The free stuff:

One of the extra perks of BGG CON is the handful of freebies they offer attendees. I cannot recall all the offerings, but here’s what I took home from those freebies (with a bonus from Christopher Parks, who passed his along to me).

Rise to Power, Road Hog, Tokaido, and Voodoo were my selection and Chris passed along Lords of Rock: Mosh Pit and Memoarrr! (that’s 3 Rs and an ! in the name).

We played Voodoo – it’s a cute game where you place curses like your opponent cannot remove their hand from the table or your opponent must clap before taking a certain in-game action. If you don’t perform the curse, and the player who cursed you calls you on it, they get bonus points as you ‘break’ the curse. Quick and fun — good game for kids and kids-at-heart.

The purchases: Then I did some shopping which is probably a bit silly the week before Black Friday, but I thought it would be nice to support the publishers more directly.

Kodama: The Tree Spirits (from Indie Boards & Cards) was first — I had previously played this when visiting my company in San Francisco. In it you build trees and based on the cards you have you’ll make different choices on how to grow those trees, ending up with very different looking trees in the end. A relaxing casual game that results in pretty trees in front of each player.

Galactic Scoundrels (from Mercury Games) was next — I had talked to Mercury Games about this game at last year’s BGG.CON. It is a storytelling game clearly based on the Firefly space-western (with nods to others space-based classics) that has players taking on jobs to complete — other players, through “gambling, lying, cheating, and lowdown dirty dealing” attempt to stop them.

Gaia (from Asmodee) grabbed me on the nostalgia — it heavily reminded me of Populous, a game I played heavily on the Amiga some 30 years ago. I brought this to Thanksgiving dinner and we liked it enough that it got played twice in a row. Each player plays cards and tiles, slowly building a tile-based map. As opportunities open, you can build cities and place your meeple on a tile, but you have to be careful as other players can play their cities, possibly weakening your city to the point where your meeple abandons it. First to play all their meeples wins.

Jellybean Games purchases: I also bought a bunch of goodies from Jellybean Games, who will be getting another write up in another blog post.

The titles are:

Dracula’s Feast and expansion Cthulhu & Friends, a social deduction game with no elimination which offers 20 total roles and require you to identify everyone else’s role to win.

The Lady and the Tiger is a set of 18 gorgeous tarot-sized cards with rules for 5 different games included, Doors (deduction), Favor (bidding), Hoard (solo puzzle), Labyrinth (maze), and Traps bluffing).

Scuttle! with expansions Scurvy!, The Curse of Black Jack and the little pack of cards in front of Dracula’s Feast, are all part of a game of pirates racing to collect 21 doubloons before anyone else can.

The little book in front of Cthulhu & Friends is a notebook I got as they treated my purchase as a bit of a bundle.

These games all sounded fun (and my game design students really enjoy social deduction games), but the reason I purchased them is because of how awesome Peter Hayward and Nicole Perry were at Metatopia, which I’ll write about soon.

They also have a Kickstarter up for their next game, Jabberwocky – a 1-7 player collection of games for all ages! in early 2019 — the print and play version is available now, so head over and check out their print-and-play version of the game.