Geekway Mini Day 2. Ramen and Pirates

 Geekway Mini Day 2

First full day of the Con and we dove right in.

1. Treasure Island  (7)

Bluffing and Buried treasure.  Treasure Island is reminiscent of games like Scotland yard and Letters From White Chapel, but has none of the hidden movement.  Instead Long John Silver has buried his treasure.  Only Capt Silver (the player playing him) knows where the treasure is, but has to watch, imprisoned by the other players, as they roam the island digging randomly for the gold.  Players have unique abilities and are given different clues at the start.  Each day, a different pirate player will act on private and public clues until finally on the 15th day Long John Silver escapes and must race the other priates to his treasure.
In our game, we were able to use several of the devices available to give clues...  there are several different templates that provide map info, along with a large wooden drawing compass.  The game really flowed well after the initial rules breakdown and we were really enjoying it when I  stumbled onto the treasure on the 6th day.
I cant wait to give this one another shot.
Did it spark joy?  Yes.   Will I add it to my collection:  Sure - for the right price.

 

2. Gizmos (6)

Another engine building game.  In Gizmos, you are trying to build and energy machine that will process, convert and replicate energy for victory points.   The goal is to gather energy marbles and use them to purchase components for your machine.  These components will eventually allow you to chain actions together into massive chain reactions. 
I enjoyed Gizmos and would certainly play it again.  Like any good engine building game, there are several possible paths and each of us used a different one in our first play.  In the long run, I dont think the novelty and limited cards will give this one enough replay-ability.
Did it Spark Joy?  Yes
Do I see this entering my collection?  No.

 

3. Fool! (6)

Trick Tacking with uneven suits and a skip token.  Fool! should probably not be played with 4 players.  Fool plays like any other trick-taking (no-teams) game except the low card in each trick has to sit out the next turn.  There is an 8 card, 11 card, 13 card, and 17 card suits, so missing out on a hand isn't always a bad thing.  I think with 6, this is probably a better experience.  Unfortunately I am a purist when it comes to trick taking, and I really enjoy traditional team game mechanics.
Sparked Joy?  A little
Adding this to my collection?  Maybe.

Break for Lunch at Nudo.  

Ramen was had. 

 Extra broth was consumed.  

Strange Donuts followed

4. Cacao (5)

Tile laying to harvest and sell Cacao:  The Fruit of the Gods! 
The game has 2 types of tiles.  Player tiles show meeples in different concentrations per side and Game Tiles that depict cacao fields, trading posts, water holes or temples.  Players have to play in a strict checker board pattern and will take turns taking advantage of gaps created by previous plays.
While this was different than the recent tile laying games I have played, it doesn't really do anything special or new.
Sparked Joy? No
Adding this to my collection?  No.

5. Skull Island (5)

Trick Tacking similar to Oh Hell.  Skull King features a set up similar to Spades, with the addition of escape cards that let you play off without losing power, and super trumps.   There is a lack of teams, a simultaneous bid calling and a convoluted scale of super trumps;  pirates that beat everything including a mermaid, a Skull King that beats everything but a Mermaid, and a Mermaid that only trumps everything if the Skull King is involved.  All of this combined with a scaling hand count (1-10) results in a lot of randomness that makes normal rank and file cards useless and the trick-taking is insufferable at best.  In our play, I was so irritated at the early 2-3 card hands and an inability to know what cards are involved that I didn't care when the hand counts were larger and played more like a traditional trick takers.   One major flaw is that there is no way to comeback from a poor score since there no teamates to cover you, being down results in bigger risks and losses.  Kristin and I, leaders in the last round, both called nill and were able to play off all cards without much difficulty.
Sparked Joy?  Not even a little.
Adding this to my collection?  Never

6. Pantone (8)

Pantone is an art game where, on your turn, you have to create a piece of art out of pantone color swatches, that represents the character on your clue card.  The characters range from simple cartoon characters like Bart Simpson to super heros like The Hulk, or well know public figures like Barack Obama or Prince.   We love this game.  Both the challenge of creating some of the characters and the difficulty of guessing on such abstract images  crates an experience that you cant wait to capture for social media.
Sparked Joy?  Yes
Adding this to my collection?  Likely.
Below:  Prince / Mickey Mouse / Donald Trump

7. Just One (8)

This is a great Party Game where one player takes a card and presents it to the other players without lookingat it and nominates one of the 5 words.  Those players now have to write down a single word clue.  Once all players have their words, they compare them and remove any duplicates.   Now they present the remaining clues to the player with the list and he/she has a single guess or pass.   The team that passes the least will do the best.
The game rewards creative flexibility and the resulting groupings of clues can be quite interesting.  It also forces you to look beyond your initial thought and search for something else that will make sense but not lead your team off the answer.

Sparked Joy?  Yes
Adding this to my collection?  Likely.

8. Decrypto (9)

Players compete in two teams in Decrypto, with each trying to correctly interpret the coded messages presented to them by their teammates while cracking the codes they intercept from the opposing team. 
We started a little slow in our first round, but as the rounds passed the drive to give perfectly disruptive clues really enhanced the competition.  Intuition builds as you play this game and your own codes get better as you are forced to look for the logic in your opponents clues.  A great game for 6-10.
Sparked Joy?  Yes
Adding this to my collection?  Likely.

To the right:  Code Breakers:  Cornelia, Ryan and Chris;  Breaking codes and hearts.

9. Spikey Dastards (6)

An evil dexterity game with painful spikey pieces.  We played a quick game of this with Matt and Cornelia, but you should check out my full review of this delightful game in the next entry that details the Saturday night game of this played full contact and drunk.
Sparked Joy?  No? 
Adding this to my collection?  Already own.

10. Knapp Daneben (6)

A German Roll & Write Dice game.  We were really looking to play Ganz Schon Clever, but could only find this one.  Players own one of the colord dice and when each player rolls the dice, they may use that color and one other to record the sum of those dice in different boxes.  Playing either hard to roll numbers like 2 or 12 or keeping numbers within one of their neighbors will score the most points.  Great filler and saying the name in broken German to annoy Scott Reed mad it even more fun.
Sparked Joy?  Yes
Adding this to my collection?  Maybe

.

Chris, Scott, Alicia and I start drinking...  

11. Deadpool vs. The World (7)

Imagine a combination bewtween Cards Against Humanity and Say Anything.  Players are given a hand of Deadpool Caption cards that have a phrase with a blank and a place to fill in the blank and maybe do a small vulgar drawing.  Another player flips a WTF card that reveals a cartoon of Deadpool and players compete to fill out cards and be selected as the funniest or most appropriate (read that as "not appropriate at all") cards.   This is great late night fun and we covered the range of answers from Deadpool movie appropriate to completely vulgar (image and text)
Sparked Joy?  Yes
Adding this to my collection?  Already own.

Small Con Paradise in the Mid West.

Small Con Paradise in the Mid West.

I spent the weekend gaming with 399 other folks in St. Louis this weekend and had a blast.  For one, smaller conventions are really starting to appeal to me.  While larger cons tend to draw more vendors and events, I am more at home among the close-knit friendships you tend to find at a smaller venue. 
Geekway Mini 2019 was the break I needed as 2019 got underway.  We were able to play what we wanted, never needing to wait for a game to show back up in the library.  We were able to leave for lunch and not come back to find our table claimed by others.  And best of all, I got to lose another game of Turfmaster...  but more on that later.

Fellowship and other Things.
Games are great, food can be great, but they can both far better when in a group.  Luckily I have found such a group.  The Dardens and the Reeds, primarily, allow me to tag along -sans wife, and even go to lengths to keep me safe when Im far too deep into a bottle of bourbon...  how do I know?  Again.  Turfmaster, and I'll add those details later...  
Toby Gee has become another staple of gamesmanship and camaraderie...  and is, in my opinion, the single nicest Turkish coffee barista I know.
Our normal touring group has other regulars that were unable to make it, and they were missed, often and mightily.

Now for the games.
Overall, I enjoyed what I played, and we got in a good amount of games this year.  The following list is chronological at best.  I will separate each of the three days into their own blog post.

Thursday

1. Wingspan (7)

We arrived Thursday night, and after getting settled in, we gathered with Chris Darden and grabbed the game we knew would be scarce the rest of the weekend... 
Wingspan -from Stonemaier Games.
It's the first month of 2019 and already there is a buzz surrounding this game, so Chris, Scott, Alicia and I sat down to see what the fuss was all about.   This is a very well produced engine-building game.  Any fans of Stonemaier games wont be let down by the components and general quality.
As games go, this is a nice new take on what's popular right now.   Engine-building.
The Pros:  It's theme is unique and the components lean into it well.  The 150+ individual birds with unique traits is interesting and adds to the theme in several smart ways.
The Cons:  It's like most of the other engine builders out there...  next to no interaction with other players.  You are generally in solitaire mode on your own board.   The designer added some interactive mechanics, but they are few and far between.   The Bird-feeder component isn't a bird feeder....  its a bird house.  Finally, like my two plays of Scythe, I really had no idea how I was stacking up to the other players at the end of the game.  When your scores are in the 80-100 range it really is too difficult to intuit who the leaders are, and almost impossible to guess what their points are...  so I had no idea and was just along for the ride...  waiting to see how I scored on the bell curve.

Overall it is a fun game.  I'll play this again, and enjoy it.   Did it Spark Joy?  Yes.  Will I add it to my collection?  Probably not.

2. Nut So Fast. (9)

Dexterity game like Jungle Speed, where you frantically watch as cards are flipped and when a certain combination of images comes out...  be the first to grab the item.  Nothing new here, except where the focus is and that makes this game brilliant.
Other games like Snorta, Jungle Speed, Ghost Blitz or even Spikey Dastards have you struggling to catch the necessary details in multiple player stacks.   This can be quite difficult if the players are spread out and at best, these games reward the one player, in a trance,  sitting at the table ignoring everything but the next flip. 
In Nut So Fast, you only care about the two cards in front of the current player, and because of that, there is so much more competition for the grabbing.
If you play with us, chances ar, your gonna say ouch a couple times, but you will also laugh a lot more than when you play this game's predecessors.

Update:  1/22/19
Turns out the designer of Nut So Fast wants us all to know that he admires religious douche bags like John Piper and apparently doesn't care what you think your pronouns are.  He also apparently doesn't believe you have the right to no be touched without consent.   So DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. 

Friday:  Finding Treasure and eating Ramen. 
https://olriverstudios.blogspot.com/2019/01/geekway-mini-day-2-ramen-and-pirates.html
Saturday:  I crash and burn again in Turfmaster.
Sunday:  Time to get back before snowmaggedon.

Fuzzy Primer Update.

The Goliath ganger I primed with Armory turned out ok in the end.  There are a couple area I don't care for and couldn't fix easily.  The blades in his mohawk, his metal collar, and feet still betray the primer issues, but from play-distance, I think, it looks pretty darn good.

Things I learned:
• Get a good detail brush.  I grabbed one from my fine arts stash and I am glad I did.   The better brush made it easier to hit details, though when I went in on the teeth I did miss my mark and had to rework that whole area again.
• Thinner paint is much better for layering.   In the past, back in art school, I always had an issue with opacity.  I loved watercolor painting, but I used watercolor pigments like gouache or acrylic pigments.   I did the same thing with minitaures, as evidenced by the older Escher models in the last post.  Thinning down the paint really lets me get in and put some nice fades against edges or blend into the areas that creep in on washes.
•I can only do 2 models at a time.  Any more than that and I lose focus and get board with whatever color I happen to be on.

Three models done, 2 on my painting board and 5 more sitting on the shelf - primed and laughing at me.

Necromunda:
These ladies are 23 and oh so HAWT.
(having a wonderful time)

After being quite critical over my first 2 painted miniatures, painted after a several-year-break from miniatures, I wanted to look in to see where my skills were before and after. 

I dug out my old Escher gang from 23 years ago (A gang of deadly Amazon-like women that compete for dominance against the other, mostly, all male gangs in Necromunda.)

I cant really tell if I'm more detailed now, or if it's just the vast improvement in the modeling that is forcing me to to address details I wouldn't have bothered with earlier.

Here is a random selection of the Plasma Queens and a few other old Necromunda figures.

Necromunda:

Prime Time!

I move on to my next couple models and learn a thing or two about the good and bad of primers.

The miniature on the left was sprayed with a can of Armory Grey Primer.

The model on the right was primed with Games Workshop Mechanicus Grey Standard.
As you can see there is a big difference in how these paint cover the models. 

The Armory Primer has been hit or miss for me.  On previous models I have been able to get a smooth full coating, but only after 2-3 coats.  I dislike putting more than one coat on models with this much detail.  On this most recent model, the coverage became fuzzy after the first coat.   This is definitely not the desired output but I carried on with mixed results.  Some of the results were good, some remain a challenge, but I'll comment on those below.

As far as I can tell the only downfall for Mechanicus Grey Standard is the price point. Online prices range from $16 - $22 for a single 12 oz can.  Compared to Armory's $5.39 to $7.00, MGS is a hit to my hobby cash stash, but the results are vastly superior.  Coverage is complete and the finish is smooth.   In fact, I used MGS on some models primed previously with Armory.  MGS Primer covered and corrected some of the texture problems.

Fat Miniature in a Tiny Base Coat.

First things first;

Pants and straps:  Eshin Grey
Armor:  Averland Sunburst (Yellocadian Fleshtonew) Leadbelcher (metallic)
Skin:  Cadian Fleshtone





Basecoats on the Armory Primer helped but the model remained textered.   Basecoats on the MGS Primer covered well and remained smooth.  It was much easier to cover the areas with precision.

Layers, Washes and Details.

After a liberal coating of Nuln Oil wash I discovered that the texture I had been fighting on the Armory Primer now lent itself to looking a lot like grease and grime.  This gives the model (below) on the left a great dingy look that really belongs in Necromunda.  Other issues remain, but I love the dirt and grime look on the weapons and certain parts of the armor.  I will likely keep using the better primer, but will be looking into some of the Citadel Texture paints.

At this point I moved on with just the Bone Shredder model.  Flesh, washes, edge detailing a a little Blood for the Blood God.
This model turned out better than the first model but there are still some things I need to change, and a little more practice will have me where I want to be soon.  I am still not happy with the flesh tones and edge highlighting looks so much easier when the guys on Warhammer TV do it. 
 

The Armory Primed model is next and I am looking forward to finishing it.

Necromunda:
My eyes have betrayed me!

Wow.  These miniatures are small.  Why wont my eyes focus on the details of the face?  Why is everything blurry, and why isn't that small brush tip going where I want it too. 

Oh...  right,...   Im old now.

The Devil is in the Details.  

It's no surprise Games Workshop has the market cornered on Demons.

The new Necromunda models are ridiculously detailed, which is no surprise since their entire line of plastic miniatures now sport the same obsession to micro details and flexibility.

I decided to start with House Goliath.  They are the largest models and appeal to me this time around because they look brutal and aggressive (a little like human versions of Orcs.) 

Let's face it.  the original Goliath models looked a little silly.  These (pictured left) are actually not bad, but I wouldn't know because I've never seen a Goliath gang painted-up.

The new sculpts are amazing.  Less of a bondage look, an more armor plating gives these models a ferocity that fits with the other Necromunda Houses. 

Delightfully, you could still paint them up like a bunch of Joker Henchmen and they would look perfectly imposing.

Time to see if I can still do this.

Being an artist is it's own hell sometimes.  Being a slave to your own expectation can really cause anxiety and for me it causes me to procrastinate.   I often put off starting creative projects simply so that I don't prove to myself how shitty I am at creating.  
Eventually the desire to have a painted gang over ruled the trepidation and I grab the leaset interesting ganger and began painting. 

My goal was to see where I was skill wise after 20 years.   I know some tips and tricks, and I can make terrain look awesome, but fine detail and my materials were the unknowns.

1.  Did I have good enough brushes for these new uber-detailed models?   Yeah...  but I could probably use some nicer ones.

2. Can I see these fucking things.   Nope.   I've ignored having Astigmatism for many years now.  Not anymore.  Being able to focus my eyes on a spot close to my face is simply impossible.  So I now need +1.25 or  +1.5 reading glasses in order to paint these details.

I'm very glad I did one model as a test.  There are a number of things I learned and will be changing.
1. I used too much wash and didn't stop it from pooling.  Next model:  I will revisit the wash several times to make sure I don't get glossy patches.

2. I need better colors.   As much as I hate to admit it, the Citadel colors are just superior.  They have fucked up names that make no sense, but they really are superior to other brands and I learned the hard way that nothing beats their Mechanicus Standard Grey Primer.

 Flesh wash finished, ready for highlights

 Flesh wash finished, ready for highlights (back)

In the end, I am really pleased with this model,
but I'm setting the bar quite a bit higher for the next models.