Dragonflight 2023 Retrospective

Dragonflight was my first convention ever, back in 2015 (I think).

It’s held at the same hotel in Bellevue, Washington, as OrcaCon is held (though the hotel rooms are a lot more expensive, being in the Summer instead of January like OrcaCon).

Thus, it holds a bit of nostalgia for me.

I haven’t been since 2019, missing it in 2020 due to Covid (obviously) and then not really feeling like attending the last two years.

But this year I decided to go again!

Not only do I have a contingent of Vancouver friends that I always enjoy going to conventions with, but now that I have some Seattle friends to hang out with as well, it looked like it was going to be a great weekend!

Of course, this post would have gone out last week if I hadn’t caught one of the nastiest colds I’ve had in a while from this very same convention.

If you saw my Friday Night Shots post last week, you saw that I’ve been out of commission and I still feel like shit. Just not as much shit as I was feeling last week.

I’m finally feeling up to writing something!

I have to say that the Bellevue Hilton is a really great hotel. I’ve been there many time for conventions and their service is top notch.

I don’t know how they are to deal with as far as organizing a convention goes, but from an attendee standpoint, I have no complaints.

While OrcaCon arranges for food trucks in the parking lot, Dragonflight has a kind of concession area open for lunch and dinner (breakfast would be nice too, just baked goods and coffee and whatever would be fine!).

Yes, it’s a bit overpriced, but your hamburger is actually pretty thick and juicy, not flattened and greasy like it so often can be in other places.

But anyway, you’re not here to hear about the food, right?

(The restaurant breakfast buffet is also worth checking out at least once, for $22 you get all you can eat breakfast stuff, pretty much anything you can imagine

but I digress)

You’re here to hear about the games!

I got to the hotel and checked in on Friday around 12:30.

While waiting for some of my other friends to make themselves known, I found a couple of my Seattle friends sitting down to a game of Rise (by Capstone Games).

I would have loved to have joined that, but unfortunately they had already started. It looks like a cool game!

While chatting with them for a bit and watching the game, one of their friends came by and mentioned they were looking for a fourth player for Dokmus (by Renegade Game Studios), one of the older games that I’ve heard of but never played.

Wanting to get the gaming started, I said “Sure!” and headed to the ballroom with him.

Dokmus is a game where you are exploring an island of your peoples’ gods.

The cool thing about the game is that the map consists of 8 square tiles set up in a square (leaving the middle blank).

It has some elements of area control but also action selection in that each round you will be drafting one of the five god cards that will determine turn order and also what your special power is.

You will then be placing/using three of your pieces to spread influence on the board (before or after you do your special god power).

The map will be constantly changing, which adds to the tactical nature of the game.

This is a “new to me” game, so I’ll be going into more detail in that monthly post (hopefully) next week.

Suffice to say that this was an interesting game. I enjoyed it.

A good way to open the convention.

I finally met up with the Vancouver contingent and four of us played one of the Unlock: Heroic Adventures (from Space Cowboys) games.

This one has three of them in the box (I believe they also were released separately?) and we played the video game one.

Not posting spoilers and since this was another “new to me” game, I won’t go into too much detail about this one either.

This is essentially a puzzle room in a box, using an app as a timer, a hint collection, and to basically get through the game. Sometimes you need to use your phone’s camera to scan a card, for example.

We managed to finish with a lot of hints (which also burns time) but with 3 minutes to spare!!!

After that it was back to an old favourite of mine (which I probably have played enough to finally do a review, if I ever get through my backlog): Ecos: The First Continent (by Alderac Entertainment Group and John D. Clair).

I love this game so much, and we even managed to play the long (80-point) game and not get too aggravated at the end of the game.

This is a great tile-laying game where you are creating a new world, and perhaps modifying it to best suit you rather than your opponents!

I first explained how to play it before, so I won’t go into that here.

I love the tile-laying, but also the bingo aspect of calling out elements to try and complete cards that will let you actually put out tiles (or animals, or other elements, or just got a bunch of points)

I’m still torn whether going to 60 points or 80 points is better. The long game lets you build up, but by the end of the long game, people can sometimes be getting really bored and irritable (especially if they are far in the back).

You continue going after the 60/80 point limit is reached until the Harbinger (the Bingo caller) pulls a wild element, so it can go long. Our game ended with the winner having 124 points! (Me and another player had 105 and 108 points respectively).

Anyway, another fun game!

After this it was time for some quick games until Scott had to go to his scheduled game, so we pulled out Grandpa Beck’s Cover Your A$$ets (Grandpa Beck’s Games).

This is a fun take-that card game where you are trying to collect as much stuff as possible, but you have to be careful that people don’t steal the top cards from your assets pile.

If somebody has the same card as your top asset (or a wild Gold/Silver card), they can steal it by playing the card, taking all of your cards of the same set on top of your pile.

Unless you also have the card or a wild, which means you take their card instead!

I was the asshole in this game, as I was stealing right and left, amassing a huge fortune to win.

There was one memorable exchange where Scott targeted me but I had a counter card. He played a Gold ($50,000) card to counter my counter, and I had a Gold card to counter that! I really added to my value in that one.

On my turn, I quickly played another set down so the set he had tried to take was no longer on top.

There was a lot of laughter in this game, and even when you’re stealing, it’s not mean-spirited.

It’s a fun game, very quick, and definitely worth checking out.

A quick play of Archaeology: The New Expedition (by Z-Man Games) followed.

This relic-recovery card game is always fun to play.

It’s a set-collection game where you are collecting cards and trying to sell sets of the same card to the museum for maximum points.

Hopefully avoiding being stolen from by the Thief or losing half your cards in the sandstorm.

After dominating in Cover Your A$$ets, I floundered this time. I guess I’m better at stealing than I am digging.

With Scott heading off to his scheduled game, four of us played one of my favourite games: The Prodigals Club by (Czech Games Edition)

I’ve talked about this one a whole bunch, so I won’t say a lot, but I will predict that it is moving up in my Top 25 games of all time list (posting early next year!) as I’ve played it a couple of times over the last two years and I’m reminded of how good it is.

Last year at SHUX, we played with all three modules for the first time (previously we had been playing with just two of the three) and we did it again this time.

The three modules are: wealth, political status and social status, and you are trying to tank your reputation in all of them. You want to go broke and you want everybody to hate you.

I managed to pull off a narrow win this time, having my political number of votes at 17 while one of my opponents had it at 18!

Your highest score in the three modules is your overall score, and the lowest overall score is the winner.

I love this game so much.

Maybe I should review it, but it would hardly be a surprise!

The game just took 2 hours too, which is ideal (though setup can be a bear)

We ended the night with a quick game of Herbaceous (Dr. Finn’s Games), the card game of planting herbs in your gardent and trying to get the most points.

This is a quick-playing card game that is a bunch of set collection, though one of the pots you are planning to fill requires the same type of herb while another pot requires different herbs. A third pot requires unique pairs of different herbs.

This is a fun way to end the night. It was getting late and there was a lot of gaming to be had on the morrow!

Of course, Saturday turned out to be more game length than it was quantity of games.

First, the breakfast buffet was amazing on Saturday!

The rest of the morning didn’t amount to much, though we started a very long game of Eldritch Horror (from Fantasy Flight Games) right before Noon.

Wow, this was a long game.

We decided to try and face off against Hastur, who we haven’t done before.

I started off being Rita Young, an investigator I have never been.

She was pretty cool!

But in the end, six of us could not stop the bad guy and many of us were defeated and had to choose new investigators before the end.

We called it before it officially ended, but at almost 4 hours, it was time.

We will win this game one of these days (I think we did at Bottoscon…two years ago!)

But this was not that day.

After this one and getting a little bit of dinner, it was time to play a couple shorter games before Scott, Catherine and Devon had to go to another scheduled game.

First out of the chute was a game I haven’t played in many years (before this blog began, even!).

Thurn and Taxis (by Rio Grande Games) is a pretty quick route-building game about creating post office routes in late 19th Century Central Europe.

We were playing with the Power & Glory expansion, so some of the rules from the base game were different.

Essentially, you are collecting city/route tickets (similar to Ticket to Ride) and then eventually building a route of houses from one city to another.

You need to have also built the coach capacity to build longer routes, so you may be playing city cards face down to your capacity instead of your route.

The longer your route, the more points you will get…if others haven’t done it first.

Also, when you score a route, you can choose to either place houses in all of one of the city colours on your route, or you can choose one of each colour.

You will get bonuses for filling up all of the colours on the board, but it will always take at least two routes to do that because the colour bonuses have some divided colours in them (like in the picture above, where you have to have both light green and dark green to score).

At the end of the game, you also get -1 point for each house you haven’t placed, which either we played it wrong the first time many years ago or this is an expansion rule. It seems that would make it very difficult for a person who doesn’t end the game by playing all of their houses to win the game.

Anyway, this is a fun little game. It moves fairly quickly and has that same Ticket to Ride feel to it.

I enjoyed it.

The final game of the day with my Vancouver contingent was Cascadia (from Flatout Games and Alderac Entertainment Group).

This is a game I’ve always enjoyed, and the point spread between first and fourth was only 6 points!

I managed to maximize my Elk scoring and get some good points from Eagles and Foxes.

Along with Bears!

After this game, they all went to their scheduled games and I went to look for my Seattle friends.

Sean (from Thing12 Games, and a very cool guy) was going to be playing a game with some other friends, but BJ (another one of the group) asked me if I was up for The Resistance (Indie Boards & Cards).

This is a social deduction game where 1-3 people are spies (depending on player count) against the regime. Each round, a captain decides who will be going on a mission, and all players vote on the composition of that mission. If it gets voted down, the next player gets to make up a crew.

You are trying to figure out who the Spies are.

On the mission, each player who is going on it secretly puts either “succeed” or “fail” cards in the batch.

One failure will tank the mission (except on Mission #6, I believe, where two Fails are required, but that might only be in the 8-player game, I’m not sure).

Two tanked missions and the Spies win.

There are more rules depending on what roles are in play, but for now, let’s leave it at that.

This was one of the most cantankerous, unpleasant experiences I’ve had in gaming.

One player was like a cancer in the group, so much so that it set off another player so much that they were both yelling at each other (there were two games, by the way! I honestly thought things had cooled down and we were all laughing together at the end of the first game and the beginning of the second. But then…).

It was…something to behold.

Finally, I started a game of Schadenfreude with Sean and two other players, but one of the other players was sent to bed because they had to get up early the next day (it was almost Midnight) so we had to quit.

Sunday dawned, and it was time to leave.

But not before I managed to get two quick games in!

Tony and I were waiting around before we discovered that everybody else was going to a scheduled game so they would not be joining us anyway.

The only game I had brought that plays 2 players well (and relatively quickly) was Speakeasy Blues (Artana Games).

During Covid, I had played a bunch of this at 2-player with my wife.

I much prefer it with three or even four, but it’s a fine 2-player game.

I really do like this game, even though it’s not a “great” game.

It’s fun, has some interesting choices, and with more players it’s a quick but not “too” quick game.

At 2 players, it’s over quite quickly, which is too bad.

But it’s a lot of fun!

We ended with a 3-player game of one of my favourite deck-building games, Valley of the Kings (Alderac Entertainment Group).

This is the base game (not the Lost Souls version, which I kind of prefer) but it’s still fun.

I love the “entomb cards to score” aspect, which means you can’t use the cards in your deck anymore.

My friend had a bad game and said she wouldn’t play it again for a long while, which is too bad.

I love it.

With that, it was time to go.

I packed up my bag of 7 games (only one of which was played on the weekend) along with the rest of the car, and did the 3-hour journey back home.

And promptly got sick.

But it was still an amazing time, and I look forward to going down again next year!

First, though, speaking of the same hotel, there will be Orcacon 2024 in January.

That will be a totally fun time.

Have you played any of these?

Thoughts or curses?

Let me know in the comments.