AireCon 2023

So last weekend was AireCon 2023 in Harrogate. This year it was even bigger, which meant it was in the larger halls. I was there for three days. On the Friday, I ran two roleplaying games; on the Saturday I popped in to play games and catch up with friends; and on the Sunday, I was there with family. (Previous AireCon reports here.)

At the entrance to AireCon with Megan on Sunday

Friday

Friday was exciting because of all the snow that had arrived overnight. It didn’t last long but caused some travel chaos. I caught the bus, so I just had to contend with some slippery pavements, which I navigated with care.

I ran Perfect Organism (for ALIEN) and The Bone Swallower (for Fate Accelerated) and had time to wander around.

Perfect Organism (game files here)

Perfect Organism is my ALIEN cinematic set in a W-Y station in orbit above LV-426. The USCMC are investigating the loss of the Sulaco (from Aliens), and, well, things don’t go according to plan… Perfect Organism sold out before AireCon, so I knew I had five players. This would be my first time running it with all five players – my previous runs each had three. I was interested to see how the additional characters changed the scenario. I had expected everything to take longer, but to my surprise, we took less time than before.

This time, the players never made it out of orbit. That’s because one of the new characters shut down any suggestion that the PCs head down to LV-426 itself. Had they gone down to LV-426 (as earlier groups had), the game would have lasted longer.

It didn’t matter – the players seemed to have a blast. They leaned into their conflicting agendas – for much of the time I just sat back and watched them.

My favourite moments were the number of excuses the lead scientist had for keeping the investigators from looking at anything too deeply. She was so inventive – “There’s always a reason,” said one of the others.

Me and most of my Perfect Organism crew

Finishing earlier than expected gave me time to chat with Graham (the organiser and someone I know from Furnace), grab some lunch and a pint of beer, and buy Ivan Brett’s two books, The Floor is Lava and Bored? Games!

The Bone Swallower (more info here)

The Bone Swallower is the adventure in my Other London: Desk 17 setting book for Fate Accelerated. Again I had five players. (I’m normally wary about running games for five players, as I find it difficult to ensure everyone has enough spotlight time. But from what I can tell, I think I got it right at AireCon in both games this year. Although I may not be the best person to judge.)

My players knew of Fate, even if they hadn’t played it before. Except for one – for whom this was their first time roleplaying! While they were hesitant at times, they soon got stuck in and played along with the rest of them.

Five players is a bit much for an investigative scenario (it can feel like the players are going in mob-handed at times), but we split the party when we needed to, and their investigation took a different route to previous runs.

(It also changed one scene dramatically. Previously, there’s one scene where I’ve seen players be a little tentative. This time, convinced they had found the suspect, they went in hard and fast and quickly overpowered the bad guys.)

My favourite bit was tracking where the missing Iona had gone – using an eyewitness and traffic cameras to find the van. Nobody’s tried that before, so I was thinking on my feet.

Again, it felt like a successful session, and I felt pleased.

With my Friday duties finished, I headed back to the bus station.

Over tea, after telling Mrs H about the convention, we played Licence Plate Sentences from The Floor is Lava (but we grabbed some random letters as we were in the kitchen rather than in the car). Mrs H is so much better at it than I am!

Saturday

Overnight, I dreamt that Taylor Swift had written a song about an unpopular D&D setting she really liked. I think it was pretty good – but I can’t remember anything now. Mrs H suggested it meant I had had a good time yesterday, which was hard to argue with (although I don’t play D&D…)

Anyway, I hadn’t originally planned to be at AireCon on Saturday. However, the snow prevented the planned visit from the in-laws, so I was free to brave the bus into Harrogate again and I was there by about 11.

Saturday was a day of catching up with old friends and playing boardgames.

Games played:

Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game: A Star Wars-themed Star Realms, with a few twists. Maybe if I didn’t have so many Star Realms cards, I would be interested in it.

Letters from Whitechapel: I played this twice, a hidden movement game along the lines of Scotland Yard where one player tries to avoid capture by the others. Three of us hadn’t played before, but we picked it up pretty quickly. I was an investigator in the first game, and we caught Jack (the villain) before he murdered his second victim. As that was over fairly quickly, we played a second game, and this time I was Jack. I won on the last turn, but goodness, it was stressful! I was exhausted at the end. (One of the other players, who’d played before, said it was one of the best games of Letters that he’d played.)

I found this game by spotting a lightsabre – the system AireCon uses that lets players know that people are looking for more players. It’s a great system – and along with the area where you can linger if you’re looking to play a game means nobody should be looking for a game for long.

King of Tokyo: I entered the AireCon King of Tokyo tournament at the last minute. (I was nearby as it Cwas setting up.) I was knocked out in the first round – the winner of our table obviously loved the game and was a worthy winner.

Other moments of note included chatting with gaming pals and telling Ivan Brett (author of The Floor is Lava and Bored? Games!) about Freeform Games. I cursed myself for not having a business card with me…

Sunday

Over breakfast, we played the gloriously silly Brian? Brian! From The Floor is Lava. 

Anyway, Sunday was family day for me. I had deliberately avoided the demo and playtest areas so far as I knew I would likely spend time there today with my family (my daughter Megan, brother Phil and nephew Jack). And that’s what happened.

Megan at the AireCon sign

We had a lovely time – games played included:

7 Wonders: An Asmodee demo (some cards removed, I think). I knew how to play, but it was new to the others. However, they all liked it, and Jack won. I like 7 Wonders, but I don’t own it because it needs 3-7 players, and I won’t get it to the table often enough. (Lots of my friends have it, though, so I get to play it when I see them.)

My shelfie: Build a point-scoring bookshelf. I won this. It was okay, but nothing to write home about.

Silly selfie while playing My Shelfie

In the footsteps of Darwin: I played this with Megan and came last. Megan was pleased to beat me. Gorgeously illustrated tableau-building game. Not too heavy. A game I’d happily play, but not one I need for my collection.

Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza: I was terrible at this – a crazy loud snap variant. Jack won, and I definitely lost. Megan wanted a copy as she knew her friends would enjoy it. Unfortunately, the copy she bought was the FIFA version, which she wouldn’t have chosen had she realised. So she’s going to tailor it.

Cobra Paw: Roll dice and take the matching dominoes. I thought I’d be rubbish because Megan’s so good at pattern-spotting (she thrashes me at Dobble and Panic Lab and Set). But Phil won, and I came second. Not too bad for the old folk.

Scout: Phil was looking for a game to play at restaurants, and after asking around, we tried Scout, an intriguing trick-taking game. It fitted the bill, so he picked up a copy. (I often put Timeline or Red 7 or No Thanks or some dice for Perudo in my pocket for those situations.)

It was then time for us to head back, so that’s what we did.

Loot

I was fairly restrained at AireCon—my loot is shown below.

Airecon loot - small by many standards

I’m very happy with the books and counters, and Megan is happy with Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza (despite the FIFA branding). The freebies are fine:

• The extra card for Dixit reminded me to get it to the table more often.
• I’ll give the Ticket to Ride promo cards to someone who has TtR: Europe.
• Megan and I played with the Dobble, Time’s Up and Cortex cards when we got home. Dobble was fine—she beat me as usual (we have a set), and she’s taken the cards as a portable set to play with her friends. She also beat me at Cortex (which neither of us liked). Time’s Up might have been fun (like Articulate but with some twists), but we only had the two of us, and there were too many pop culture people that neither of us knew.
• The King of Tokyo character was a freebie for playing in the tournament, and Megan has taken that for a friend who has the game.

Gloom of Kilforth tempted me—but I need to do some research first. Megan was more interested in the upcoming version, Call of Kilforth (pirates!), so I may get that when it comes out.

I was also tempted by Earth Rising, a new cooperative game about making the world a better place (fighting poverty, solving climate change, reversing biodiversity loss and so on). It’s a great message, and the game seemed interesting. Maybe if there had been a copy to buy, I would have walked away with it. But only maybe – I don’t know how much overlap there is with the upcoming Daybreak (which focuses on climate change).

I was also tempted by the journalling RPG Be Like A Crow, which looked beautiful. But I already have (and don’t play) Thousand Year Old Vampire and I don’t suppose Be Like A Crow would be different, and I don’t need more games on my shelf to sit unplayed.

(Isn’t it interesting that the games that tempted me are all solo or cooperative? I think that’s because I know I can get them to the table. If I buy a multiplayer game, I’m relying on it appealing to my family.)

AireCon 2023 - final thoughts

Overall, I had a wonderful time. Megan was sorry she could only go on the Sunday – next year, she wants to go on Saturday and Sunday.

I thought the new halls were good. While the smaller halls are much nicer (the large halls are rather industrial - not that anyone notices when they have their heads down, studying the board), AireCon never felt overcrowded, even with the obvious increase in attendees.

AireCon 2023's industrial vibe

And although I would love to do AireCon every weekend, as an introvert, I did find it exhausting. Time to recharge the batteries!

AireCon

Last weekend I visited AireCon, the new Yorkshire-based games convention. Technically I think this was the fourth AireCon, but given that the first was in one of the organiser’s houses, and the previous two were in Bradford, but I missed them completely. But given that AireCon is rapidly expanding and its new home was the Harrogate International Centre, I thought I’d support it this time.

I bought a full ticket (Fri-Sun), but I ended up unable to go on the Friday. But I was there for both Saturday and Sunday.

Spacious!

Anyway, a few thoughts:

Location: Harrogate International Centre is a really nice venue. Large, spacious, on-site catering (and although the food was expensive, it was pretty good.) There was some unused space as well - three spare rooms that didn’t seem to be used much (the quiet play area, the large games space and the event space). The quiet area was used by some people to eat, and the event space had some people in it on Saturday but was empty when I popped my head in on Sunday.

Boardgames: tabletop games were really well presented. Huge versions of Ticket to Ride and Pandemic, a comprehensive games library, many games designers demoing their wares. And lots of people playing games. It was an awesome place to play new games, but not quite so good for meeting new people to play with. (I played Pandemic, Star Realms and Crabz.)

Family friendly: Loads of families with kids, whether playing giant Ticket to Ride or just looking at the stalls and playing with their mums and dads.

Giant Pandemic (we lost) with giant Ticket to Ride in the background

Some tabletop rpgs: The tabletop roleplaying needs a bit of attention and clearly isn’t as well developed yet. Paizo sponsored the marquee, and there was a “how to learn Pathfinder” GM, along with some other GMs, including Simon Burley and John Dodd. there. There were other GMs as well, and I played a SF horror game by John Dodd and an introductory Pathfinder adventure (more on that below).

I think the tabletop roleplaying still needs to develop. There’s an intriguing difference between regular tabletop convention goers (not many at the convention) and casual boardgamers who might drop into a game. The regulars want a four hour slot, the casual boardgamers want something that will take about an hour or so (like a regular boardgame). I’m sure there’s a solution in there somewhere.

(The AireCon website doesn’t help - it’s not very tabletop roleplaying friendly.)

GoPlayLeeds: I attended along with a few others from GoPlayLeeds, but it wasn't a great success for us. We weren't really organised, and so I don't think we drummed up any new players. (But then there were many more boardgamers than roleplayers present.)

We also didn't advertise ourselves very well. There was a community area which I found which we could have advertised on, but as far as I can tell, it wasn't directly linked from the AireCon website so I didn't find out about it until too late.

AireCon community noticeboard - which I didn't find out about until too late

Pathfinder: I played in an introductory Pathfinder game, a simple adventure involving finding a teenager who had run away and gotten a bit in over his head. I’ve not played Pathfinder (nor much D&D for that matter), and to me the switch between character interaction (what I think of as roleplaying) and the tactical miniatures game for the combat (never my favourite bits of tabletop rpgs) was a bit of a clunky switch.

But the GM was lovely (I'm sorry, I didn't catch his name), and I can really see the appeal of the Pathfinder society. The teenager in me thought that was great.

Mugs! AireCon’s mugs are really nice. For £6 you get a nice souvenir and £1 off tea and coffee at the drinks counter. They even come with a stick of chalk so you can write your name on the side so they don’t get mixed up.

Deodorant: One thing that made me smile was seeing three cans of deodorant in the gents. I’ve no idea if they were used, but it was a nice touch.

Airecon 2025

Ow. Ow. Ow ow ow.

So let’s get the bad out of the way first. Two days before Airecon 2025, I put my back out. Ouch! And to nobody’s surprise, spending three days at Airecon didn’t do it any favours. (I’m resting it now…)

But despite that, I had a great time. This is what I did.

Friday

Friday was my day for running tabletop roleplaying games.

Last year I left it a bit late and arrived at my table only a few minutes before we were due to start playing. I don’t like running late, so this year I set off from home in plenty of time (and this time remembering that driving into Harrogate during rush hour can be grim).

Anyway, I arrived at the convention centre at about 9:15 am. There was (unsurprisingly) a queue to get in, but that was okay. The doors opened at 9:30, and as most people ahead of me in the queue had checked in last night, it was only a couple of minutes before I was picking up my tickets and heading into the first of several cavernous halls.

I had plenty of time, so I got myself settled in and found the food hall, where I got a cup of tea.

10:15 to 13:15 The Aurors (Fate Accelerated)

At about 10:15, my players turned up, and we started playing The Aurors, my Wizarding World-themed Fate Accelerated investigation. (You can download it here for free.)

The players threw me an interesting curveball – during the minimal character generation, one of my Aurors developed a backstory involving Lidl and dark wizards. At our first location (the lovely town of Warkworth in Northumberland), he spent a fate token to add a story detail – Warkworth now has a Lidl in its centre. And so the players decided to check it out.

While one created a firework-based distraction in the front of the shop, the others went in around the back. So I mentally threw away the prepared start of the adventure and moved the first location to the Lidl storeroom, which the PCs investigated (while fire out front rapidly caught hold, drawing the fire brigade).

Anyway, the rest of the adventure played out (more-or-less) as expected, and our heroes defeated the villain.

I had a good time running The Aurors. The players were engaged and seemed to enjoy themselves. I don’t think any had played Fate before, but they certainly got into the swing of it.

I kept the pace up, as at only three hours, the first RPG session at Airecon is the shortest. Something to be aware of when deciding which game to run.

Lunchbreak

One thing to note if you’re running (and I guess playing) all day is that you only have a 45-minute break between session 1 and session 2. Given the food queues at previous Airecons, that might have been a problem, but luckily, it was fine this year.

Anyway, in my 45 minutes, I dropped some games into the bring-and-buy (which was extremely easy – it’s a very easy system to use – and by leaving it this late, I didn’t have to queue), and then picked up some sandwiches, which I ate back at the table.

14:00 to 18:00 Hillfolk

My second game was Hillfolk, and sadly, only two people had signed up. I really need at least three for Hillfolk (ideally four or five), so one of the other GMs (whose game wasn’t running) joined my table.

We had the Chief, the Curate, and the Captain, and this time, the game went in a very different direction. The tribe quickly became very weak (a raid on a neighbouring tribe went badly) and ended up merging with one of their rivals.

With only three PCs, I ended up running several NPCs. My favourite was Delight, the chief’s ex-girlfriend who deliberately undermined him whenever she was in a scene.

Two of my players had never played Hillfolk before – but the third had played in my game last year and come back for more!

Tea

We finished slightly early (which was always likely to happen with only three players), and so I had a leisurely hour for tea (a nice steak and ale pie with mushy peas) and chatted with old friends.

(And new friends. Someone smiled at me when I was walking gingerly through the halls, and although I smiled back, but didn’t recognise them. Our paths crossed again shortly after and they explained that they enjoyed my Cthulhu Dark adventure last year.)

19:00 to 23:00 Perfect Organism (ALIEN)

My final game was Perfect Organism, my ALIEN cinematic one-shot set a few months after Aliens and concerning the USCMC’s investigation into the loss of the Sulaco. (Download it here for free.)  

This went brilliantly. I created the characters to be deliberately antagonistic towards each other (lots of conflicting agendas), and for the first 45 minutes or so,, I did almost nothing but watch them roleplay. The players really leaned into their characters and it quickly got very intense. At one point I asked if everyone was okay, but they said they knew each other and were having a great time (but appreciated my concern for their wellbeing).

As ever with an ALIEN game, there were character deaths. We ended up with two dead and the other two in cryosleep tubes on LV-426 with no obvious means of rescue…

And with that over, I packed up and drove home.

Saturday

After a not-great night (bad back), this time I took the bus to Harrogate, getting there at about 9:45. I went straight up to the RPG area where I had signed up for a game of Slugblaster.

Slugblaster

I’ve reviewed Slugblaster before but this would be my first chance to see it in action. I signed up when Guy noted over on the Gaming Tavern forum that he was running Slugblaster at Airecon…

Unfortunately, Guy wasn’t well, and the session would have been cancelled – except the Airecon gods smiled on us. As luck would have it, we had a replacement GM, Iain, who not only knew Slugblaster but also had a one-shot session with him and wasn’t doing anything else at that moment. (As it turns out, Iain runs a game very much like Guy does.)

I took The Heart playbook. My character was Solstice, and I rode a Hardlight BMX (whatever that is).

One of the things I really like about Slugblaster is the character beats – mini dramatic arcs. Iain had already started a couple of beats on each pregen, and on mine, the Heart Arc had started: Solstice had started a relationship (with a girl I named Luna) with a member of another gang.

Iain structured the game so that we started play at the the end of a run, then we got to play some downtime, then we played through a full run, and finished with a bit of downtime.

It was all great, and I worked through two more beats in the Heart arc – the rest of the gang learned about my feelings for Luna, and it almost tore us apart.

It was brilliant, and now I want to play Slugblaster even more… (At the very least, I need to re-read the rules!)

Saturday afternoon

I chatted with Dom over lunch (I think we should start some face-to-face gaming in Wetherby), and then parted – him to run his game and me to socialise.

I bumped into Paul of Cthulhu (who runs the Yog-Sothoth.com Cthulhu website), who I haven’t seen in years. He runs a podcast and took the opportunity to interview me about the origins of Tales of Terror, the little ideas booklet I produced in 1990. I have no idea if it was any good or not or if it will actually appear. (And as I was unprepared, I forgot to mention my co-editor, Garrie Hall, who was so influential. Oops.)

I also took my proceeds from the Bring & Buy – through some aggressive pricing, I had sold all of my games.

I had arranged to meet another friend, Philippa, but she was playing Blood on the Clocktower, so I enjoyed a quiet beer while I waited. When I caught up with Philippa, she needed something to eat, and after that, we tried a demo of Rallyman GT (which was fine but not special).

Phillippa had a game of Root booked at 6 pm, and my back was giving me gyp, so I headed home.

Sunday

If I hadn’t promised to take my daughter to Airecon, I probably would have stayed at home and looked after my back. As it was, I came into Harrogate for my third painful day.

Sunday was a day of board games and demos. We played several: Finspan, Spokes, Word Colony, Living Forest Duel, Flow, Wizards Cup, and War of the Worlds: One More Day.

My favourite was probably Finspan or Living Forest Duel. Megan liked Spokes (and really didn’t like Word Colony, as trivia isn’t her strong point).

It was a nice break from revising for A-Levels, and we headed home shortly after 3 pm.

Airecon mementos

Next year

So what about next year?

As usual, I will aim to run three TTRPG sessions. It’s much too early to decide which games, but I like running Hillfolk, but it struggles to attract players. I wonder if I should create a more geek-friendly playset – maybe something set in the ALIEN universe. (I dunno, the leaders of the colony on LV426? That might be fun. I’ll have a think.)

And this year, Airecon had a couple of rooms set aside for “social games” – things like Werewolf and Blood on the Clock Tower. They’d be ideal for a small freeform larp, so I may investigate that. (I will try and persuade Graham to find out more – I’m happy to be involved!)

This year, I also learned how the game finder worked (thanks, Philippa!) – if you want to run a game of something, you can add it to the system and say when and where you’ll be. And then people can sign up. (Or you can just trust the lightsabres – which indicate a game looking for players.) As I so rarely play Cosmic Encounter these days (it’s best with 4-5 and doesn’t appeal to Mrs H, so it rarely sees the light of day), next year’s Airecon may be an opportunity.

But that suggests I’m going to be extremely busy…

And hopefully, my back will behave itself!

The Crasta Demon at Airecon

Airecon last year

Last weekend was Airecon in Harrogate, and I ran The Crasta Demon. I would have liked to have run at least one other game over the weekend, but I could only attend Airecon on the Saturday during the day as I had other commitments.

The Craster Demon went really well.

I turned up to discover that six people had signed up to my five-player game, so I quickly created a 6th character: Apprentice Pike. Juggling six players is always a bit of a challenge, so I had to keep everything brief and didn't let anyone avoid the spotlight.

Some Crasta Demon highlights:

Apprentice Pike

• Only one of the players was familiar with Fate Accelerated, but they all picked up the system really quickly. Nobody had a problem with approaches, or a lack of skills. Five of the players already knew each other, which helped the dynamic around the table.
• This time I tried using Bonds (inspired by Dungeon World) instead of DramaAspects, and they worked really well. Simple, and I think more effective than DramaAspects, so I shall carry on using them for one-shot games.
• The first time I ran the game, I didn’t roll for the opposition (I assumed everyone rolled zero). This time I did roll - and my first roll for the goblin attack (my first roll of the game) was +4 - so the goblins were attacking at +8 for that round. That resulted in quite a bit of damage - but it was nothing the players couldn’t handle.
• As his trouble, Wickham chose I have family obligations. He played on that a couple of times, and used it to bring in a family member in the lynchmob scene. So while the rest of the team was all for a rescue (as expected), I tempted him with a fate point by compelling him and his family obligations. He refused…
• After a good first round against the goblins, Loxley had a miserable set of dice rolls and really struggled to inflict damage against his enemies. Yet he was the one who finally killed the Crasta demon. (During the battle, I suggested that they start creating advantages, and his final shot was at +17 or something like that).
• Apprentice Pike ended up being played by the youngest player (well, he looked youngest to me), and I really liked how he fitted into the game (given that it was a handwritten, last-minute character sheet).
• Wickham invented a secret passage into the castle that he would have known about, which was an interesting twist. I love it when the players come up with things that I hadn't planned.

Overall it went really well. It took a little over two hours and the players seemed to enjoy themselves (as did I).

I did spot a couple of minor glitches to the scenario, which I’ve now updated (along with Apprentice Pike).

The rest of Airecon

I enjoyed the rest of Airecon as well. I played Thunderbirds and Swords and Bagpipes, and I taught someone D-Day Dice. The food was good - better than last year. Next time hopefully I’ll get there for both days.

Saving disasters with Thunderbirds

AireCon 2026

Last weekend was AireCon, the three-day board game and ttrpg convention in Harrogate.

I couldn’t make it on Saturday this year, so instead I just attended on Friday and Sunday, running three TTRPGs.

Friday

Although my game didn’t start until 2pm, I arrived just after 11 and dropped off some games at the bring-and-buy. (My memory last year was that there was an early rush for the bring and buy, but leaving it until later was much more relaxed.)

I then wandered the trade hall, chatted to friends, and had a bit to eat from the food trucks (in their new position outside the convention centre in the grounds of the Hilton Hotel (which was used for ttrpgs and other events – a lovely new venue for this year).

ALIEN: Perfect Organism

I ran Perfect Organism, my five-player cinematic ALIEN scenario that focuses on a USCMC investigation into the loss of the Sulaco after Aliens. The investigation team have arrived at LV-426 and the W-Y station there. Things don’t go well...

I had five great players, and a higher survival rate than many of the games. (Although we burned through the NPCs at quite a rate.)

I had updated the scenario to the current ALIEN rules (Evolved edition) and was interested in seeing how it had changed. While there are lots of small changes (a full list here), the main changes as far as I was concerned were the new stress rules. However, having now experienced the new stress rules, I didn’t like them. Maybe they work in longer games (or where you are making lots and lots of dice rolls), but in a short game like Perfect Organism, stress was never a danger. I may go back to the first edition rules when I run it again.

Saturday

I didn’t make Saturday this year, which was a shame. If I had, I would have spent the day playing board games.

Sunday

Good Society

Good Society is Storybrewers’ Jane Austen game. After my experience at last year’s Furnace, I decided to bring my Wealth and Fortune playset to AireCon. The changes I’ve made are around character generation – I’ve created the base characters and links between them beforehand (just like a pregen), but letting the players create the minor characters.

After my experiences of Hillfolk not filling last year, I was a little reluctant to pitch Good Society, but I needn’t have worried – it filled up pretty quickly. 

I had a full table of five players, and after a slightly slow start, they soon got into the swing of the story and got up to all sorts of shenanigans (including a risqué scene in a lake). We reached a fine conclusion, which included a marriage proposal, so it was all as it should be.

(The slow start isn’t unusual with this kind of game. It can take a little while for the players to warm up properly.)

So I was very happy with how my playset worked. I’ve made a few tweaks and if you’re interested, you can download them here.

Thoughts on Good Society

With a second edition imminent, I had some thoughts on my experience.

Resource tokens: For a one-shot, we had an awful lot of resource tokens on the table. With two per main character and one each for the minor characters, that was 20 resource tokens on the table before we added any for the rumours. (And had I been playing strictly according to the rules, there would have been another 10 on the table – I allowed the minor characters only one resolve token each.) 

And as it happened, we didn’t use resolve tokens all that often. Maybe five or six times? So I think in future, just giving each player two resolve tokens to begin with will probably be enough for a one-shot. (And let them share the tokens between the main and minor characters.)

Reputation: While we used the reputation rules to assign new criteria, it didn’t have much impact on the game. I would be tempted to remove reputation completely from a one-shot, except that the players did adjust their reputation tags as they took actions they felt affected their reputation. 

(Technically, reputation tags can be traded for resolve tokens. As noted, we had masses of resolve tokens, so this was never an issue. Also, doing this removes the tag, which makes sense as a game mechanic but not in terms of character.)

Minor characters: With each player having two, we had ten minor characters involved. Not all of them became part of the story (many appeared only briefly). While I’m tempted to suggest just one minor character each, I think having lots of minor characters gives players more opportunities to find exactly the character they need.

Lunch

AireCon doesn’t leave a huge gap between the first and second sessions – just 45 minutes. I was slightly worried about getting back to the bring-and-buy to collect my earnings and unsold games, but it wasn’t crowded, and I had plenty of time to do that and grab something to eat.

Traveller: Calli’s Heroes

My last game was John Ossoway’s adventure for Traveller: Calli’s Heroes. The PCs are Imperial soldiers operating in a warzone during the Fifth Frontier War, and have the opportunity to loot an Ancient vault full of unimaginable riches.

I’d played Calli’s Heroes last year at Furnace, and so I knew it would be a solid con game. John was kind enough to let me have the files, and so at AireCon I took it out for a spin.

Calli’s Heroes was great. I had five good players, all happy to lean into the squad dynamics. They did appropriately soldierly things and ambushed Vargr mercenaries and Zhodani troops. They ended up with a handful of fabulously valuable Ancient artefacts – assuming they can figure out how to fence them. But that’s another adventure…

Next year

I’m already looking forward to next year. Hopefully I will be able to attend all three days…

Airecon 2022

So last weekend found me spending two days at Airecon 2022, the friendly boardgame convention in Harrogate. I’ve been to four or five Airecons—the last one was in 2020 and was the weekend before everything locked down because of the pandemic. (Previous posts here.)

Airecon was my first big event since lockdown. I’ve done a few things since then, but nothing on the scale of Airecon and I was shattered by the end. And I was there for less than 50% of the time…

On the Friday I played a few demos, chatted with some old friends, and ran some Fate Accelerated. On Saturday I attended with family (my daughter, brother and nephew) and we played games. I didn’t attend on the Sunday.

Boardgames

We played a load of demos and games—these are the ones that stuck with me.

Moon: I played two demos of Moon, the forthcoming game by Haakon Gaarder and published by Sinister Fish (and coming to Kickstarter in May). Moon completes a trilogy of games with a similar look that started with Villagers (which we really like) and continued with Streets (not such a hit with us, but I should give it another chance). In Moon, you are running a moonbase, and it’s a drafting game much like Seven Wonders or Sushi Go.

As I don’t have either of those in my collection (and given that Megan enjoyed it when she tried it on Saturday), it seems likely that I’ll back the Kickstarter.

Trek 12: Trek 12 was Megan’s favourite game—rolling dice and creating chains or groups of numbers. I found it surprisingly tricky, and Megan well and truly thrashed me. She bought a copy (and is playing it as I type this).

Sagrada: I enjoyed Sagrada, a dice-placing game about stained glass windows. I won the four-player game we played, but Phil picked up a copy, so no doubt I’ll be playing it again.

The Aurors

On Friday afternoon, I ran The Aurors, my Fate Accelerated adventure of hunting dark wizards in the world of Harry Potter. I had five inventive players who came up with lots of suggestions. None had played Fate before, but they picked it up pretty quickly.

I started the game with a Setting Grid and questions (as Backstory Cards). I could tell the players hadn’t done anything like that before, but they embraced the concept, and we used several ideas during the adventure.

The players clearly knew their Harry Potter and came up with loads of great ideas, including:

• Asking if the first victim’s ghost was around. A Fate token made that so, and they got key clues much earlier than the previous times I’ve run it.
• Rather than fight the acromantulas, the animagus changed into one and spoke to them instead. That was great—during character generation I told the players they could choose stunts and other aspects of their character during play, and this was a great choice.
• The plot involves a powerful wizard’s wand, and one player had an idea to go to Ollivander’s and see if there was a twin, and whether it was available. Again, another Fate token spent, so I gave them the twin wand (a special +2 stunt).
• They looked up Aberforth as an old member of the Order of the Phoenix.
• And they posted lots of ministry guards—but of course, Lucivere cut through them like a hot knife through butter because the PCs are the heroes of our story.

I think my GM-ing was okay. I ran with their ideas which meant deviating from my notes now and again, but we ended up with a big battle at the end during which they defeated Lucevere Razorblood, dark wizard and Dementor inventor. We took about three hours, all told, which was about right.

You can download The Aurors here and I wrote about it previously, here.

Overall

I like Airecon. Next year I’ll try to run more than one RPG—but there’s so much going on that I don’t want to spend my whole convention in the RPG room.

Airecon 2019

Overall, I had a delightful Airecon 5. Airecon is the annual board and tabletop rpg convention held in March in the Harrogate Conference Centre. This was my third visit (it's virtually on my doorstep so it would be daft not to go).

This year, for the first time, I didn't go alone. Megan came with me, as did my brother and Jack his son. They all enjoyed themselves, and Megan decided to come back on the Sunday with me.

Here's how our convention played out.

Saturday

We started with Arrr, a playtest of a game of pirates digging up treasure. This involved getting our meeples to the buried treasure, rotating sections of the board to get paths to line up. There were some rules about stealing other player's treasure, but these seemed a bit complicated (a few too many exceptions involved) and when we started playing the complexity of just getting my meeples to my treasure meant I couldn't handle the stealing rules. I said this, Phil agreed, and we decided to ignore stealing for this game.

Arrr

Maybe stealing works once you've figured out the movement, but as a race game it was fine. (But I won, so maybe my view is coloured by that.)

Over at the Asmodee section of the game we decided to try Dice Forge. We were taken through the rules by one of the demo team, and had a very enjoyable game. Dice Forge features six-sided dice with interchangeable faces that you upgrade - it's a bit like a deckbuilder but you only have 12 cards. It plays quick and I like rolling dice. I won this as well.

Thumbs up for Dice Forge

After Dice Forge we wandered around the stalls a bit, I caught up with a few people that I knew, and then we grabbed something to eat from one of the several food outlets.

After that I went to find Megan (who was dropped off by Mrs H) while Phil and Jack played a few other games. When we came back, Phil and Jack were deep in a game so Megan and I played Wibbel, playtested a bee game (a bit too random - Megan had a great theme suggestion though), and played a huge version of Tsuro using carpet tiles (fun mainly for the physicality of it).

Phil and Jack then joined us to play Hey That's My Fish with the players as the playing pieces. We played a team game (kids v adults), and the team aspect was very interesting in trying to agree who should move each turn. Happily for all, it turned out to be a tie.

Hey! That's My Fish!

We then headed back to the Asmodee demo section to try Pandemic: The Fall of Rome, which we lost heavily. We followed that up with Four Elements (a four player flicking game similar to carrom) before having a final game of Dice Forge (which Phil decided to buy).

Sunday

My original plan for Sunday was to go on my own and play a tabletop RPG. (My even earlier plan was to run some tabletop, but I wasn't organised enough for that.) However, Megan had such a nice time on Saturday that she wanted to come with me. I'd booked myself in on a game, but it had no free spaces so instead we found a game with a couple of free spaces and played that instead.

Our characters - we were all playing women.

I checked with the GM that it was suitable for a 12-year old, and we started playing. The game was a Victorian Fate Accelerated investigation into mysterious goings on at an archaeological dig in Egypt. Unfortunately the game was very slow and I could tell Megan was bored (I wasn't that excited myself). Worse, I don't think we could ever have worked out what was going on from the clues we were given (even the grown-ups, let alone Megan).

A couple of things would have improved it:

• Fewer players: When we joined, we had four players total. That's a good number for a tabletop RPG, it means that everyone gets plenty of limelight. Unfortunately, we were joined by two more players, making us six. Unless you're playing Hillfolk (or another game designed for lots of players), or you're an exceptional GM, six players is really too many.
• Replace the first scene with shared history: Although the game was set in Victorian Egypt, the first scene was set at our lodgings in London and basically consisted of us being hired to investigate mysterious goings-on. We were never going to say no, but dutifully we played this out over 30 pointless minutes. Instead, we could have started in Cairo and replaced the hiring section with some character building and shared history.
• Provide context with the clues: In an ideal scenario, we would have pieced together the clues, understood what was going on, and developed a plan to stop it. Unfortunately while we were finding clues, as players we didn't understand what we were seeing. As a result, all we did was poke the scenery and reacted to what turned up. If we'd understood what the clues meant, maybe we could have been more proactive. While the GM did bring the final scene forward, I'm pretty sure the mystery was unsolvable. The denouement featured a previously unknown NPC and some mad science, which I certainly didn't see coming.

Sorry for the rant. I set high standards for convention games as I don't like disappointing players (and I don't like to be a disappointed player).

Adding a cat to the wall of cats

Lunch followed the RPG, and then designer Jon Hodgson demoed Bang and Twang, a very lightweight card game that was a fun but probably needed a few more beers to properly enjoy.

Megan and I then played Assembly, a cooperative game that we narrowly lost (we would have won it on our next turn). We finished Sunday with The River, a worker placement game that I came joint first in.

The River

Sunday at Airecon was noticeably quieter than Saturday, and speaking to one of the traders they said that it felt like everyone was just passing through the trade stands on Sunday, unlike Saturday where they would stop and browse. I couldn't disagree, as I'd done exactly that!

So that was Airecon 5, and we are all looking forward to Airecon 6 next year.

Airecon 2024

Last weekend, I was at AireCon 2024, the games convention in Harrogate’s convention centre.

AireCon is lovely. There’s a great mix of RPGs, board games and other activities and a lovely, friendly atmosphere. I was there Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Friday

Friday was RPG day for me. I ran three RPGs (enough to get me a weekend pass). I ran Hillfolk (DramaSystem), Hazelwood Abbey (DramaSystem) and In Whom We Trust (Cthulhu Dark).

Hillfolk (DramaSystem)

I set off from home a little later than I planned and arrived at my table to find my three players waiting for me. Unfortunately, that was all we had – three players. I know the game was sold out, but two players never turned up. 

Of the players, one had never played Hillfolk, one had run it some years ago, and the other had the Kickstarter, but their partner had played in the game I ran at Continuum last year! They’d said it was awesome, so no pressure this time…

We spent an hour or so developing our characters and creating the network of needs and wants that drive the action. The characters this time were the Chief, the Artisan and the Curate and our story involved cave paintings, the suspicious death of the previous chief and (eventually) the successful raid on a neighbouring tribe.

Some thoughts:

• Hillfolk with three players was fine. It wasn’t as good as with five, but it was more intense for each of them.
• We had quite a few procedural scenes this time.
• I introduced a few NPCs – I think I’m getting better at managing them in DramaSystem.
• I kept track of scenes this time – we had 18 scenes in total.

After Hillfolk, I had a quick bite to eat, and then it was time for Hazelwood Abbey.

Hazelwood Abbey (DramaSystem)

Hazelwood Abbey is Hillfolk but in a Downton Abbey setting. Again, I had three players, and this time they chose the Earl, an illegitimate Heir and the (Dowager) Countess. Our story this time was driven by Dowager Countess’ refusal to accept the Heir and her eventual murder of the Earl!

Some thoughts

• Again, just three players – but I think five had signed up. Again, the game was intense and would have benefitted from more players.
• Only one procedural scene. When I ran it at Furnace last year we didn’t have many either – maybe that’s a feature of the setting.
• Again, 18 scenes. I think that’s a coincidence. The situation for Hillfolk has an obvious ending (dealing with the neighbouring tribe) whereas with Hazelwood Abbey I have to judge the right time to stop – so the Earl’s murder was ideal. 
• I played even more NPCs this time than I did last time.

In both Hazelwood Abbey and Hillfolk, the players embraced the game and the system, and we had lots of lovely dramatic scenes. And DramaSystem games are so easy to run – almost no preparation is needed. I’m now planning my next playset – this time set around a successful rock band.

(My Hazelwood Abbey DramaSystem playset is available on Itch.io.)

After Hazelwood Abbey I went to get some tea and met Philippa, a friend. I had some time before my next game, so I taught her the Villagers board game (and, um, won) before heading back to the RPG rooms for Cthulhu Dark.

In Whom We Trust (Cthulhu Dark)

I had all five players for In Whom We Trust, a one-way trip deep into the Amazon jungle. Inspired by the movies Outbreak and Arachnophobia (the scariest PG movie ever), I originally wrote In Whom We Trust as a Call of Cthulhu “tournament” adventure for Convulsion/Continuum in the mid-90s. Since then, I’ve redone it for Cthulhu Dark and made it available via Itch.io and DriveThruRPG.

Thoughts

• We had one survivor this time – but from what I could see, all the players were enjoying themselves. Even those that died grisly deaths.
• The system was simple and great, as usual. One character was close to going insane – which was about right.
• I last ran In Whom We Trust five years ago at GoPlayLeeds, and it was nice to revisit it.

After finishing, I walked back to the car past several light artworks – it was Harrogate’s Beam light festival, which was an unexpected pleasure.

Saturday

On Saturday morning I brought Megan and one of her friends to AireCon. I’d ignored the trade hall and the board games yesterday, so today was a chance to remedy that.

We played lots of games:

• War of the 3 Sanchos (a small wargame which I enjoyed more than I thought I would – but I won, so I might be biased)
• Forbidden Jungle (a co-up which we lost, badly – I’d happily play it again.)
• Panic Lab (a mental agility game which Megan won both times)
• Giant-sized Hey That’s My Fish (which Megan won – I came last)
• A playtest of a game about finding poison antidotes (which I won – the game was fine but not stellar and we gave some feedback)

Losing at Panic Lab

Then we had to say goodbye to Guy, and so Megan and I played Woof Days (which I don’t recommend, we won one game each) before catching up with Philippa again. We played:

• Wyrmspan (a heavier variant of Wingspan that I won but Megan was bored by – she found it slow towards the end)
• MLEM: Space Agency (a push-your-luck game I enjoyed but came last while Megan won; but the cat-based space theme I found offputting)
• Reef Rescue (a light memory game that I won)

After that, we entered the wonderful charity raffle. There are only a dozen or so prizes in the raffle, but each prize consists of 20 or so board games, and you stand almost no chance of winning. But if you do, you win big (and it’s up to you how you get them home)… We didn’t win, and the raffle raised over £10,000 for charity.

Waiting for the raffle

Entropoly

Finally, on Saturday, Megan and I watched Ivan Brett (from The Traitors) host Entropoly, a game where the players invent new rules each time they take a turn. The rules got crazier and crazier, with rules for wearing wigs, moving anti-clockwise, and changing the spelling of the board.

The game ended up as a co-up, with all the playing pieces merged as one trying to find the correct finish space, which had been duplicated twenty times. There was much laughing and silliness, and it was a lovely way to end the day.

Sunday

I was tired after Saturday and almost didn’t go to AireCon on Sunday. But I decided I would, and I’m glad I did, as I played in a tabletop RPG and did some networking.

What’s Old Is New (WOIN)

I took the last place in a game of WOIN, where we played adventurers with strange abilities (I was a martial artist with mysterious chi powers, another character was a mutant, and another was a cyborg) helping the oppressed. Like the A-Team. We fought vampires, met some nuns, built an improbable vehicle and smashed a sinister vampire plot. I had a good time, but I’m not sure the WOIN system is for me. It was fine but didn’t stand out – we could have used almost any trad ruleset.

After that, I found friends (old and new) and talked about Jubensha, freeforms, escape rooms, and Dune 2 before heading home.

And that was my AireCon. What will I do next year?

2023 in games

And suddenly, it’s 2024. Was 2023 anything to write home about? Some good, some bad – at least in terms of games.

2023's new boardgames

Freeform Games

Freeform Games had a great year. We published two games, transitioned our old shop into a more modern shop, and had our best year (sales and revenue) so far. I will write more on the Freeform Games blog, in a few days.

Conventions and games weekends

I’m attending more conventions these days (largely thanks to giving up the day job). I love going to conventions – as much for catching up with old friends as much as playing the games.

In 2023 I attended:

Retcon (February, Retford): A replacement for the normal UK Freeforms weekend game, Retcon was a convention of smaller freeforms and boardgames. I ran two freeforms and facilitated a game of Fiasco.

Airecon (March, Harrogate): A lovely local convention in Harrogate – I’ve been going for a few years now. It’s primarily a boardgames convention, with a small-but-healthy RPG stream. (It’s like a small UKGE, but more focus on playing and less on the trade halls.) I ran two tabletop RPGs and played lots of boardgames.

Peaky (April, not far from Tamworth): I’ve been to every Peaky since it started in the early 2000s. Intense, creative and fabulous. I wrote one game and played three. Brilliant.

Continuum (July, Leicester): This was my first Continuum in a while – it had fallen off my games calendar. I like the mix of tabletop and freeforms that I get at Continuum, plus I ran into several old friends that I don’t see at the other cons. I ran two tabletop games and played in three freeforms.

Furnace (October, Sheffield): Tabletop roleplaying only, and local enough that I don’t need to stay overnight. I ran one game and played in three.

Consequences (November, not far from Poole): Longest time away (four nights), I ran two freeforms and played in five.

Plans for 2024: Mostly the same, except that the weekend freeforms are back, which means there’s no Retcon. And I’m hoping to get to at least one day of Larpcon in Coalville.

Freeform larps

2023 was a great year for freeforms. I played or ran 20 freeforms, which I’m sure is a record. I also self-published a book, Writing Freeform Larps, which does what it says on the tin.

Favourite to run: Children of the Stars, at Consequences, was my favourite to run. It went smoothly – and although the follow-up (Messages from Callisto) also went well, that was beset by errors on my part.

Favourite to play: The Ashlight Labyrinth, which I played at Peaky, was a delight and my favourite freeform as a player in 2023. (Close runners-up were Across the City, Better than Life, Antarctic Station 13 and Ghosts: It’s not Ibsen.)

Plans for 2024:

• Finish writing and then run The Stars our Destination (the next in my first-contact series of games).
• Publish All Flesh is Grass on Itch.io. Start work on getting Children of the Stars ready for publication.
• Maybe start writing another freeform for Freeform Games.

Tabletop RPGs

I played in and ran fewer ttrpgs in 2023 than in recent years. My regular groups are fairly small (usually just four of us), and if someone can’t make it, then we cancel the session rather than struggle with just three of us. Unfortunately, we had lots of cancelled sessions in 2023.

My 2023 top games in terms of numbers were As the Sun Forever Sets (nine sessions as GM), Good Society (four sessions as a player – this is ongoing), Kingdom (three sessions as GM/facilitator). 

I ran two sessions of Hillfolk, which I’ve been meaning to run ever since it came out in 2023. So it only took me ten years. It was as good as I hoped, and I want to run more.

I published Other London: Desk 17, along with a couple of adventures. They’re not setting the world alight, but I find the whole process very satisfying. I like sharing my stuff.

Favourite to run: The two sessions of Hillfolk, which were a delight.

Favourite to play: The session of Fiasco I played (and facilitated) at Retcon – we had a great group of players and it was one of the highlights of the con.

Plans for 2024:

• Run more Hillfolk (at Airecon – and maybe see what it’s like online).
• Playtest the two scenarios I have written up (one for the Department of Irregular Services, one for Desk 17) and then publish them.
• Finish writing up two half-finished scenarios and playtest them as well.
• Maybe run a bit of Traveller, which would be very old school for me. At the very least, I will buy Mysteries of the Ancients and Wrath of the Ancients, which are completely in my wheelhouse. (I know I can get the pdfs right now, but I’m saving myself for when the hardbacks are ready.)
• If the Urban Shadows 2.0 Kickstarter appears, I’d like to take it for a spin. It’s very late (the campaign was back in 2020), but I’m relaxed about its tardiness. I don’t have room for another game, and I’d rather it was right and late than wrong and on time.
• And perhaps most important, I’d love to meet more gamers and play more games. Maybe run a few one-shots online or find a semi-regular face-to-face group.

Boardgames

In 2023, I played more games of My City than any other game. I played on boardgamearena a fair bit, which has been a lot of fun. While I’ve had a couple of online evenings with friends, most of my games have been turn-based against strangers. It’s been more fun than I had expected, and I’ve tried a lot of new games.

The new games to my collection:

My City: Reiner Knizia's legacy game with 24-episodes, plus an “eternal” game once you’ve done with the legacy game. It's a tile-placing game that takes about 15 minutes to play - so easy to play a few games in one sitting. I’ve played the eternal game quite a bit on Boardgamearena. The campaign is okay – although, toward the end, it can be demoralising if you get too far behind in the overall score.

Mottainai: a small card game by Carl Chudyk with a lot of gameplay. It’s the spiritual successor to Glory to Rome (one of my favourite games), and I like it a lot. It's tricky to get your head around and has some of the craziness that Glory to Rome has – but in a smaller, quicker package.

Daybreak: A cooperative game of decarbonising to solve climate change by Matt Leacock & Matteo Menapace. I gave it to myself as a Christmas present. I’ve played it solo on Boardgamearena a few times, but my first in-person game with Miss H ended in a loss. Don’t put the fate of the planet in our hands!

The Traitors Card Game: A Christmas present from Miss H. A tie-in to the wonderful TV series. I wondered if it was just a reskinned Werewolf (which is all The Traitors is), but it brings in elements from the TV series, such as shields and gold. It's for four players or more, and so we haven't tried it yet.

Plans for 2024: More of the same – no doubt the games collection will swell. Already on order is Kavango (drafting African animals, Kickstarter) and Innovation Deluxe (more card-based craziness from Carl Chudyk, Backerkit), but I should restrain myself. (I try and cull it every now and again, but not always successfully.)

Other games

And as usual, I played the usual assortment of video games: too much World of Tanks Blitz, plenty of Star Realms and Race for the Galaxy.

And overall?

So overall, 2023 was not so good for tabletop roleplaying, about average for boardgames, and excellent for freeforms. So I can’t complain.

2018 in games

So how was 2018 in games for me? Pretty good, I think. Here’s what I played, wrote and ran.

Freeform Games

Freeform Games had a great 2018, with sales up on 2017. This year I finally finished The Reality is Murder, a game I’ve been editing for longer than I care to admit. We put it through playtesting over the summer and in October it finally went on sale.

Freeforms

Getting theatrical
in Shogun

The weekend freeform this year was Shogun, and I surprised myself by getting involved in a theatrical troupe. I really don’t normally do that, but it was the highlight of the game for me. At Peaky I co-wrote Love Letters: The Crusade and I played in The U-Geneva Convention and The Borden Legacy.

I did a bit of development work on Second Watch, getting it ready for a third run at Consequences (and also into a publishable state). I also started work on volumes 2 and 3 of The Peaky Files (collections of Peaky freeforms).

Daniel Taylor introduced me to Little Leeds Larps (a Facebook group), but our first attempt to run a freeform for them (The Highgate Club) didn’t get enough attendees and we are trying again in January. Still, it was a good excuse to do a bit of development work on The Highgate Club (it’s a game I’ve always wanted to return to).

Tabletop roleplaying

2018 was a great year for me - I ran more tabletop rpgs than I have in a years:

• The Fallen (Fate Accelerated). An Other London investigation that I ran with my online group. I had originally conceived this as something that could be played in an hour - but I failed badly! 
• The Crasta Demon (Fate Accelerated) at Airecon, GoPlayLeeds and with my family. Although I like running the same game over and over again, I am tempted to tweak it every single time. The GPL session was interesting - I had three players, all female. I wondered if they would play female characters (the characters are all set up as gender-neutral), but only one of them did.
• The Bone Swallower (Fate Accelerated) at Furnace (more Other London(.
• The Seeds of Doom (Monster of the Week) at GoPlayLeeds. My first PbtA game, and I wrote about it here.

My character for Megan's game

Also, Megan ran a totally improvised tabletop rpg for me and two of her cousins, which was awesome. She had a whale of a time, which was great to see. It looks like she may prefer running games to playing them.

RPGs played: Starfinder, The Cthulhu Hack, Fate, Blades in the Dark, The Sword, the Crown and The Unspeakable Power and maybe a couple of others that I don’t remember. (All of them apart from The Cthulhu Hack and Fate were new to me.)

Tales of Terror

I published 37 Tales of Terror on the new website in 2018. That’s a little down on 2017, but I have been publishing a lot from the 1996 Tales of Terror collection (ToT#2, as I think of it) and none of these have been published online before.

Boardgames

I have been recording my boardgames on boardgamegeek.com for a few years now. I don’t record games where I’m playing an app, unless I’m also playing another player. (So if I play Ticket to Ride on my own, I don’t record it. If I’m playing it against Megan or Emma, then I do.)

So this year I played 221 boardgames in total, of 48 different games. The games I played most of were the ones I can play solo - so the games I played most were Tiny Epic Galaxies, D-Day Dice and Star Realms: Frontiers.

New games to the Hatherley games library were:

• Set: A very simple pattern-matching game that Megan usually thrashes me at. 
• Impulse: By Carl Chudyk. I really like his Glory to Rome and Red 7, but this hasn’t worked for me and I won’t be keeping it.
• Tiny Epic Galaxies: I really like this, a push-your-luck dice game with spaceships. It has solo rules, which means that I have played this more than any other game this year. (That also means that my family won’t play this with me because I’m too good at it.)
• Rhino Hero Super Battle: An awesome balancing game - very family friendly.
• Star Realms Frontiers: I Kickstarted this and it arrived in September. I really like Star Realms, but it’s always much easier just to play it on the app rather than get the cards out. This is probably my favourite set of cards though.
• London (second edition): Much prettier than the first edition, I’ve not played it enough to work out how much I like it.
• Pandemic Legacy Season 2: Christmas present and I expect to play through that in 2019. More on Pandemic below.
• Crypt: I Kickstarted Crypt and it turned up just before Christmas. I gave it to Megan to give to me. We’ve played a few games so far - it’s taken me a few games to get the hang of it..

Our last game of Pandemic Legacy

I finally played through season 1 of Pandemic: Legacy. I started playing it with Megan, but she got fed up with it by about August. I enjoyed the story aspect of Pandemic: Legacy, but July-August-September was a bit of a grind. The game did then pick up in October and November, with the changes taking place then having a really big impact on the game, which I really liked. (There was a point in my first November game where I considered deliberately throwing the game because of how it would affect later games. Which I guess is a sign of a good legacy game.) Megan then joined me for the finale in December: we lost the first game (on outbreaks), but got ourselves in a good place to win our last game. We ended on 799 points (“Disaster Averted”). Had St Petersburg not had an outbreak in our last game then we would have been at 802 “Legendary”.

Videogames

Videogames were dominated by World of Tanks Blitz (again - and despite trying to give it up a year ago), with Star Realms (the app) a close runner up.

2019 in games

Next year will be more of the same. In no particular order I’m looking forward to Peaky, The Torch of Freedom (2019’s weekend freeform), running The Highgate Club, Furnace, Airecon and there will be more Kickstarters arriving.

Plus Mrs H gave me the best Christmas ever: a promise to play more games!

Best present ever! Tickets to play more games!