Last Friday and Saturday marked the 3rd Annual "Gathering of Strangers", also known as the Utah Boardgaming Convention. I took off work and attended both days, leaving a little early on Saturday.
I have a couple of pix, but nothing terribly noteworthy to show in a picture other than a big room full of tables filled with tons of people playing tons of games.
On Friday, Lynette was able to attend with me for about 5 hours. We played Tikal, Scrabble and Settlers of Catan (as well as walking to the bookstore to pickup my first packet of books for fall semester). After she went home, I played Pillars of the Earth (which was a lot of fun but felt like there was too much going on in too short a period of time...not that the game was short, it was a lengthy game, it just felt too busy at times. I also played a game called Uptown which was a strange little strategy game where players are placing their tiles on a board and trying to keep their own tile clusters as tight as possible. Kind of interesting.
On Saturday I played Shear Panic and Senji. Shear Panic was a lot of fun and I'm thinking of picking it up....I think my kids would love playing with the sheep too much though and they might get lost. Senji is a brand new game (just released last week) and it was a ton of fun. The closest comparison for non-hardcore-gamers would be Risk...in that it's a conquest style game complete with dice rolls and troop movement and other such fun. It goes beyond Risk or even Axis & Allies by adding in card collecting and trading elements as well as special Samurai units. It was a bunch of fun.
This year's convention felt a little more relaxed and organized...maybe because I felt like I had more time for gaming and so I wasn't always frantically looking for the next game while bemoaning my 'downtime.'
It was a fabulous success in my opinion and I look forward to next year. :)
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