/Carmel this weekend for my birthday - lady friend is taking me up there for a romantic weekend. You live sorta close Elrock and friends - any ideas of stuff we should do/see? I doubt she'll let me go to SC for gaming tho :(

| In honor of Strategicon...

...I stayed in my room and watched Small Wonder. It was a good weekend.

| some things never change

I got the bug to play Dragon Wars (a super fun, old RPG from the Apple days). I spent a long time on character creation, then jump in and 5 minutes later what happens?



Fuckin' hemophilia strikes again.

Yeah! Totally awesome Rude, I'll forward you the links and stuff through email. It would be a lot more fun getting all of us in a group. They get together really often. Each group gets together officially once per month, so, 2 groups is 2 weekens, (1st and 3rd), then individual members gets together on the weekdays soemtimes. I can't really do those because I actually have to work and stuff.

Oh man, wish I would have gone Jael! I've been interested in game design for awhile now and would have enjoyed being exposed to all the different games. Let me know about those meetup groups. I used meetup for lots of active-life kinda groups (hiking, biking, etc) but never looked at gaming groups. Also local is Dennis and Peter from the cons (don't know if you've met Peter) so I was going to try and get in some gaming with those dudes soon if you want to join us. I got a bunch of new games incoming to try out.

Youre right! sorry, it was Dominion, not Imperial. Dominion was the 2009 game of the year. Thunderstone is a role playing variant of the card system Dominion. I brought that up because I knew you would be interested. The guy at the dealer room was introducing me to the games and it seemed interesting. I was a stone throw short of buying it partly to support the persistant business owner of the empty dealer room. It was awkward not buying anything but 60 bucks for another game I would eventually be parting on Ebay. Less hassles.



Excilis was definitely much better in person. Parsing it on internet video streaming didn't get the overall UI and feel of having the actual miniatures and computer on the table.

my thought however, and I might actually work on this can you imagine using Iphones or Android phones, tablets, instead of laptops which are bulky for competitive, bluetooth interface. Second, Excilis confined itself to the limitations of the board and used the software only a tool. My idea is rather, get rid of the confinement of the board. You can make complete software game including card management, resource management, and even strategy management on the software portion. The game itself adds the visuals, but also you need to have physical inputs into the software, in order for the game to manifest itself completely. Did I lose anyone?



Jon, another reason I think I had a good time at this con was I didn't limit myself to Axis and Allies and shogun. I actually went around playing different games, learning and perusing different mechanic/game systems. Also I befriended a lot of people and was invited to join two separate meetup.com gaming groups, one in pomona and one in Thousand Oaks. From different walks of life.



Anyway, it was cool.

Wait did you meet the owner of Kublacon or Strategicon?

I can't believe you went to Strategicon! That's a blast from the past. I honestly don't know if I could go to that again, it would be really weird. We started going to those 18 years ago or so. Probably the last one I went to was in 2000 or 2001, then the the era of KublaCon began. I randomly met the new owner earlier this year when he bought a game I sold on eBay -- seemed like a nice guy. I remember the dealer room was good about the first three years we went there and after the mid-90s it just went downhill. Hopefully the event has hit a good parity level though.

Did Exilis look fun, Ja-El? Matt mentioned it a while ago and I checked out the website. I couldn't get my head around the multimedia aspects of the game (I love rolling dice, so I was dubious about having the computer resolve stuff for you) but I definitely could be talked into giving it a try.

I looked up Thunderstone. I keep seeing it at the game store so your mention made me curious to check it out. It looks very similar mechanically to Dominion (I'm not sure if you've played that one) with a strong fantasy hero building theme, which could be really cool. Buy it dude!

I picked up Tales of the Arabian Nights to play with the wifey. This is a pretty neat game that basically is a board game combined with choose-your-own adventure. You go around the board having semi-randomly determined encounters out of this enormous book. All kinds of crazy stuff can happen to your character like you can get sex-changed, married, become a sultan or vizier, etc. It's fun to follow along with the crazy crap that happens to your adventurer so it's a very fun casual experience.

| Strategicon

Yeah, it was a mixed bag of craziness. Was fun just doing some random small gaming and signing up for events. Should come out. Just fyi, they moved back to the Radisson, aka wyndham aka hyatt from Westin around 5 years ago. The Radisson is really nice though. Some elements of the con

Game design competition hosted by Labs:
Open gaming seemed crowded but was decieving because they also consolidated, miniatures, open gaming, and boardgaming. The trend this time around was a "Game design" competition with a panel of professional industry judges/testers which brought out a lot of home brewed games littered with paper chits and maps. I met some interesting game design professionals, including an old friend who founded a consulting company for publishing games. I also met a graphic director from the Art Institute of Gaming, that taught 3D graphics modeling, art design etc. This might be good if I actually tried to publish my game. But after seeing the game design competition, it's no wonder why 99.9% of most games fail. Just the INCREDIBLE amount of game concepts/inventors ther are out there in the works. (The girls were nice too)

Dealer room:
Dead. There were 2 major booths, the rest were displays. most just couldn't compete with online pricing, which diminishes the spending value of the dealer dollars

Notable new games:

I saw this game demoed Excilis - Have you seen this rude? was better in person. Half computer simulated events (die rolling, combat) which saves time, and half miniatures for movement.

Thunderstone - Imperial was the first of this type of 500 card based game. Won the 2009 game of the year. Imperials a conquest type game, but Thunderstone is a Role playing game/adventure party type variant utilizing the same 500 card progression system.

That's cool that you won! I looked up that game and it looks pretty interesting. What was the con like? Lots of people? I haven't been to one of the LA ones in YEARS!