GTF 2011 – All the Rest

My musings about GTF 2011 continued …

Fillers and Lighter Fare

Some were old and some were new but all were light and fluffy.

Ghosts is an old Stratego-like game Luke brings each year and about 10 games are played in 30 minutes or less.

Hey Waiter! was a recent release from R&R Games with a restaurant theme using cards to eliminate the stack of colored chips (representing food) in front of you before your opponents do.

We also played through the Easy Play series (Level X, Numeri, Big Points and Finito!) in about an hour. Nothing here but quick playing games that do a fine job filling the time between meatier fare.

Standards

I was glad to play favorites such as Power Grid, Pandemic, Race for the Galaxy, Pillars of the Earth and Thurn & Taxis again this year.

We used the Japan map for Power Grid. The interesting twists with this map include specific starting locations, cities with 2 spaces or no space of a particular level (e.g, 2 10 spaces or no 15 space) and the ability to start 2 separate networks. I also saw the Central Europe map being played later in the weekend. Pandemic saw multiple plays. It has become the regular co-op game at GTF.

New Stuff

Other than the deck-building and filler games, the only other new games I played were Troyes and the new edition of DungeonQuest. Using dice in clever ways has been a recurring theme over the last couple of years.

Troyes creates an interesting mash-up of using dice for actions and worker placement.

DungeonQuest is a light, dungeon crawl that is random and purely tactical. It was easily the most played game at the event this year. I played once and saw it being played at least another 6 - 8 times. In all, DungeonQuest was likely played 12+ times over the three and a half days.

Epic Proportions

I know of at least 2 epic plays at this year’s event.

Runewars (something I wanted to play but missed) had a play lasting 7 and a half hours. Other plays of this at GTF have been in the 3 – 4 hour range (still pretty epic). I don’t know what caused this one to go so long but I saw some of the guys shambling about like zombies after it finished.

However, the king of epic this year was a 9 hour game of 1830 (including explanation) between me, Dan and Bob. The best epic games are those that don’t feel like it and we all felt this way about 1830. Instead of 9 hours it seemed more like 3. In the end, Dan won running a very profitable B&O (generating $91/share/operating round with 2 engines – a 6 and a Diesel). His net worth was $12,230. Bob and I lagged by about $2K each.

Misses

I missed opportunities to play Runewars and Ascension. I don’t know if Sid Meier’s Civ was played or not (I don’t recall seeing it set up in any of the cabins).

Luke brought a variety of maps but we did not play AoS this year. However, I did see some of the guys playing the Europe map for Railroad Tycoon/Railways of the World instead.

Until Next Year

And that’s it for GTF 2011. The count down clock has been reset and it’s little more than 350 days until 20 guys in 5 cabins for 4 days with a few 100 games do it all over again for GTF 2012! 😀