OrcaCon 2024 Retrospective

Another year, another OrcaCon has passed.

I first went to OrcaCon in 2020, but then some world-wide event that I can’t seem to remember stopped me from going again until last year.

I wish it would come to me.

Anyway, this last weekend was my third OrcaCon, and once again it was amazing!

One of the great things about OrcaCon is how inclusive it is. It’s really a safe space for all kinds of different types of people. The people who run it are amazing and fun, their Discord channel is really helpful as well as being nice to follow when talking about games.

They care about their attendees, and it really shows.

The convention is held in Bellevue, Washington, the first weekend in January every year. It’s held at the Hilton hotel, the same one as Dragonflight (but being in January, the rooms are a lot cheaper!).

This year, it wasn’t raining on my trip down, for the most part anyway.

That made for a much more pleasant trip.

I made it down around 11:30 or so after stopping for an awesome breakfast.

I didn’t quite do it like that, but I felt like it!

Then it was time for the fun to start.

Unlike previous years, I didn’t do a whole lot of wandering around looking for games.

(All of my game descriptions here will be very brief since I’ll be talking about them in my “New to Me Games – January” post, as well as the fact that I don’t want this post to be super-long!)

My good friend Sean Epperson (part of the Thing12 game publishing company) was going to be demoing some of their games on the first floor by the elevators, and I wanted to spend some time with him and do some gaming with him.

We spent the afternoons both Friday and Saturday doing demos and, when traffic was light, playing some light two-player card games.

What was really interesting about all of that was hearing him talk to other people in the industry, other game designers and publishers (like Carla from Weird Giraffe Games, who is a lovely person and whose Fire in the Library game that she’s published is one I’ve played and should probably review soon!). It was a great behind the scenes look for me. I’m not really familiar with the publishing side, so it was all very eye-opening.

The main game that was on the demo table, so much so that I ended up playing it eight times during the weekend, was a game that is coming to Kickstarter in late February.

I’ll probably do a review of it, which Sean can link to if he wants, because I did play it a lot! Though of course there will be the caveat that he is a friend of mine.

The game is called I Found Bigfoot, and it’s an interesting family-level card game (it’s really not complicated at all and only takes 20 minutes).

I thought it would be a good thing for Sean to have a third player if only one person came up to try it out, and it’s a fun game so I had no trouble doing that.

The artwork isn’t 100% final but it is pretty much.

In the game, you are trying to collect cards with pictures of various cryptids (Bigfoot, Mothman, etc).

You can score them by taking cards from one of the nine piles and then, on future turns, playing the same animal or background in sequence, and collecting them for scoring.

Each cryptid type in your score pile gives you points based on their dollar value.

But if you have them in your hand when the game ends, you lose those points!

Fun little game, and we had a number of people come by to check it out.

Which included Grant from the Our Family Plays Games Youtube channel. He’s Starla and Mik’s son, and he’s the video editor for the site.

He loved the game so much, he encouraged his parents to come down at some point and try it out for themselves.

And they did!

Apparently they knew Sean from previous conventions, but it was great for me to finally meet them all. (Another thing that hanging around Sean was good for, I got to meet some great people, including other content providers!)

They loved the game, and I managed to convince them that it wouldn’t be detrimental to them to appear in a picture with me!

All three of them are such great people. So nice and warm, and accommodating. Loved talking to them!

They also stuck around to play a couple more Thing12 games with us, so I’ll talk about them now (some of these were played multiple times with other people as well).

The first one was a game that Thing12 will be republishing (it was originally self-published) called Hit Me!

There are a few art issues (lack of diversity in the characters, for one) that are going to be taken care of with the reprint, but we were playing with the current version (so the artwork will change on that as well).

The game plays 2-6 players, and guess who happened to walk by when we were deciding to play it?

Beth Sobel and her husband!

I’m such a big fan of her game artwork, and I actually did play a game with both of them at my first Dragonflight in 2015!

Hit Me! is a game where you are trying to knock everybody else out of the game by hitting them with cards.

Not literally, but you’re turning over cards from the main deck. It’s kind of a push your luck game.

If you draw a Hit, you give it to one of the other players. A Whiff is just nothing. If you draw 3 Trips, though, then all of the hits you distributed come back on you. You tripped and hurt yourself instead.

You can stop before 3 Trips, though. if you do, then each player you hit removes cards from their life deck equal to the number of hits they took.

Those cards get put into the main deck, adding a bunch of other cool cards to it (like Hit x3!).

Last player standing wins!

(This game got played a couple of other times throughout the weekend with other people).

It was tremendous fun playing with the four of them (and Sean, of course).

Beth and her husband had to leave, but Mik wanted Starla to play another awesome game, a game that he had fallen in love with at a previous convention.

Puppy Pile is a game where you want your puppy to be the leader of the pack of puppies at the awards ceremony when the Pick A Winner card comes up.

Each player is secretly one of the puppies in the line-up.

They want their puppy to be at the head of the line when that card comes up.

Each player will turn over an action card and do it. But you don’t want to broadcast which puppy you are by always choosing to improve your position, or everybody else will knock you back down.

But if you manage to be at the lead when the card comes up, you win!

That was a lot of fun and the artwork is so cute!

Finally, we got a game of Dice of Crowns in.

This one I have actually played before, playing it with Sean (and my wife) at Dice Tower West back in 2020.

This is a dice-rolling game where you are trying to collect 3 crowns without getting daggers. So another kind of push your luck game, except that the only time you’re pushing your luck is if you already have 3 crown dice (which gets you a crown token).

Three daggers and your turn ends, but the interesting thing about it is the scrolls. You send them off to other players to roll. If they roll a dagger, they can give that dagger to anybody (including you!). If they roll a crown, they keep it for their next turn.

Another fun, short dice game and another great game played with Mik and Starla!

What was very cool to me, as a relative nobody in the gaming content creation arena, was that both of them (and Grant too! Though I don’t know if I saw him again) were such great people and now I knew them well enough that if we happened to see each other, we actually chatted for a bit.

It made me feel like somebody in this world, which I don’t always feel like.

I still get intimidated going up to other creators and talking to them at these conventions.

Anyway, enough of that.

This all took place on Saturday, actually, but I wanted to get all of the Thing12 games in at once.

After a Friday afternoon of demoing the Bigfoot game, another one of Sean’s friends showed up and the three of us played a game of Vanuatu (2nd Edition).

This game looks so peaceful!

But man, is it vicious.

Again, more details in my “new to me” post, but basically you are residents of a South Pacific island trying to gain points by fishing, collecting treasures, or maybe showing tourists around the islands.

There are a bunch of actions available, and on your turn you will be placing two of your five action markers down on one or two of them. On your third turn, you will place your fifth marker.

The trick is that in order to take the action, you have to have the majority of action tiles there (not outright majority, but have more than anybody else). Ties are broken by turn order.

Once you’ve placed your markers, then in turn order you will be doing your actions.

If you had planned a certain order for your actions, you could have been stymied by other players’ markers!

You have to take an action on your turn, so if you only have majority on one action, you have to do it, even if you can’t actually do the action yet.

You just remove your markers and cry.

Sucks to be you!

If somebody has majority over you, if they do the action first, you could then have majority and do the action (you remove your markers when you do the action).

Wow, is this mean. I managed to pull out the victory, but there were numerous times where I had planned a series of actions and not having the majority in the first action I wanted to do totally wrecked my plans.

But it’s a really fun game!

Maggie left after the game but a few of Sean’s designer/publisher friends came around and we played some card games.

First was the stupidest, silliest, but for some reason most hilarious game I’ve played (maybe it was fatigue? I don’t know, but we laughed a lot).

Tricky Dicks is a card game where you are comparing the size of your Richards with everybody else.

Each player is dealt a deck of cards, all with various sizes of Richard Nixon “I am not a crook!” poses on them. You will take the top card in your hand.

Then the current player will say that they have the Longest/Shortest/Narrowest/Widest dick in their hand.

Other players then choose to either say they do or they pass.

Then you compare your sizes!

Whoever has the…well, you know, wins all of the cards.

As soon as somebody’s deck is empty, the game ends and whoever has the most dicks wins.

After my rant in the Bottoscon post about “adult” versions of games, I probably shouldn’t have found this funny.

But for some reason, proclaiming that I had the widest dick just made me laugh.

We then played a game of Splito, a relatively new card game where you are playing in teams with the players next to you.

Kind of.

It’s kind of a card drafting game, in that you are playing a card and passing the rest to the left.

However, you are playing the card either between you and the player on your right, or between you and the player on your left.

You want both sides to do well!

Some cards are just cards with colours and numbers.

Others are objectives, which that section needs to meet in order to score the points.

After all the cards are played, you score each area, and multiply the points the two areas gave you.

Whoever has the most points is the winner!

This was a fun one that took a bit of time to really make sense, but once it did, it was really good.

We played it twice. I won the first one handily but came in the far back in the second game.

Then we played my current favourite trick-taking game, Schadenfreude!

Where you want to come in second.

I still loved it but did not do well at all in it.

After that, a few people left, one joined us, and we ended Friday with a 4-player game of Quantum.

I’ve played this asynchronously on Boardgame Arena but never live. Asynchronously, it didn’t make a lot of sense but it does now.

In this game, your dice are ships, and depending on what number you rolled, they are different types of ships with different abilities.

You are moving them around the board, trying to drop crystals on planets to establish a base (or something) there.

As soon as you’ve dropped all five, you win!

But other players will be attacking you to try and prevent you from doing it.

When your ship is destroyed, it will go back to your shipyard and you can redeploy it, so it’s not too punishing.

But it can be detrimental to your plans.

I thought I might sneak under the radar and win, getting four crystals deployed.

But then people started attacking me and I never got the fifth one done before Sean finally won.

It was a fun game, though!

Saturday, I did actually go into the Ball Room and check out a game. One of the guys we played Quantum with was teaching two other people how to play Gizmos.

Since I love that game, I sat in on it.

This is the engine-building game where you are almost literally building an engine.

Or at least a bunch of mechanical gizmos that hopefully work together.

I did terribly once again, but it was still a lot of fun.

Prior to that, Sean demoed a game for me and another guy that Thing12 will be publishing (so the artwork on this isn’t final either).

Matches is a card game but it doesn’t have tricks or anything.

Instead, you play one of your cards and this is the card that everybody is trying to match.

So if you play a 10, then everybody’s trying to match a 10. Either with another 10, with a Wild card, or with cards equaling 10.

Play goes around. If you can’t match, you’re out of the round, but you do score a point for each pair of the same number you’ve played in front of you.

If somebody matches the card with one other card, another point is added to the card.

Last one standing wins the card and the points.

There are four rounds, and whoever has the most points is the winner!

Another fun, light card game that doesn’t take too long and would work well during breaks in your game night.

Between demos, Sean taught me the 2-player trick-taking game Claim.

This one was really interesting (and we played it twice more Sunday morning).

There are two rounds in this game.

The first round, a card comes up and you are playing a trick in order to win that card for your next round’s hand.

So maybe it’s a low Goblin card and you don’t want it.

You might play a really low card, forcing the other player to take it.

The played cards are discarded and the won card goes into your next round’s hand. The loser of the trick takes the top card of the deck, so you don’t know what you’re getting (though hopefully it’s better than a 0-Goblin!).

The second round, you’re playing to flat out win the cards and the points.

But there are a couple of wrinkles.

First, Undead cards in the first round go to the winner’s score pile immediately instead of getting discarded. You don’t want to lose those!

Secondly, in the second round, the loser of the trick collects any dwarves that were played, not the winner.

At the end, you see who has the majority for each race and get a point for each. Whoever has the most (in our games, it was always 3-2) is the winner!

After demoing was done for the day, we brought out my brand new copy of Guild Academies of Valeria, a game I’ve been wanting to break out for almost a month now.

This Valeria game is more complex than the other games I played this weekend, so only a cursory explanation here. More later.

In this game, you are guild masters trying to draft students (dice) into your academy, educate them, and then send them out to complete quests.

Kind of like Harvard grads.

Each turn, you’ll be drafting a die from one of the docks (I guess you’re on an island and they are coming to you?). You’ll do that dock’s action and place the student in your garden. You will also need to bring some professors into your academy to teach as well.

Then you will be sending your students (dice) to their classes, hoping to level them up (increase their dice value) until they go above 6 and graduate.

Any graduates will be sent out on quests!

If you can’t use them for a quest, they decide they can make their fortune elsewhere and bugger off.

That’s college loyalty for you.

Much more to it than that, but after four rounds, gaining points from quests and educating your students, you total up all of the many endgame scoring points and whoever has the most is the winner!

It took me a bit of time to really grok this one. Sean and Jason got it a lot faster than I did.

I hope to get this to a Sunday game day and play it again, but it was definitely interesting.

The big occasion for Saturday night was coming up, but Sean and I had a little bit of time so he introduced me to a 2020 card game called Kompromat.

This is a neat little game where two spies are vying for the goal cards (or maybe devices that will help you) by playing secret blackjack hands to the four cards on offer.

Each round, there are four items played out. You will play a card to one of them and then play secret cards on top of that card until you decide that you are done.

Ultimately you want to be closer to 21 than your opponent without going over.

Whoever does that wins that card. It may be a goal (like the four above) or it may be an item, which is worth a point but can also help you in the future.

If you bust (go over 21), you get a notoriety token. Each of those is worth a point at the end of the game, but if you get 9 during the game, you lose immediately.

This is kind of a lane-battler, bluffing, deduction type game, and it was really fun.

The headline of the night, though, was a 4-player short game of Xia: Legends of a Drift System.

This is a game where you can do pretty much anything. You have a ship, and you can try to buy and sell goods. You can try and blow up your opponents (which Sean did to me on my first turn…welcome to the new game, Dave!). Blowing up your opponents just makes them respawn on the board, and explore the galaxy (though if you don’t scan ahead of time, you might find the sun and force yourself to respawn!)

When you move off of a tile, you place a new one out, bringing a new tile into play which may be good, bad, or just have interesting possibilities.

And yeah, finding Xia is bad.

It’s kind of a sandbox game, giving you a lot of latitude on how you want to play it.

You can get a fame point (victory point) for rolling a natural 20 on a 20-sided die, for heaven’s sake!

This was fun. It was late on Saturday and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’d definitely be up for it again.

Our short game took 2 hours. If you play to the full 20 points, you’re looking at…much longer.

Both Friday and Saturday, I managed to get to bed at a reasonable hour (1:00 am), which wasn’t too bad.

But I didn’t sleep the greatest.

Sunday, I ended up leaving a little bit early because I had a long drive and I was exhausted.

But I did mange to get two games of Claim in as well as wandering the ballroom for a bit and finding Wally (the guy who I played Gizmos with) sitting there wanting to set up a game.

I didn’t have a lot of time before I wanted to leave, but Port Royal is a short game and one that I’ve heard many good things about!

Port Royal is another push your luck game, where you are drawing cards from the deck and trying not to draw two of the same coloured ship.

You are gaining gold in order to buy cards from the row that you played out (as long as you didn’t bust).

Some of the cards will give you victory points. They may also give you abilities. Like swords to fight off the lower-power ships (which means they go away and don’t count against you when you’re drawing).

Once you’ve gained gold and maybe purchased a card, your opponent can then pay you a gold and buy one of the cards that you revealed (or take one of the ships that gives them gold).

You keep doing that until somebody has 12 points worth of cards.

Whoever has the most points is the winner!

This was a nice way to finish a great OrcaCon.

I went back and chatted with Sean for a little while, said good-bye to some of the people I had met, and headed home for my 3-hour drive.

Next year, I may wander a bit more, but will probably still spend a lot time talking and demoing with Sean. I will probably get a wider variety of games in (wandering can do that), but this year it just seemed so cool to sit with him and just absorb so much about game design and publishing.

I got to meet some really cool people. Mik, Starla and Grant were wonderful, and maybe next year I’ll be brave enough to approach some other people as well.

Or I’ll sit with Sean and let them come to me.

Another great con is in the books, and I’m really looking forward to next year.

Because I will be there!

I hope to see you there.