Next of Ken, Volume 10: ...and then, Trashfest South

It's rare that I'm at a loss for words to describe something.  Yet, that's exactly how I felt when I sat down to write out our adventures at Trashfest South.

First up, this comic (courtesy of Three Word Phrase) goes out to all my peoples from Trashfest South:

I say this without hyperbole--this was one of the best times I have ever had gaming in my entire life.  Between some of the best gamers on the planet, some of the hottest games ever made, and a liberal amount of beer, this was bar none THE SHIT.  I played some of my favorites and had the best games I've ever played while doing so.  I wandered around and freely found pretty much any kind of game I wanted to play.  And at times, I laughed so hard I was in tears and my stomach was hurting.  It was that kind of legendary event, from start to finish.

So I'm going to do my best to regale you with my perspective on Trashfest South 2.  May the Chaos Gods have mercy on your soul.


THURSDAY:

My brother Jeremy and I were supposed to meet meet Pete "SuperflyTNT" Ruth where we worked--he had scheduled business there that morning (without any coordination...he didn't even know I worked there.  Scary how these things work out.)  However, his plans fell through, so we arranged to meet in Chatanooga instead at a BBQ place called "Sticky Fingers."

When we got to the parking lot, I saw a guy gesticulating and talking to himself.  Turns out, that was Pete, doing his best Ari Gold with his hands-free.  We waited for him to wrap up before heading inside and having a killer lunch and a couple of beers.  The best part was since Pete was meeting with a couple of employees from our work (namely, us), we talked a little bit of Telecomm and recycling, and Pete chalked it up to a business lunch, picking up the tab.  You can't beat that with a stick, so we were already off to a great start.

We made the plunge down I-75, but we stopped for gas and Pete mentioned his GPS was suggesting an alternate route, so we ended up doing some crazy zig-zag action through many, many suburbs and small towns in Georgia.

We passed through, no joke, "Cumming, GA."  Legend has it, the town prints T-shirts that say, "I love Cumming," so they are in on the joke.  I resisted the urge to buy a pack of them to distribute to F:ATties...seriously, that would make the most awesome convention-bomb, ever.

Before too long, we did find our way to "Poor Ol'" Steve Avery's house, where he had been keeping Chris "A Strange Aeon" ****** hostage since Wednesday.  Rumors that they spent the previous evening playing Soggy Toast 2K11 went unconfirmed, but that's probably good for Chris as Steve Avery is the local champ anyway.

We wasted little time in getting a game on the table.  First up for us was a game called Astron, a game from the 50s that has a really cool scrolling board.  Players play movement cards to zip their planes around the board, and some of the cards cause the map itself to scroll forward.  There are hazards and scoring spots, and you get scoring cards and negative hazard cards for landing on those respectively.  I underestimated how valuable the diagonal movement cards were and squandered the two in my opening hand, and didn't see very many after that at all.  Jeremy managed to get his plane to the right place often enough and with some high-scoring cards took the win.

Right after that, Steve had to leave for the airport.  Jeremy and I busted out some Nightfall, but right then Edward from AEG arrived, and he was all too eager to get dealt in to one of the company's hottest games.  

Playing with an experienced player was a breath of fresh air, and I think this was the first game I'd played of it where I didn't have to much teaching (Chris knew deckbuilding games, so the teaching time was pretty short.)  The game flowed so quickly, and as I've played more and more of it I've been able to "see" the Chains, how and when to play off of them, and what to buy based on how your cards chain as well as what your opponent tends to leave you.  The game zipped right along, and in fact we played another game immediately afterward.  Nightfall kicks ass, it's a lot of fun.

Steve had begun grilling by this point so we squeezed in a game of Mall of Horror (Chris, me, Jeremy, and a local feller whose name I didn't catch, my apologies.)  I lucked into Security Chief and held it all game.  There were some funny moments such as when Chris and the local guy were facing being zombie chow, when Chris said, "I got this."  Then when the time came, Chris told Edward, "No, you got this," forcing him to burn one of his cards.  Freaking hilarious.

When the smoke cleared that Jedi mind trick worked in Chris' favor as we all ended with our 5-point guy (the first time I've ever seen that happen!)  The tie-breaker?  Cards left in hand.  Chris?  He had three to everyone else's less than that.


Matt Loter, Billy, Bernie, and Josh had arrived and Loter immediately made his presence known with is cute "The boys heart me" pink tank-top.  He laughed about it later because no one said shit about it (who wants to get Loter'd?  Nobody.)

We all chowed down on the awesome burgers and franks that Steve had cooked up for us, and headed over to The Clubhouse.  Richard Lanius said he didn't actually have the Clubhouse reserved for that night, but Honey Badger don't give a shit, so we all set up for some Thursday night gaming.


It was Cosmic Encounter time, where we got in a six-player + both expansions battle.  We were so busy laughing, shooting the shit, and playing fistfuls of cards, I don't remember many of the specifics.  I do remember that Avery and I made a stab at an allied victory (long-time readers may remember he screwed me out of an allied victory last time, much to his chagrin.)  Sadly, we couldn't do it, and the next turn, someone won with five colonies.  I do remember it being a particularly bloody game, as when Moebius strips were played, the Warp was looking like a Used Starship lot right before it emptied.

We ended the night with Nostra City, a game where players are mobsters looking to exonerate their boss while taking jobs and working all sorts of illicit jobs in the city.  Steve made it all the more memorable with the worst Italian accent you're ever likely to hear ("RESPECT!!")

Despite the cool bells and whistles, it boils down to a worker placement game where the workers have special powers, and if you don't use the workers then you can use them to place bids on stuff.  So basically, it was Pillars of the Earth, Gangster edition, where you used your guys to churn money and turned the money into points.  Steve was heartbroken when I pointed out the fact that he was in love with a Euro with a cool theme.  I liked the game though, as it did have some cool thematic elements.  The players sort of work collectively as if the boss is proven guilty at the end of trial, all the players lose, but even more it's possible to draw a "Traitor" card, where you *want* the boss to get convicted, and if he does, you win the game instead.  It's kinda cool, we'll probably pick that up at some point.

Originally, we were going to crash at Avery's place, but I had forgotten my air matress and Jeremy had only brought a sleeping bag.  He began to think better of a night on the hard floor and so we scrambled to book a hotel at a good price through Hotdeals or whatever Jeremy and Pete used.  Seriously, Pete was awesome, sticking around to make sure we got squared away before he headed to his hotel.

It took us a bit to find the place, but we checked in as the "I'm nice, but kind of creepy" night manager guy got us all taken care of.  Not long after that, I knew we'd made the right choice, as I crashed pretty hard.




FRIDAY:

We woke up at a decent hour, hoping to get to Steve's before they went to the clubhouse.  When we got there, there were lots of folks grumbling and stumbling (gamers and early hours usually don't mix well.)  We wolfed down some eggs, bagels, and orange juice as Steve and his wife's awesome hospitality seemed to know no bounds.

After everyone finally got showered, fed, and ready, we headed back to the Clubhouse for what promised to be a ridiculously awesome day of gaming.

Not long after we got there, who comes strolling in?  The Z-Man himself, Zev!  I've talked and emailed Zev online before, but this was the first time I'd met him in person.  Pretty sweet.

Jeremy, Edward and I went right into Nightfall again, playing a full hand of it, and then Billy wanted to jump in too.  A pair of awesome four-player games followed, and I think Billy was a convert after that.  Seriously guys, when I tells ya a game is good, I mean that shit.  True it's even more awesome when you play it with me, but that's not important right now.

We then went straight into a prototype that AEG was looking at.  I don't know how much I'm allowed to say about it--I didn't sign an NDA or anything--but I will say that the game was pretty craptacular.  Imagine Settlers mixed with a half-assed adventure game mixed in with literally two dozen ways to score Victory points...ugh.

Three turns in, Edward looks at us and says, "I've lost pretty much all desire to play this."  We breathed a sigh of relief, and it was swept from the table.

Right then I caught a glimpse of Frank Brahnam, who is seriously another of The Coolest People To Game With club ( a surprising number of people in this club frequent these boards, making this the place to be, folks.)  They had been playing Chaostle, something Frank describe as "An overproduced Parcheesi variant."  All I know is it looked cool as hell.

After he got down with that, I caught up with him as he was setting up a print-n-play game of Bermuda Crisis: Discovery Dawning (yep, that's a long title.)  The game was pretty Euro-y as it involved resource gathering and building stuff to get special powers, but there were Artifacts in the deck that allowed you to attack other players and screw with their stuff.

The goal cards were especially wonky, and we found that in the late game since you draw a new one after completing one, it was easy to set off a chain reaction of them.  I made a run at it near the end of the game but my chain fell short, and soon thereafter the game was done.  (Rylien, was that you I played this with?)  It was an ok game, not something I need to play again, but it was alright.  Plus, it's always fun to game with Frank, who is probably an expert on the weird and esoteric branches of boardgaming.


Finally the stars lined up as it was time for THE MAIN EVENT OF THE DAY, six-player A Game of Thrones.  I love love love this game, it's been one of my favorites for a long time now, so I was licking my chops at the prospect of sitting down for a marathon session.


But first, a word about the Air Conditioning.


At some point, it became apparent that the A/C was not functioning correctly...or at all.  Oh, sure, there was air blowing out, but it was pretty much just ferrying hot, sticky Georgia air right into the gaming room.  With so many people and the humid, thick air pumping in, it quickly grew to nearly intolerable levels.  There was a back building that had A/C so many of the gamers there found refuge, but we had already set up so we were bound and determined to make it through our game.

Seriously, though folks...it was hot.  Like being in an oven hot.  Hotter than a June bride riding bare-back buck naked in the middle of the Sahara.  Hot hot.


We dealt out the houses randomly, and I got Lannister.  I groaned because this was my third time in a row getting Lannister, and they are pretty much the hardest house to win with, but I was going to finally crack the Lannister puzzle and put the sister-humping Kingslayer on the throne once and for all.  Chris was Stark, Josh Look was Greyjoy, Matt Loter was Tyrell, and Evilgit was Baratheon.

It was the first game for a couple of them, and the comment that always comes out with newer players is, "ah look, there's plenty of room to expand."  Game of Thrones is deceptive that way--it starts out looking like there's all the room in the world in the Seven Kingdoms, but before you know it, it's a knife fight in a phone booth.

I took Josh aside in the early game just to establish which sort of Greyjoy/Lannister game this was going to be.  Were we going to take each other out, or would he allow me to tend to business in the south while he crushed those frosty-bearded cold-blooded Starks to the north?  He agreed to deal with the Ned Stark problem, and I went about my business consolidating my power.  

It was hilarious because early game, everyone at the table all reassured one another that we were ALL "cool with each other."  "Yeah man, I know I'm going to have to kill you guys to win, but other than that, we're cool with each other."

Stark suffered an early beating as the banners of the rebellious Greyjoys came knocking on the northern lands.  Chris became pretty agitated, at one point opining, "I don't have any castles."  (This whole thing really gets steamrolling in the later hours or the night, so stay tuned.)

I finally made my decision which way I was going to push, and decided my way to victory went through Tyrell.  With Greyjoy honoring our pact, I basically had no one at my back, and fighting Tyrel leaves me nestled along the shore nicely.  However, The Knight of Flowers was a savage fighter, and although I battered their forces with my vicious Hound and Ser Gregor "The Mountain" cards, two successive Clash of Kings left me no longer as rich as a Lannister and while I held on to power on all three tracks, I was screwed over by the "No Consolidate Power" event that left Tywin's coffers empty right before another Clash of Kings.  

It turns out I'd made my bid for victory too early and appeared too strong, as all the players made sure to punish The Lion for its early aggression.  Without money and with my forces spread thin, my reach for victory was done, ending in failure.

Baratheon made his stab for victory next, but was rebuffed in a brilliant stand.  The thick humidity in the air was making the tense battles feel all the more claustrophobic.

Then wouldn't you know it, Chris of the "I don't have any castles!" refrain snuck in and stole victory.

You see, I think Josh had pity on him.  Although Josh will insist his war effort didn't quite go as he'd hoped, I think the black banners felt pity and spared those icy bastards long enough for them to quietly recapture much of the north.  Greyjoy had considered taking Lannisport as much of my armies were abroad, but realized too late that Stark was going to waltz in and steal victory.


Well done to Chris, this was his first game at a table half-filled with sharks, and He With No Castles became He With All The Castles and Protector of the Realm.


An excellent, excellent session of one of the best boardgames ever, and we suffered through some intense heat to finish it.  It was that good.


Once the spell of AGoT was broken, we went to the cooler building like sane people.  It had gotten to be early evening, and when we got to the other building the noise was insane.  The building was cool, but it had tile floors that absorbed none of the noise.

We were looking for something light so we sat down for some Dragon's Gold.  I hadn't played it before.  It's a game where players take turns slapping down characters to try and kill dragons, and when they succeed, all the ones taking part have to negotiate for the treasure.  They have a very short period to do so, and if they can't reach a deal, then everyone gets nothing.

It's the kind of game that I call a PAT game--a "Perfectly Acceptable Time-waster."  You play it with cool people, you have a good time.  I snuck in the win by brilliantly, carefully...ah, who am I kidding, I was lucky when the game ended and had a higher score by a few points.


The capper for the evening was Chaos in the Old World.  This was one I hadn't had the chance to play with, so Matt and Josh convinced me to sit in and give it a shot.  I gotta say, I'm glad that I did, as not only is it a great game, but it became a session that will forever live in infamy.

I'm not sure how it all started, really.  I know that at one point Chris came by and I was joking about "Not having any castles!"  Then Matt started talking about some guy who called fingers Dickflippers.  Then I was doing a bad southern belle impersonation, talking about "Getting the vapours."  Somehow, in the middle of all this, the Honey Badger made his appearance, and by then we were all losing our shit.  I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes and couldn't see.  Then we upped the ante by talking about Ascending Empires, and if Chris would play and "NOT HAVE ANY SPACE CASTLES!"  We were in agony from laughing so hard.  Billy tried to figure out what was going on and I turned to him suddenly with a deadly stare, leaning in, wide-eyed...and we all lost our shit again.  The jokes started merging into one big "DICKFLIPPIN' SPACE CASTLES GIVING US THE VAPORS", and it's a wonder we ever made it through that game.

I was Slaanesh, and it was my first game so I went to work trying to corrupt the land.  Matt's big red Khorne beasties came knocking, but I fell into the trap of playing it like a straight up dudes on a map game and fought right back, killing me some red demon dudes and kicking them off my properties in due haste.

It didn't win me the game, though, as the Rats set off a domination chain that brought the game to a point-based end, and I had fallen short.  One more turn, and I would have single-handedly corrupted two territories, making for a big point splash on my own.

Chaos in the Old World was my favorite new game I played the entire weekend.  I like the battle system, the cardplay, and especially the power point system that has players basically trying to hold on to power points as long as they can so they can react to what other players are doing, and not tip their hand too quickly.

The different factions all had their own strengths, the upgrade system was tight, I have nothing but good things to say about this one.  I'm definitely going to score me a copy, sooner or later.

Though I don't know if I can EVER match the hilarity of that game session.

It was 2am at this point, so it was back to the hotel, crash hard, wake up early for another full day of gaming.



SATURDAY:

The good news was imminent when we arrived, as Richard told us there was an A/C guy coming to fix the system.  Which was good news, as it was only 10am and already the heat was evident.

Jeremy and I busted out Lords of Vegas, a game I've been meaning to get played for several months now.  We did a two-player learning game, as Richard came by and gave us a quick crash-course on the ruleset, which all in all is pretty simple stuff.

It's basically a dice-based version of an Acquire-style game, as players draw lots and build different Casino chains out on the Vegas strip.  You get payouts based on the card draws and the values of the dice you have in each casino.  There are other tricks you can pull such as re-rolling all players' dice in a particular casino (a costly, but often worthwhile endeavor), or changing the casino company of a casino you're the boss of (read: have the highest value die in said casino.)  What happens often is, you'll get a 6 in a small casino you own, flip it to the same as a neighboring casino chain, and boom!  Meet the new boss.

We were about half-way through our 2-player learning game when Dave Roswell strolled up, asking to crash the party.  2-player was turning out kinda dry anyway, so we set up a 3-player game.

With Dave singing "This town...is a craaaaaazy town" the whole time, we had a fierce battle for a large hotel chain that Jeremy ultimately had the good fortune to have control of at the right time and stole the win.  

The three-player was much better but it had an endgame that sort of grinded along, as we were all pretty much tapped out and just doing random casino dice battles, waiting for the end to trigger.  I liked it, but wondered if maybe there should be eight of each casino instead of nine.  


Then it was AT time again as we broke out Wrath of Ashardalon.  I had played Ravenloft but not Ashardalon, and was glad to get a chance to get to play it.  Turns out, it too is a pretty good game, though I didn't see the need to have both of them.  The scenario we played was pretty wonky--you had to find the Secret Chamber, find 2000 points worth of Treasure tiles, and escape before Ashardalon fried you all.

Funny thing though...Ashardalon showed up, and we tag team kicked his ass.  I was the Paladin and led an unholy beatdown, and before you know it the big guy was dead and we hadn't even used a healing surge yet.

The problem was, of course, that there weren't 2,000 GP worth of treasure tiles.  Seriously, the values on all of them didn't even add up to 2,000.  One of them had you draw a random item, and I guess that was supposed to count for the tally, but we couldn't find that anywhere.  The others were just marked with a straight GP value.  We just called it then and there, as there was no way we were going to fail just dealing with the random monsters that were left.

Ashardalon became infected with the same lunacy as the night before, and suddenly we were talking about Dickflippers descending from the ceiling and attacking us, and cracking up when we drew "Volcanic Vapors" (OH MY! THE VOLCANIC VAPORS!)  

Poison?  The Honey Badger doesn't give a shit, FYI.


We then moved right into another game of Cosmic Encounter.  I drew the dreaded Tick-Tock, who put a time limit on all that negotiation and defensive trickery that people love to pull.

I wasn't very vocal in this game as I knew I already had a target on my head, and would quietly suggest things like, "I don't have to participate in defense to use my power, let me help you anyway" and stuff like that.

I think the leaders were on their third foreign colony each when Evilgit made a Negotiate deal, forgetting that triggered my power too.  That left me with one token and on the edge of victory.

Jeremy launched an attack then but it was revealed he had a Negotiate he'd been trying to get rid of forever, dooming him to lose on the offense, and POP went my final token.  Tick-tock was the winner!

I'm glad I kept my mouth shut for most of the game, because all they had to do to shut me down was hardcore tag-team me at every possible opportunity (Chris had the destiny-deck choosers, the name escapes me.)  Anyway, I was glad to steal away the win, though the Tick-tock are super annoying to deal with, truth be told.

After that it was a couple of games of Puzzle Strike and a 4-player session of Lords of Vegas that made me realize that the game was only really meant to be played with four.  (It's also funnier if you make jokes about the back-alley casinos specializing in hookery and dentistry...hey, when you're off the strip, you gotta make your living any way you can.)


The evening was getting late, and Rylien roped me into...Minion Hunter.

Now, let's be fair here.  It was late, I was tired, and I'd had beer.

Minion Hunter is...I don't know, man.  Imagine a game where you get sent to the hospital and roll a d6 and then a d10 over and over for six or seven turns.  Imagine a Talisman where when you roll to move, both options are almost always shit unless you're near a corner.

Imagine Talisman where there's a "1 Gold Piece" card, and a "10,000 Gold Pieces" card, all in the same deck.

Imagine figuring out this scale of money on a piece of paper.  "Okay, I have $65,715, this weapon here costs 390, then I'm taking a plane trip that costs 5,000, oh look, the Honey Badger is rapidly not giving a shit."

The rub is of course is that once you get over the hump (the game starts you off as a powerless guy with straight 1s for stats...what.  the.  hell.)  that the game does kick in and gets more interesting.  After sitting on my ass and getting to do very little, I did finally get to join the fray, but it was too little, too late.  Had to settle for second.


Apparently they'd been cracking jokes at the other table about how miserable I looked, and I'll be honest at one point I did want to gouge my eyes out, but I'm a gaming soldier, man.  I can withstand anything, and like Doc Holliday said, "We started a game we never finished."  


I think there's a decent game buried in Minion Hunter, and if I owned it I think I could fix it.  I...uh...think I have other things to do, though.  Like wax my armpits, maybe.  

We snuck out for some awesome Asian food, still laughing our asses off.  I'm pretty sure that the waiter was a little disturbed by Matt's cute tank top.  NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT~!


We finished up the night that had already run long with Matt's Battling Tops game.  It's exactly what you might expect--four players hunker over a little plastic arena, pull the ripcord on their tops, and last top still spinning in the arena gets the point.  First to 10 wins.  We played two games and most of the time Matt and I had the last two tops spinning, but I kept tripping over the corpses of other vanquished tops and Matt squeaked out the victory both times.

I will probably get a copy of this too, just because of its simplistic awesomeness.  I'm not sure that a children's game is supposed to be this dangerous (we had tops flying out of the arena every other battle or so) or involve this much cursing ("DICKFLIPPIN' WARRIOR TOPS, BITCHES!") but who cares?  This is the type of game that tops out an evening of gaming.

Tops out.

See what I did there?



It's not funny if you have to explain it.


We did our part to help Richard clean up, and staggered off to another 2am+ bedtime.  Sadly, we knew checkout was the next day.  We were going to head to Steve's and out.



SUNDAY:

We woke up again after like five hours of sleep and got our stuff together to get checked out.  Then we headed for Steve's.  This was actually one of the most awesome parts of the trip as we got to sit in Avery's dining room and listen to Richard Lanius talk to us about all sorts of stuff about the games he'd designed, stuff he had in the pipeline, his opinions about certain kinds of games, all sorts of good stuff.  We all just sat there absorbing this stuff like a sponge.  He talked about some stuff he has in development (not allowed to talk about!) as well as some of his experiences working with certain companies.  Richard's the kind of guy who is just overflowing with all kinds of information and history about games and game design.

Due to Frank's family tragedy (our thoughts are with you, my man), we headed to Will Kenyon's.  It was nearing time for us to go by the time we got there, so we settled for some Rock Band action.

Turns out I was pretty rusty (and I play more Guitar Hero than Rock Band anyway...something I forgot as I realized I didn't know the note charts on the stuff I was playing).  Zev wandered up, took one look at me and said, "You gotta live up to your avatar, eh?" which got a laugh out of everybody.

So although I didn't live up to reputation of GUITAR HERO, we still had a great time.  No one had the balls to sing, but I did guitar, Matt on bass and a local guy whose name I didn't catch did drums.  We did a little "Killing Moon" and "Lazy Eye", and then it really was time to go for us.

We said our goodbyes, doling out handshakes and man hugs.  "Zev, you're a legend!" I shouted, and well before we were truly ready, we were on the way back home, Trashfest done.



Listen, folks.  Next year we will doubtless do this again.  If it is at all in your power to do so, be there.  Billy came down from Canada--so no excuses, saavy?

It was an intensely fun 3 or 4 days of gaming that with all the great people, awesome games, and tasty beer, you'd be hard pressed to find better gaming action ANYWHERE.


Next year though we'll need some sort of special sign so that F:ATties can quickly identify each other.  Maybe we can just wander in and waggle our dickflippers until we see someone's eyes light up with recognition.


So in summary, just remember:  Honey Badgers eat larvae.  Oooh, that's NASTY.