The post The Gaming Sommelier’s Board Game Recommendations By Genre – 2023 appeared first on Pikes Peak Gamers.

PikesPeakGamers is so very excited to be part of HexaCon 2020 this year! 
Come join us and play some of your favorite games, or learn some new ones! HexaCon has over 300 scheduled events! Come one day or all weekend.

PPG Events:

Your very own PikesPeakGamers will be running 14 events!

All events are free to enter, but you must register online to grab your spot! Just click here to view an event hosted by PikesPeakGamers:
https://tabletop.events/conventions/hexacon-2020/schedule#?query=pikespeakgamers
(or search for “PikesPeakGamers”)

Note: Always check the official schedule online for any changes

Collect prize tickets for fun prizes!
All participants in each of our events throughout the weekend will earn a minimum of one prize ticket for each event – and more the higher you place. Every time you earn a ticket, just write your HexaCon Badge number on it and give it to a PPG rep. See the details below for each event.

Winners will be posted on Facebook and at our partner table following our drawing on Saturday & Sunday each evening (around 6P).  Prizes can be picked up anytime during our partner table hours on Sunday/Monday:
Sunday: 10A – 4P
Monday: 10A – 12P

Note: All prizes must be picked up no later than 12:00 PM Monday morning.

Prize ticket details:

Other ways to earn a prize ticket:

• Come to our partner table and show us that you liked our Facebook page – 1 tix
• Sign up for our newsletter – 1 tix

Prizes include:

• Various Gift cards – Old Chicago’s, Starbucks, Amazon
• All-weekend badges at PPG 2020!
• Variety of (New / Gently Used) Board Games
  

Come visit us during our partner table hours:
Friday: 12P – 5P
Saturday: 10A – 4P
Sunday: 10A – 4P
Monday: 10A – 12P

The post HexaCon 2020 or Bust! Pikes Peak Gamers Hosting Board Game, Tournament, and Olympic Events appeared first on Pikes Peak Gamers.

I hope that you all are as excited as I am that we have some vendors at the convention this year. One of our vendors, Four Levels, will be bringing a demonstration of their eponymous game to PPG CON here in a week, and I had the privilege to playtest it.

It’s an abstract game, like checkers or chess, where the game doesn’t really have a theme, but you’re just trying to accomplish the objective. In this case, it is to get four of your pieces in a row. On your turn, you simply play your next piece on any square on the board. There are three kinds of pieces – a cube, a square with a hole in it that the cube can fit into, and a solid square. Cubes and holey squares can share the same space; otherwise, there can only be one piece per square. There are four, four-by-four grids stacked on top of each other where you can play your pieces, and four in a row can mean horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and in either two or three dimensions.

To make a really great abstract game, you need three elements. First, you need a simple ruleset. A simple ruleset lets you focus on the strategy and also makes it easy to find opponents. Second, the gameplay needs to have depth. A game worth playing needs to have interesting choices. Third, it should have an unusual look. Done right, an uninitiated person walking up in a coffee shop will ask what you’re playing because they want to understand the mystery presented by the bizarre object on the table. This game does all three items well. In particular, I find the strategy quite interesting because after just a couple of moves, you’re locked in a tense battle where a false step has you lose the game but you need to find the edge required to defeat your opponent. I admit that I’m not very good at it, but that has not deterred me from enjoying every play of it.

The game is currently in late-stage development, and so Jack, the game developer, has some interesting ideas to make the game even better. Among them are a three-player variant, a scoring system, and perhaps having a game last until all the pieces have been played, so as to maximize the number of four-in-a-row combinations. I highly recommend that you check out his booth and support his upcoming Kickstarter, which is scheduled to start July 1, 2019!

Four Levels: Website | Facebook

The post Vendor Playtest: Four Levels appeared first on Pikes Peak Gamers.

1. The Mind

The Mind seems like it was created by a challenge to have a game with the simplest rules. You have a deck of cards from 1-100 and all you have to do is play them in order. But trick is that you can’t talk or come up with a convention about how or when to play the cards. On the surface, this sounds like a totally boring activity, either ridiculously easy or practically impossible since how can you really communicate? Yet I found it incredibly fun, and wanted to play it over and over again, as in the right spirit, everyone is making body language and gestures, trying to get a feel for how big is the gap between the last card and what to play when. It’s short and sweet, gets everyone involved, and the longer you play, the tenser it gets, as you want to make sure you’re playing when you’re supposed to.

2. Reef

Reef is a simple abstract game about playing coral reef pieces in order to score points. Everything is in fours here: your board is a 4×4 grid, the coral pieces can be stacked up to 4 high, and you can only hold up to four cards in your hand. How many different colors of pieces are there? That’s right, four! On your turn, you either pick up a card or you play one. When you play a card, you add reef pieces to your tableau and then score combinations. What I love about this game is how to plan what cards you get and how to score them in order, so that the pieces you’re adding on one card will help you when you score the next one.

3. Vast

Vast is a game about a dungeon. On the surface, Vast is not particularly complex, but it is a bit daunting to learn from scratch. You see, each player has their own role with their completely independent ruleset for how to play. One player is the knight, another is the goblins, a third is the dragon, yet another is the dungeon itself (referred to as the Cave). There is also a thief, a character that seems to be most interesting when you have 5 players. This game is a challenge for design, as each player is really doing something quite different. I thought that some players would get stuck and not have a chance to win, and while that might be the case partway through your first game, after a couple of plays, I think you can understand all the different ways your role can influence the game. I found how asymmetric this game was to be fascinating, and it was clear that there was a lot of thought and playtesting that went into balancing the various roles. It did take us a while to play as everyone had to learn their own roles, but I look forward to playing this again, from a different perspective.

4. Teotihuacan: City of Gods

Teotihuacan: City of Gods is a really well-designed worker placement game. It bundles a number of elements that I enjoy into a great package. You’ve got a rondel, and you’re moving your workers around it. One space lets you acquire technologies. You’re collectively building a pyramid, so the acquisition of resources and deciding where you place the tiles on the pyramid generates some interesting choices as well. If that wasn’t enough, the number of players at each location influences how much it will cost, and how many of your own workers impacts how rewarding the location is. To top it all off, your workers become more powerful over time, and you then have to decide when to reset them and take advantage of the reward. Since you have to feed your workers, gaining a bunch of workers is not necessarily the best and winning strategy. I think I just loved how much was going on in this one. I’m not sure that anything individually was new, but I hadn’t see them bundled in quite this way. Certainly this is a game that will appeal to heavy gamers.

5. Gaia Project

Finally, I got around to playing Gaia Project. I thought it would just be a rehash of Terra Mystica, but in space. I love Terra Mystica, but what would really be new here? For those unfamiliar to Terra Mystica, you’re claiming places on the board by terraforming them, and then building buildings on them. Each player is their own race, which gives an asymmetric aspect to the game. You move up temple tracks as another way to score points, as well. Being next to players is beneficial, as it provides you power that you can then use for bonus actions. In Gaia Project, the board is made up of modular pieces covered with planets that adds to more variety, and the various “temple” tracks have been converted into more interesting technology tracks that enable you to make real progress in the game. The use of power in this game is much better, as you don’t have to be quite so close to take advantage of it, and you have fewer pieces to play. Since you only occupy planets in this game, and not every space has a planet on it, there are some empty spaces that force you to have to spread more along the board. It just makes for a more dynamic game. Anyone who likes Terra Mystica will surely enjoy this, and if you missed out on Terra Mystica, Gaia Project is an excellent game for the uninitiated as well.

Bonus Reviews: Dinosaur Island & Cacao

I did want to close just by saying that as much as I’m a lover of lots of games, not everything I play is great. I also recently got the opportunity to play Dinosaur Island. I know that there’s lots of love out there for this, and the game’s theme is great, as are its production values. However, I couldn’t help thinking there was too much luck in it, but maybe that’s me. I also played Cacao, a tile-placement game where the meeples are printed on the cards, unlike in Carcassonne. It was somewhat interesting, but I felt like there needed to be more variety to the types of tiles available in order to make for a more compelling game.

Anyway, I’m thankful for all the opportunities to get my game on lately. Until next time, happy gaming!

– Smiley

The post Board Game Roundup: Smiley Reviews 5 Newly Played Games appeared first on Pikes Peak Gamers.