NonCon 5

For those keeping score, this is the 5th year of NonCon, the 4th year I've been a guest, and 6th year that yon nerdy Vassar student group has been doing this sort of thing. So for me at this point, heading up there feels more like partying with a bunch of old friends than going to a convention. Which is great really, because that pretty much nails the atmosphere. In any case, my past reports described what the con is like in general, you can always read them for a refresher.

This year, the entire con was set in my favorite building on the Vassar campus. The one with the logic defying architecture and zombie sniping platform. This, I find, was an immense improvement over previous years, as one could take the whole con in easily, without having to deal with claustrophobic conditions.

Some serious communication breakdowns caused some hiccups for me in the months leading up to the con, but the only real effect they had at the end of the day was to severely cut back on the number of panels I was able to speak on. Something of a shame, but on the other hand it freed me up for other stuff. My main regret on that front though is that there were a few important concepts I wanted to get across on the Game Design panel, but couldn't as it had somehow mutated into a LARP edition of "No @$#%, there we were." A lot of panels degenerate into that one come to think of it. I guess it can't be helped.

Gaming thusly was the primary eater of my time, as usual. Since this year I was running Massive Vs. Masses demos either officially or unofficially about half the time, which cut into my ability to experiment more than I would have liked, but I really can't convey how happy I was to see that it was A- interesting enough from a distance to draw people in (even when I wasn't there to explain the rules and basic strategies), and more importantly B- how much people liked it. I've spent the last year and a half of my life on this sucker, and half killed myself (as did a few others) over the last few weeks getting it presentable, and it's great to see the end result actually works.

A few new (well, new to me at least) games that I got to play with do come to mind though. No links this year since I didn't really catch who made what in enough cases that it wouldn't be fair. Besides, you can find'em based on name alone I'm sure.

The Penguin Ultimatum looks like a simple little kid's game at a glance, but it's actually fairly sophisticated. The closest comparison I can think of is Cube Farm. With both, you're laying cards out on a grid, trying to control the area around score generating areas, but here the points are scored when certain cards are sufficiently surrounded by enough other cards, and there's a reward for scoring the fewest points from a card, but still scoring.

Hex Hex is a quick little game which to me feels like a card game incarnation of the arcade game Warlords (which was itself basically Death Match Breakout). Each round, a player begins by throwing a hex (represented by a cardboard hexagon, hence the name) at another player. That player plays a card to bounce it towards someone else. It goes on like this, with a few interesting things tossed in later. It's your basic kill-the-leader sort of game, but it's fast, it's fun, and it's easy to play in the wee hours of the morning.

Fishing for Terrorists is Go Fish with action cards added into the mix. That pretty much covers it.

Burning Wheel I didn't have time to check out first hand, but I'm intrigued by what I saw. At first glance, I thought it was just an overly detailed RPG combat engine. The sort where you're keeping track of what angle everyone's limbs are bent to at any given time. Talking to the creator a bit though revealed that it sticks to that level of detail for everything. Combat, cooking, debating, you name it. Now that I find interesting. I'm also told that when you're actually playing, it doesn't really come off as that complex, although I find it hard to believe. I'll have to actually play some time and see.

Mafia took up a lot of my time too. Not the one you're probably thinking of, a d20 system RPG based on the mafia, due for release fairly soon. I mainly spent so much time on it because scheduling conflicts shut me out of so many other things, it'd been far too long since I've really played an RPG, and the best RPG sessions are when the GM designed the game I find. Objectively speaking though, it really is pretty nifty. The feel is pretty much d20ized Shadowrun, sans cyberpunk and magic elements. That sounds terrible when you look at it from the Shadowrun side of things, but from the d20 system's perspective, it does a nice job of incorporating some foreign concepts and flavor to the rules everyone knows. All depends on how you look at it. Add to that cash as a roll modding stat instead of a number in your inventory, some fun character flaws to roll for, and serious differences between how male and female characters get handled, and there's something to it I say.

The other Mafia for what it's worth is a fun little social game, often played under the name Werewolf, which fits better I say. Under that name, it's sold by Looney Labs ("That Hippie Game Company"), who was this year's Main Publisher, much like the previous two years were Cheapass and Steve Jackson. Theoretically, all three should have been around all three years, but it's kind of neat to work out like this.

I'd talk some about LL's games, but I'm pretty sure I've covered them all in previous con reports. From where I sit, what they really bring to the table are Fluxx and Icehouse. Both of these are really astounding in this abstract surrealist cool way. The down side to this of course is that while I can sit down with someone who has never heard of it, and start playing Fluxx without having to explain one bit of the rules, it is immensely difficult to convey what it's like. Icehouse has the opposite problem, as the concept is to add a new element to the periodic table of game elements (you know, dice, cards, pawns, etc.). They're just little plastic cones with different sizes and colors, but they really are astoundingly versatile. Also, the creators of the company hang out with Andrew Plotkin, creator of System's Twilight, and that just scores you huge points in my book.

I'm sure there's at least one more game I checked out and dug, but it just isn't coming to me right now. Sorry if you designed it, but I've only gotten something like 5 hours sleep in the last 72 here. In any case, NonCon is continuing the slow progress towards turning into a pure gaming con, which isn't really a bad thing. I put it like this in the con wrap session, and the resulting laugh tells me I can restate it here.

NonCon's events page for this year said the following regarding anime: "Last year, we used a self-scheduled open format where convention-goers could choose what they wanted from our selection, and use designated rooms to view their selection." To this I add "... and this year we just said to heck with it."

I'd rather spend all my time gaming than watching anime any day personally, so that's fine by me, although I do wish I hadn't missed this year's screening of This Is Otakudom. I've seen it before, but it's still funny.