Origins 2013

(Edit:  I accidentally posted this before I had a chance to finish it because I suck, so I apologize to the 70+ people who clicked on this and then went, "What the hell?")

   I love Origins.  I love playing games with great people.  I love the exhibit hall.   I love the board room.  I love that it's adjacent to High Street and the Arena District, so there's lots of great places to eat and drink.  I love that it's only an hour away from where I live.  So if you're looking for any commentary about how Origins is a second-rate convention or complaints that vendor X, Y, or Z passed on Orgins this year, you're not going to get that here.   I can only relate my personal experiences, and I almost always have an outstanding time.    This year I was bringing my friend in from Worchester, Mass.  He's a hardcore nerd like myself, but he hasn't been exposed the boardgame side of our culture.  I knew that this had to be rectified when he sent me an email that included a picture of Mansions of Madness with the caption, "Wow."  Screw that, my friend, I've spent years and countless amounts of disposable income pimping out my Arkham Horror.  You're going to play a real Cthulhu mythos game, and you're going to love it, and you're going to want to play it again.

    My friend, Rick, flew in on Thursday afternoon, and we went right to the exhibit hall.  I think it fried his mind a bit, because he's never seen anything like it.  We explored until it closed, then we visited the room where a CCG tournament was going on for Vampire: The Eternal Struggle.  V:tES is a dead collectable card game that still maintains a decent cult following.   Apparently, because it's a relatively small niche, Rick was able to become the biggest seller of the remaining cards in the world, so he wanted to meet and put a face to many of his customers.  He was greeted as a minor celebrity, which I thought was pretty cool, and he offered credit to his online store to everyone who won their tournament, which probably endeared him further.  But enough with that ego-stroking, it's time to play Arkham, man!

    I happened to run into my old gaming group from Columbus and roped a couple of them into playing as well.  My fellow Fatties set up at a table across from us, so I had the best of both worlds going on.  We defeated Yibb-Tstll rather handily, but the highlight of the evening was Matt Loter calling me a cheap-ass then comparing me to some meathead, exercise guru on TV.  Rick loved the game and wanted to play again.  Sorry, Rick, but I'm was driving our asses home that night, and it was already closing in on 1 AM, and he might not have realized it after one play, but this game has a tendency to stretch for four hours or more.

     Fridays are reserved for the Smithee Awards, but before that, we needed to get into some more boardgaming.   Steve Avery was gracious enough to join us playing "Defenders of the Realm," where he proceeded to fuck everything up and basically lost us the game.  Everyone else was doing a really good job, three generals were dead, each one dealt a killing blow by one of the other players.  Meanwhile, Steve had kept pushing his luck, way past reasonbility and was crawling around the board with only 2 action tokens, unable or unwilling to even take the time to heal.  Eventually, we ran out of tainted land crystals and lost the game.  Next,  Steve showed us a very rough prototype of his that involved battling robots.  It was like Battletech-light, but more complicated than Abaddon.  Though it was still in its infancy, it looked great.  It's obvious that Steve has some artistic talents.  Then it was time for dinner and then the Smithees.

      I don't know if too many people here ever attended or even know what the Smithees are, so I'll include this excerpt from their website: "The Smithee Awards, or 'Smithees,' is an annual ceremony which celebrates Bad Cinema. In principle, it's sort of the Anti-Oscars, though in practice it's more like the Anti-People's-Choice-Awards. A number of films are so "honored" each year, and there are nineteen categories in which a movie might win. Some distinguishing characteristics to help you get the flavor of things: We limit ourselves to titles available on home video, and year-of-release is irrelevant. We clip the films for you; this means you're not forced to watch the whole movie, only the best bits. There are five clips per category, during which we tend to withhold comment and allow the film to speak for itself (though an occasional gut-reaction may slip out). Oh, and the voting audience, not we, are the final arbiters as to who takes the prize
 (so there can be no possibility of anything being rigged)."  So, basically, if you're a big fan of bad movies and/or Mystery Science Theater, the Smithees are probably right up your alley.  When we were both in college, Rick was always sending me MST3K video tapes, so I knew he had to attend. 

     There's a few lulls in the ceremony when votes are being counted.  During this period the presenters will kill time by drawing names of audience members out of a garbage can.  The owners of the names that get picked then get to come up to the stage, where they are given some homemade prize or some other tchotchke and then have their picture taken for all posterity.   I've always had the tradition of getting our table to write the name of the most introverted member of our group on our ballots instead of our own.  However, ths year everyone,  including my most bosum chum, put my name on their ballots instead because they all suck.  Then, of course, my name got chosen, and I had to march up in front of everyone, where I received a stick-figure, mad scientist puppet.  Hooray.  Everyone at our table had a good time, and vowed to attend next year as well.

     We spent Saturday demoing some games in the exhibit hall.  The first was Escape: The Curse of the Temple.  Not my kind of game.  It's not a bad game, by any means, but it's a game that requires you to be RIGHT ON TOP OF IT.    You have to roll like a madman and always be aware of the passing time and where everyone else is on the board and what rolls they need.  I imagine that adrenaline junkies would love this game.  For someone like me, who tends to roll dice lackadaisically, it was too much.  I felt like I brought the team down more than Steve Avery does playing DotR.  Do you remember the WKRP episode where the state trooper tests Johnny Fever's reflexes while under the influece?  Even sober, Fever is so mellow about hitting the button that the machine registers that he's had like eight drinks already.  Well, that was me.   Like Johnny, I began picking up my pace at the end, but it was too little, too late.  The other notable game was Zombicide.  I'm not one of those that's sick to death of the zombie genre, and the demo was fun, but there's no way in hell I was going to pay ninety bucks for that game.

     Later that day at the board room, we decided to take Zombicide for a full spin.  We picked a scenario that seemed different - it was basically a zombie version of Death Race 2000.  What should have been a wild ride turned into a basic math exercise.  We just kept driving around the board, plowing into zombies, until one of us won the scenario by reaching our kill limit.  The game is meant to be simple, but it just seems like it's TOO simple, and too long for being that simple.  So I was doubly glad that I didn't money for it.

     Eventually, it was Arkham time again.  Now Arkham is probably my favorite boardgame, and I've spent a lot of time and money pimping it out.  This time we were set up near the front of the hall, so my game got a LOT of attention from passerbys.  I probably spent just as much time talking about my set-up as I did playing the actual game.  One encounter stood out though.  One passerby had this conversation with me:  "You ordered the game kind of gate holders that I did."  Yes.  "You did a good job of putting them together."  Thanks.  "Nope, I take that back, it looks like I did a much better job putting mine together than you did."  Oh yeah?  Do you like apples?  Well, Richard Launius gave me his email address!  How do you like those apples?!  (For the record, I do want to mention that I really wasn't offended in the slightest.  When dealing with people that are a little "different" in our nerd culture, I see a lot of similarity to myself.  If my brain would have just zigged instead of zagged during a few crucial moments of development, I could have ended up the same way, so I try to keep a lot of compassion in my heart for these types.  However, the conversation was just too amusing for me to keep to myself).

    So, as I hinted at, the highlight of that evening was the designer of Arkham stopping by to tell me how much he admired my game and how he appreciated the obvious amount of love I had for it.  He wanted me to send him my address so he could send me some extra promo items he had.  And that's one of the many reasons that I had an awesome weekend.  The gameplay itself was very anti-climatic.  As luck would have it, every time a gate location came up, the gate would try to open at a place that had already been sealed.  I've never encountered this before.  My dear friend Regina was playing Mandy, as is her wont, and she quickly completed her story , which means that a gate had to try to open at a sealed location FIVE TIMES.   So as a consequence of completing her story, Regina got to close and seal yet another gate.  I've never seen this happen so early, and at one point I realized that there were no open gates and that everyone had had a gate trophy.     We had won the game in record time!  Fuck that.  I just didn't tell anyone that we won and kept playing until we had all sealed six gate locations.  There's no way in hell I was going to spend more time setting up the game than I did playing the game.

     Sunday was rather unevenful since I had to drive Rick back to the airport, but we did have time to squeeze in a quick game of "Betrayal at the House on the Hill."  It wasn't very noteworthy except for one incident.  We ended up playing the scenario where one of the players had to defeat the Demon Lord with the Ring of Solomon.  There are four little demons that run around, making life miserable for the heroes, but the catch is that they will always run to the closest hero.  Clever players can lure the demons away from the ring-bearer, so that that hero can win the game.  I was chosen as the traitor, and my first order of business was to run to the heroes and try to get the ring away from them and keep them from drawing the other demons away.  The scenario started while I was on the upper floor, so I went bolting downstairs, where I was immediately Scatman Crothersed by the jock hero with the ax.  My combat roll was so shitty and my friend Rick's was so good, that I took eight points of physical damage and instantly died.  Do not pass "Go," and so on.  At least he enjoyed the game.

     I have to say that as long as Origins is, it seems to go by so damn fast.  I got to meet and hang with a lot of Fatties: Bernie and Loter and Avery and Zev and others, but I wish I had time to do other things, like go drinking with those Fatties.  These guys are a hell of a lot of fun.  You can smack talk them or poke them or swear at them, and they don't even get mad.  Heck, apparently one of them even accepts pony rides.  Anyway, my friends and I had a great time, and we look forward to seeing everyone again.