Terminal Gaming

In a previous post I talked about my favourite weekend of the year, Terminal City Tabletop Convention. I discussed why I love it, mentioning that I get to play lots of games. Now I want to go into detail about the particular games I played.

This year I hit the ground running, jumping into a game of Inis as soon as I walked in the door. Inis (pronounced "Inish") is an Irish mythology themed area control game that I've been interested in since I first heard about it. Thanks to new friend Marc (phone contact Marc TCTC) I got to learn and play it, and then went home and ordered it online. It was really quick to learn, and has a wonderfully clean ruleset, with only combat causing us some initial head-scratching, but once we had a fight or two, we totally understood it. The components are nice, with the armies having a handful of different models for their units, adding nice variety to the board. The art on the cards and tiles is gorgeous, all done by aclaimed Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick.

After Inis, I taught three other players Quantum, the dice-as-spaceships strategy game, which I love, and they seemed to enjoy as well. I'm pretty terrible at Quantum, and usually I'm on the receiving end of another players epic final turn, where all their upgrades fall into place for some bonkers cool victory. But this time, I managed to pull off just that, dishing out a dramatic turn to drop my final colony onto a planet and secure galactic dominance.

One of the highlights of the weekend for me was getting to play four games of submarine themed team game, Captain Sonar, each with a full player count of eight. Well, technically, I played two games and "GMed" the other two, answering questions as they arose. The first one was on Saturday and went a bit longer than hoped, and I was upset that maybe the game wasn't as much fun as advertised. But the three games on Sunday were amazing! Each lasted under thirty minutes, and we're jammed with hilarity and tension! They were exactly how I hoped the game would feel, and now that I've played it properly, I feel I know better how to teach it in the future, and what elements beyond the rules to draw attention to. I'll do a full review of Captain Sonar soon, but the games I played at TCTC definitely taught me a lot about the game.

Super Motherload was being taught throughout the weekend, and I jumped into a game on Sunday, falling in love with it immediately and grabbing the last copy on sale as soon as I was done.

I played many more games over the weekend, but these were just some of the highlights. Terminal City is a great convention every year, but my bank account always suffers during and after.

Not that I'm complaining.