Mini-Game Reviews – GN Con 007 Trials

This month saw the return of Gamer Nation Con. It had been three years since the last one, four since I attended as I had to miss six. I’m pleased to report it was a fantastic experience and look forward to GNCon 80’s next year.

Aside from getting to hangout with gamers and play games all weekend, the best thing about convention is the chance to try new games. At home, you are limited by budget and time. At gaming conventions, you have access to a wide world of games you’d never be able to afford to buy AND a pool of players to play them with. Many FLGS have game walls you can borrow and play, but not necessarily a pool of players. People usually only go to the FLGS if they already have a plan to play something.

So what did I try and how were they?

Grav Well

This was a game GM Chris brought that I ended up playing three times. It is a nice simple and quick game that’s great for a casual play. The idea is you are stuck in a grav well and trying to move from one warp gate to another. The only way to move your ships is to push off of or pull yourself toward other pieces of mass. Game play is done in a series of turns within a set of rounds. Each round, players get a new hand of cards. Each turn, players simultaneously play a card. The cards correspond to atomic elements that do one of four actions (pull you toward a mass, push you off a mass, pull everything toward you, or push everything away from you). Since players reveal their cards simultaneously, they are resolved in alphabetical order, from Argon (Ar) to Zirconium (Zr).

Because cards are resolved against the closest mass (other ships or two crates on the track), but the order of play is unknown, you can’t be certain where your ship is going to end up. You play a card, intending to fly toward the exit, but end up going backwards. This makes the game winner a bit random sometimes, but that’s part of the fun. It’s not a hard core cutthroat game. You play a card and see where you end up.

There are some optional rules that give each ship a different ability. We didn’t use any of those and I liked it as a straightforward game without them. If you played it a few times I could see the appeal to adding some variety though. The game is definitely better with more people. When you play with all six, you have half the players starting at different points. This means the groups will pass each other somewhere during the game and be trying to go in opposite directions, which adds another layer of difficulty.

Text Based Adventure

One game I played in was a big group all working together to beat an old school text based adventure. Yeah, like you’d play back in the 80’s and 90’s. You had a screen of text and played with simple commands like ‘exit room’ or ‘pick up sword’. This was Saturday night, when a lot of people engage in ‘Gamer Nation After Dark’ and imbue some kind of alcoholic beverage. I don’t drink, and don’t like hanging out with drunk people, but that’s the nice thing about GN Con. There were plenty of drinks around, but no one had more than a light buzz.

The game played with one player reading the text and each player in taking a turn to issue a command. Some turns were boring as the command could get monotonous if you had to move between rooms a lot. But when we had to figure out a non-intuitive puzzle with very limited, and unknown, actions available. For example, the goal of one adventure was to become to ruler of a Castle Adventure. To do that you needed the princess. But she wouldn’t talk to you unless you gave her a rose, which you had to decide to pick up much earlier. And to get her to declare you the ruler, you needed to be defeat her father’s ghost with a special candle. This involved going to rooms multiple times and trying things with each new item you acquired. A potentially annoying experience, but when playing a big group all laughing at the absurdity, it was good fun.

The GM going off script sometime to add flavor helped a lot.

Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG

I enjoyed the Sentinels card game for awhile, until it was usurped by Marvel’s Champions. But that was mostly because I enjoy deck building. I liked the universe and theming well enough and have been interested in trying out the RPG. Fortunately, our very own Ben Erickson was running a game and was able to get me a seat at the table. I played Spitfire, a young hothead that was essentially the Flash or Quicksilver.

The game’s mechanics are interesting as they lean in to trying to make you feel like a superhero first. Every attack hits, rolls just determine how much damage and, depending on the target, if they are able to block that damage. It’s in some ways no different from a game where you don’t roll damage, just roll to see if you hit, but thematically it works. Everyone had powers and could just use their powers to do things. There was no mana tracking or limited spell slots or other such nonsense. Despite that, it was well balanced so no one was OP and even unpowered heroes could accomplish things.

The core mechanic of the game is that scenes are all played on a clock. The environment is a character and progresses from Green to Yellow to Red. Characters have different stats and abilities based on what level they’re at, with most getting stronger under pressure but some doing the opposite. The mechanic helps to ensure no encounter drags on forever.

I don’t know much about how these encounters are created on the GM side. Ben did a good job of build us ones that required us to work together and do more than just beat up all the bad guys. It was a challenge, but accomplishable. As a GM than tends to GM by making it up as I go, I could see this system both working great and being impossible. But I have the core rulebook on a wishlist to get and try out.

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