This is very long and rambling. So, if you just want to see some pictures, go here.Origins is one of the nations largest gaming convention. It represents many aspects of gaming: board games, roleplaying games, miniature games, collectable card games, and even some traditional games. I found out about this convention about four months ago from one of my board gaming podcasts and I new I had to go and see what the talk was all about. Plus, many of the podcasters were going to be there.
6am to 12pm:Justin and I left for
Columbus at 6am.
We got to
Columbus by 7:30am with plenty of time to register and get gaming by 8am, when most of the games started.
The
Columbus Convention Center is a large place.
And the whole thing was going to be used by gamers of some form or another.
We apparently entered the convention hall on the wrong end, because we didn’t see any registration booths.
But, we could definitely tell that we were in the right place. Gamers just have a look about them.
I stopped someone and asked him where to register and he said the other end of the Center, about a mile away.
So, we started our trek across the Convention Center passing hundreds of tables and rooms where thousands of peoples would get their gaming on.
The registration was easy and quick.
We were even given some swag.
We got a bag with the Origins program book with all the events in it, a deck of Pirates the constructible collectible card game, some D&D metal cards, and a few other small things.
I found a
Dice Tower button and pinned it on my shirt and off we went.
Justin and I set off for the Table Top Event Hall and see what was there.
It consisted of a large room with hundreds of tables but most of them empty.
In the back was a large Pokemon setup with tournemnet players signing up to play.
We looked around and didn’t really know what to do.
Justin and I thought that the vendors were just not there yet to set up for the main exhibit.
We didn’t know that that exhibit was next door and didn’t open until 10am.
At the registration booth you can also sign up to play one of the thousands of events that start one the hour every hour.
This seemed the best way to start out the day.Justin and I decided to register for one game.
We figured this way we would have a guaranteed spot for our first gaming experience.
The generic tokens we had purchased during registration could also be used to get the player into a game.
But, you
had to find (location and time) a game you wanted to play anyway, so you might as well sign up officially.
So, we wandered into the tabletop gaming hall and found our table for our first game of Caylus.
This game was supposed to take two hours and forty-five minutes.
It seems to fit the classic Euro-game style:
collect resources and money so you could buy stuff so you can get more resources.
Justin and I both like these types of games, so we thought it would be fun.
After a minute or two, the second scheduled player showed up and we had enough to start playing.
But, two other people immediately joined using generic tokens and we began a five player game.
After about 40 minutes of muddling through the directions and other players trying to teach me and Justin, we started to actually play.
The game took nearly 3 ½ hours of gameplay.
It was a fun game and I think it would just continue to get better the more you played.
I took fourth right in front of the guy who left the game early. Justin took third just ahead of me and all three of us got our butts kicked. The other two guys were pretty good. I give the game
8 out of 10.
12pm to 1pm:After this lengthy and slightly exhausting game, we were starving.
So, instead of wasting much time getting something to eat, Justin and I went to the food court in the convention hall and grabbed something quick.
But, it turned out the food court was a lot more interesting than we had expected.
This small area was a melting pot of all the different types of gamers that frequent the Origins convention.
You had people from the war room talking about different strategies for their ancient Egyptian Giza battle scenario.
In the corner was a mom and dad, wearing their Pokemon t-shirts, eating while their son (the obvious Pokemon expert) was busy sorting his boxes of cards for his next national tournament match.
Behind us were the typical nerdy board gamer and his friend ripping into a newly purchased game so they could start punching out the hundreds of cardboard pieces.
The large table was taken up with roleplayers excitedly (and loudly) talking about a
new 100-sided die they found at the convention that would roll much quicker than the usual 100-sided die and how this would come in handy in their games later on that day.
Then, you had the LARPers (live action roleplaying).
These are the people that strut around in costume dressed as a character from one of their roleplaying scenarios.
In their games, they act out different scenarios and pretend to be the characters.
For the guy LARPers, the costume usually involves a lot of armor and foam weapons from some sort of era.
But, for the girls, this seemed to be a way to dress up in either next to nothing or at least in a lot of leather.
Oh, and of course, following these girls were the overweight, mid 30 guys slightly drooling and asking if they can take a picture of the hot girl LARPer.
I will give credit to the girls, though.
They always smiled and never said no to me (I mean them).
I think the LARPers are the ex-drama geeks that need a way to express themselves and be the center of attention again.
You could spend many hours in the food court watching people and be completely entertained.
1pm to 3pm:After this rather surprising experience, we decided to hit the main exhibit hall were all the vendors and game manufactures resided.
This was the meat of the convention.
Games everywhere, millions of dice available to purchase, booth babes trying to get you to buy nude vampire art, foam sword fighting, this hall had it all.
Justin was interested in finding a “Got Wood for Sheep” t-shirt, so we started walking up and down all the rows to see if we could find the Settler of Catan shirt.
While there were a lot of shirts for sale, we were not able to find anything that game specific.
We some games for sale (including Space Dealer, which I’ve been thinking about getting for a while), we didn’t want to have to carry them around for the rest of the day.
So, we thought we would just browse for now a come back later in the day to purchase.
We found our way over the Rio Grande Games section and saw that they had a lot of the Spiel de Jares nominees set up and you could demo them.
So, the only open table was for Jevuit Von Theben and I had heard of this game and wanted to try it.
When we got to the table a guy came up to us and
asked if we wanted to play.
I assumed he was working there and was going to show us the game, but it turned out he just wanted to play too.
That’s when recognized the voice and looked up to see Rick Thornquist, game news expert (I know him from the
Dice Tower podcast).
I said hi and that I listen to him all the time and we got someone to show us how to play the game.
Theben is a fun light game.
You are an archeologist trying to acquire knowledge of different dig site and then going on digs to gather the most points.
The unique aspect of this game is that everything you do takes time.
And time is important in this game.
The person who is in last place on the time track always takes their turn.
So, if you use up too much of your time on one task, the next player could take 3 or 4 turns in a row.
After 3 years of play, the game is over and the person with the most points wins.
The luck of the game comes in on the dig.
Each site has a bag full of point chips where over half of them are blank.
When you draw a point chip you get it, unless it is blank, then it goes back in the bag.
So, you could spend a lot of your weeks drawing a large number of chips and get nothing while your opponent could spend just one week and get a five point chip.
The players do know what chips are left in each bag, so they can go after the bag with the better odds.
But, this doesn’t always help.
Rick and Justin tied with more than twice the points than what I got! I give this game
6 out of 10.
Rick was very nice and told us about a new game he was excited about called Duel in the Dark.
In fact, he had just purchased it when I meet him.
This is a high recommendation for a game.
(He doesn’t have to buy many games.)
He also mentioned that we should go up to the Board Room and play some games there.
This was an area that the Columbus Gamers Group set up where you can go and just check out games and play them.
This sounded good to us.
But, before we headed up to the Board Room, we wanted to check out the Miniatures Exhibit Hall with all the wargamers.
Wow, these guys are devoted.
In this huge room, many different tables had been set up with different scenarios for battling.
We saw tables that were 15 feet long with different terrain sculpted into the board.
There was desert, jungle, space, and even river boards.
Each had tons of little painted miniature unit scattered throughout the map getting ready to battle the opposing forces on the other side of the map.
The Helm’s Deep board was amazing.
It looked really good.
There were even maps for dogfights in the air for everything from WWI planes to modern jet fighters.
One map had biplanes suspended 12 – 20 inches above the table by poles.
These planes were obviously in the middle of a frenzied dogfight with 8 people sitting around the table contemplating their next moves.
After the miniatures room, it was time for some more gaming.
3pm to 7pm:The Board Room is where most of the gamers from the podcasts hang out.
I tried to find Tom and Sam from the
Dice Tower or Dave and Stephen from the Spiel or Scott from Board Games with Scott.
No luck.
Oh, well.
They were probably out to dinner.
So, Justin and I took a while to find a game that worked for two players that we thought we would like and could learn to player fairly easily.
We saw Power Grid and decided that would be fun.
(It was at this point that I reali
zed that generic token people were second class citizens to people with the “Board Room” ribbon.
You needed one of these two options to play games in the Board Room.
When the guy running the room found out we only had generics, he made sure to tell us that they were only good for two hours and we had to have it back by then.
He was not very nice and I think I’ll just get a ribbon next year.
Maybe he was just hungry.)
So, we decided on Power Grid.
We took it into the hall and found an empty table and started to set it up.
I read the rules and we even had a few people stop by to give us a rules summary and ask if we needed help.
They were very nice.
Soon, we were quite into the game and loving every minute of it.
Power Grid is a game about balancing your expenses between power plants and the resources to run the plants and the number cities you are powering.
The first step is to auction off a power plant.
This property is used to power a certain number of cities.
The second step is to buy enough of the resources to use the power plant.
Then the last step is to purchase new cities.
The player has to be careful because he can only use the cities that he has enough power plants for.
After these steps, the player then gets more money based on the number of cities that he has.
Then you repeat this until someone gets to a set number of cities.
In our game we both tied on the number of cities.
So, the tie breaker was the amount of cash left over.
Throughout the game, we had been spending hundreds of dollars on cities and resources.
The difference between Justin and I was $9.
That’s it.
I won.
Great game overall.
I give it a
9 out of 10.
My only concern is that the game seems too balanced.
I don’t know if Justin and I are that evenly matched or just new at the game or if it was because it was a two player game, but I just hope that the end isn’t always that close.
After Power Grid we went back to the food court and grabbed another quick meal.
We didn’t want to waste any time on eating.
We decided to go back to the Main Exhibit Hall To see if we wanted to purchase any games.
Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that the main hall closed at 6pm.
What’s that about?
I don’t understand why it would close so early.
Oh, well.
We did see a sign for an all day live auction of games in another smaller room, so we went over there.
Here, an actual auctioneer would take a game from his stack of hundreds of used games and auction it off within 30 seconds.
Apparently, people bring in their used, new, or rare games to be auctioned off and make some money.
We didn’t see anything we need and it seemed a little bit too frantic for us.
So, we didn’t buy any games from the convention.
Time enough to play one more game, though.
7pm to 9pm:So, we found an area in the convention that was for Mayfair Games.
We were admiring the LARGE Settlers of Catan games and other Mayfair Games in the area.
I saw that they had Shear Panic.
This was an Origins nominated game of the year and it plays relatively quickly so
we decided to try it.
Justin needed to get back so we only had a little over an hour left.
We talked to the
Mayfair people and sat down to play a two player game.
The moderator came over to explain the game and told us that she didn’t like explaining the two player game, so would we mind getting another player.
Weird.
But, we said we didn’t care if someone else joined.
So, she found someone who was waiting to play another schedules game and asked him to join us.
He said he only had 15 minutes before his next game.
No problem.
Fifteen minutes later, she was done explaining the rules and we were ready to play.
Of course, the third player guy had to leave by then.
So, the
Mayfair moderator girl went on to explain the two player version to us, anyway.
After about five minutes we were ready to play.
That’s when another girl sat down and asked if she could play.
The moderator said she was done and her shift was over.
The girl could play if I wanted to teach her and the moderator left.
Weird.
So, having played zero times, I explained the rules to the new girl and we started.
Shear Panic really isn’t hard.
It’s a nice little abstract game with a cute theme over top of it.
You have a board that shows about 7 different type of movement that you can do to the sheep.
The sheep start out in a 3x3 grid and you take turns moving them in some way such as jumping them or turning the whole flock.
Nonetheless, you take turns rearranging the sheep to get points for your sheep and keeping you opponents sheep separated as much as possible so they don’t get points.
During the game the object of the game changes so the sheep need to be in different spots.
Sometimes the sheep need to be in front, sometimes they need to be in back, and sometime they need to be side by side.
It was a fun quick game.
I give it
7 out of 10.
Oh, and I totally kicked butt at that game.
We left the convention having spent 13 hours there and 9 hours of it playing games.
All in all, not a bad day.
I can see how people could easily spend all 5 days at the convention.
There is just so much to do.
Maybe next year.
I’ll start working on Sarah now.
See my few pictures here.
We land at the airport at about 6:30pm in Columbus. We get off the plane at head towards the shuttle to take us to the long term parking. I don't remember exactly where we parked, but I know the area of the parking lot. We got to the shuttle and discover that there are three different lots: green, blue, and red. I don't remember what lot color, but Sarah says she thinks we're in the red lot. So we get on the shuttle and start heading out. Jacob is pretty relaxed because he's dead tired. The red lot is huge and I know that we are in the furthest corner of the lot. So, the driver drops us off and we start walking towards our car. Can you guess what happens next? Yeah. Our car is not there. We look around and I can tell that we are too far away from the airport. So, I lug Jacob on my shoulders and head off towards the airport looking for our car. It doesn't take long for us to realize that we must be parked in the next lot. After a half mile walk, we see the same driver pulling back into the lot. We sheepishly get back on the shuttle and ask him to take us to the blue lot.
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