We spent Friday at Gamestorm 11 down in Vancouver, Washington. It had probably been 20 years since either of us had been to a gaming convention and we had a great time! We’ll be talking more about the overall Gamestorm experience in next week’s podcast, but we thought we’d put up some quick reviews of the games we played while we were there.

With the exception of Munchkin Quest we had never played any of these games before. Some of them have been around for a while but they were all new to us.

The first table we stopped at was the Rio Grande Games demo. They had six games laid out; Oregon, Witches Brew, 3 Commandments, Fast Flowing Forest Fellers, Key Harvest and Change Horses. We ended up playing Change Horses, a racing game where the object is to have your horse come in last. There are (up to) five players and six horses. Each turn every player lays down a card with the colors of two of the horses. After all the players have played their cards you count up how many of each horse’s cards are out. If there are an odd number the horse moves and if there are an even number it doesn’t. Of course the idea is to make sure that the horse you are backing has an even number of cards showing. Turn order is random in the basic game and there is a distinct advantage to going last since you can see the cards that the other players have laid down and make sure your horse doesn’t move. The advanced game adds a system for players to bid for their turn order with carrots. We played the basic game but I think the advanced game would be more interesting since it removes the randomness of the turn orders. It is a deceptively simple game that could have as much strategy as you want depending on how much effort you are willing to put in to trying to figure out which horse all the other players are backing.

We then moved on to Munchkin Quest from Steve Jackson Games. We actually own Munchkin Quest and tried to learn to play it ourselves but we had a few problems getting the hang of it. Part of the problem may have been that we were trying to learn it during the worst blizzard the Seattle area had seen for decades and we were a little stressed out and distracted. In the (relatively) calm surroundings of Gamestorm and with Jason, a very helpful M.I.B. to guide us we picked it up quickly. If you a familiar with the Munchkin games and enjoy playing them, Munchkin Quest is for you. It is exactly as advertised, a Munchkin boardgame. You explore a dungeon created with randomly chosen room tiles all of which have some special condition to affect play, kill monsters and grab all the loot. If you aren’t familiar with the Munchkin games I recommend you go out and pick up the card game version for your favorite genre and start playing it before you try Munchkin Quest.

We weren’t able to actually play Planet Steam because all the slots for the game were filled up in pre-registration but we wanted to check it out anyway. Planet Steam is a civilization building game inspired by the video game M.U.L.E. which is, in my mind, still one of the best colonization/resource gathering video games ever made. Unfortunately Planet Steam is a very hard to find European import and runs between $150-200 if you can find a copy at all.

Another game we saw being demo-ed but didn’t actually play was Monsterpocalypse from Privateer Press. Monsterpocalypse is a collectible miniatures game that pits two giant monsters in a slugfest set in a major metropolis. If you were a fan of the video game Rampage you’ll like Monsterpocalypse. The mechanics seemed fairly straight forward and you can throw your opponent through buildings. What more could you ask for? If I wasn’t already totally saturated with collectible miniatures from various games I’d dive into this without hesitation.

After watching a couple turns of Planet Steam and Monsterpocalypse we had some time to kill so we went over to the Gamestorm game library and asked the people there to recommend a fast easy two player game for us. They handed us Star Wars Duels and after about 5 minutes of instruction we were playing on our own. Star Wars Duels plays out individual battles between famous Star Wars characters set on different board locations. We played Mace Windu with two Clone Troopers versus Emperor Palpatine with two Imperial Guards fighting in the Death Star throne room. Each set of characters has its own deck of cards which are used for attack, defense, or special abilities. There are four different maps and dozens of characters to chose from so replayability is very high.

After Star Wars Duels we headed back to our Steve Jackson M.I.B. Jason and tried out a round of SPANC. We were initially drawn to the game because of the artwork done by Seattle favorite and 2009 Hugo nominated artist Phil Foglio. SPANC is a card game in which players form a crew of Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Cat-girls with the goal of collecting the most loot. Loot is awarded by completing capers which are are made up of four randomly selected challenges that test the various skills of the crew, either space pirating, amazon-ing, ninja-ing or cat-girl-ing. You can also collect Toys (various weapons, armor or Pool Boys) that enhance the abilities of your crew members. SPANC was fast to learn and very fast to play. All the tests are resolved by rolling two six-sided dice and trying to get lower than your chosen crew member’s score for the relevant ability. It was fun once but I don’t see it as having a lot of repeat play potential.

The last game we played was Lunch Money from Atlas Games. Lunch Money is a card game that simulates being little girls running around the playground beating up each other and stealing each others lunch money. The play can be enhanced by coming up with your own blow-by-blow descriptions of the action. The cards feature dark, almost Goth photography by Andrew Yates which I think contributed to one of the major flaws with the game. The photography on the cards is really cool. So cool, in fact, that it seems they didn’t want include any rules text that might have covered up the pictures. Play is supposed to be very fast paced with one player attacking, one defending and the potential for interference from other players. Unfortunately, even with two of the six players at the table being very familiar with the rules and helping the rest of us out, the flow was disrupted on nearly every turn by people having to consult the rule sheet to find out what their cards did. There are apparently many pages worth of errata and rules clarifications on-line but again you would have to have all these memorized in order for play to actually be “fast paced”. It was still fun to play but I think it would help enormously if there was at least some basic text on the cards to speed things up even if it did interfere with the atmosphere.