Dragonflight 2024 Retrospective

This past weekend was the Dragonflight boardgame convention in Bellevue, Washington.

I’ve gone down the last couple of years and used to go down before the pandemic, but this was the first year where most of my Vancouver contingent didn’t go down too.

Thankfully, I have a Seattle contingent of friends to hang out with, and I even got to meet more of them on the weekend!

I pretty much only see them annually (most didn’t go to OrcaCon last January and aren’t going to it this coming January either) so it’s always good to catch up with them.

Of course, one of that group is the awesome Sean Epperson from Thing 12 Games, a man who not only designs great games, but also somebody I love hanging out with.

This year, I didn’t play a whole lot of games, but every one of them was new to me!

And also fairly new, which isn’t going to make my cult happy.

Since all of them are new to me, I’m not going to go into great detail about them here. I’ll save that for my September “New to Me” post.

This convention is always fun, but it was marred this year by the fact that there were so few “free play” tables and tons of scheduled games.

Were they a victim of their own success? Maybe?

The Hilton in Bellevue doesn’t have the largest space if a convention is getting successful.

That’s why OrcaCon (supposedly) moved to a new venue starting in 2025.

Other hitches made Friday a bit of a slow day for gaming.

For the first time in I think forever that I’ve been going to cons at this hotel, my room wasn’t ready when I got there in the late morning.

Usually I stop at the top level and check in and then drive down to unload my stuff. This time I just drove down to the bottom level and I had all of my bags with me.

And the room wasn’t ready, meaning I had to lug my stuff around for a while. There was no way I was going to put them back in the car. That’s a good way to get your car broken into.

I thankfully found a friend who let me store my bags in his room until I could actually check in, which left a little bit of time for gaming!

I didn’t want to get tied down in a long game and it turned out my other friends weren’t arriving for a little while, so I wandered around a bit and found my first game of the day.

Faraway is a new card game published by Catch Up Games and designed by Johannes Goupy and Corentin Lebrat.

It’s a tableau-building card game with a unique scoring method, where you are playing cards left to right, but then they will be scoring at the end of the game right to left.

It’s a nice twist and it really makes you have to think about what you’re playing.

Of course you’re also trying to get…ummm…artifacts? Something that will give you permanent symbols as well as possible additional scoring.

I liked it a lot, and it’s so quick. I’ve now purchased it for work and potentially Sunday game days.

Then my friends showed up…and it was time to wait.

And wait…and wait.

We had 10 people and only one free table!

One of my friends came up with the idea of getting his daughter to bring a card table and a game-topper set to give us another table to play on.

Which took time.

One of the aggravating things for me at past conventions is sitting there with my Vancouver friends and just chatting.

We can do that in Vancouver!

However, with people I see once a year, it was nice to just catch up and talk, and it made the waiting a lot more bearable.

We finally had tables to play on, so it was time to break out another game.

That game would be a game with flying whales in it!

Mistwind is a pick up and deliver game that is nothing like Merchant of Venus (sorry, Eric).

It was published by a local publisher, First Fish Games, in 2024 and designed by Adrian Adamescu and Daryl Andrews.

And you get to fly your whales around, picking up stuff and delivering it!

You are also trying to make connections on the board by setting up outposts.

It was a pretty fun game, and I actually won even though I’m not sure how.

I did manage to get all three of my whales out, so maybe that helped?

Again, more in my “new to me” post but this one was pretty cool, especially considering I’m not a huge pick up and deliver fan.

The capper for the evening was a 2023 economic game that I didn’t feel that comfortable playing, mainly because I suck at economic games.

But it was pretty cool too.

Kutná Hora: The City of Silver is an economic game about getting silver. Duh.

The game was designed by Ondřej Bystroň, Petr Čáslava and Pavel Jarosch and published by Czech Games Edition in 2023.

In the game, you have three guilds for which you can build buildings and get income (if you build a building for which you don’t have a guild, it won’t help you at all!). You are also mining for ore and maybe you can make some income that way.

I do like the action cards in your hand, where you will get five actions (card plays) so you can’t do everything you might want. And you have to choose which side of the card to play! So you can’t use the other side of the card during this round.

This was an intriguing game which I sucked at. Again, economics are not my forte, so this may not be the game for me.

But I enjoyed it.

Friday night was done (we got done with that game just after Midnight after almost 3 hours) so it was time to head up to the hotel room and to bed.

Incidentally, many of my games this weekend took longer than they really should have, mainly because we were also talking and other things.

Normally that’s annoying but again, when I only see these people once a year, that’s not a bad thing!

So I won’t be basing any of my “time to play” ratings on this weekend.

Saturday morning, I woke up early and joined a Vancouver friend for breakfast at the hotel breakfast buffet (which is fabulous! Though hard to pay for with the Canadian/US dollar exchange rate right now).

That was good. It was nice to catch up with him and see how retirement is going and everything.

I then headed back to my Seattle contingent and eventually started another game.

We were looking for a fourth player, and while Josh was going downstairs looking for somebody, one of my Vancouver friends stopped by!

I asked if she wanted to play, contingent on Josh not finding anybody. She said she would love to.

Josh came back empty-handed, so my friend was able to join us.

Pirates of Maracaibo is a kind of card game version of Maracaibo. The game was designed by Ralph Bienert, Ryan Hendrickson, Alexander Pfister and published by Capstone Games in 2024 (in fact, it just came out!).

Much like its predecessor, on your turn you can move 1-3 spaces. However, this time the layout of the board is a bunch of cards.

If you take an improvement, then that card gets replaced and somebody else can take it.

Otherwise, you can visit an island card and do whatever island stuff is on there (maybe pillage! Or maybe move your explorer or something else).

Or you can visit a Residence and perhaps by a space on it.

You are trying to get to Maracaibo, but you’re also trying to move your…explorer/soldier/whatever the heck it is along the island spaces to also get bonuses.

You’re building a tableau of improvements, as well as trying to improve your ship, to get even more bonuses.

I did terribly this first game as I didn’t really understand how best to play it.

But it got better…stay tuned.

This was a fun one, and my Vancouver friend won!

So that was cool.

After that, I got to help playtest one of Sean’s upcoming prototypes, a secret game that I can’t really talk about.

Though I can say it’s a worker placement game with a little bit of conflict and that it’s coming along very nicely.

And Sean may even incorporate one of my suggestions.

Win!

As we had dinner (Sean went out to Chick-Fil-A and brought us all back food), my Vancouver breakfast friend joined us and I began learning another new game, one that I have on pre-order and will be hopefully receiving in the next week or two.

Rock Hard 1977 is a worker placement game about forming a rock band in the late 70s (hey, maybe that’s what 1977 means!).

It was designed by Jackie Fox (big-time boardgamer and former member of the 70s band The Runaways) and just published by Devir Games.

And by “just published” (for those of you seeing this post in 2026 or something), I mean in August 2024.

This was a really intriguing design where you are doing an action during the day, in the evening, and then after hours, trying to increase your rocking ability, maybe play a gig, and then perhaps go to some after hours party (or parties) to increase your exposure.

Or you might have to work to keep your day job.

Of course, you can only do so much during a day, so maybe you might want to eat some candy (wink) to let you do more.

If you have too much candy and hit the sugar rush, though, you may have to spend some time in Recovery.

This game, again, took way longer than it should have, but that was mainly us players.

And it was really fun.

I can’t wait to get my own copy!

After all of that was done, Josh wanted to show Sean Pirates of Maracaibo and I desperately wanted to improve my performance from earlier in the day.

And I did!

I came in second, just a few points behind Josh.

That was a nice way to end the evening.

After getting a good night’s sleep (ok, I lied…maybe 4 hours?), it was Sunday morning.

Time to check out and hopefully get another game in before it was time to head home.

I spent some time chatting with a couple of my friends who were going to be playing a longer game that I didn’t have time for.

Thankfully, Sean showed up and five of us decided to give another try (for them, this was my first time playing it) of River Valley Glassworks.

This game also just came out and was designed by Adam Hill, Ben Pinchback and Matt Riddle, two of whom also designed the brilliant Subastral.

This game was published by Allplay.

River Valley Glassworks takes some of the Subastral mechanics and makes them out of solid bits instead of cards.

You are collecting glass from the river and putting it on your board in certain ways in order to score points.

In this case, you are spending one of your pieces of glass, putting it on a river segment with the same shape, and then collecting all of the glass from an adjacent river space.

When somebody has collected 17 pieces, that triggers game end, with players taking turns until everybody has had one, then everybody taking one more turn.

I’ll give more of an opinion in my New to Me post, but I did enjoy it, and it was fun playing with my friends one last time before it was time to say good-bye.

After that, there was nothing else to do but pack up the car (I had already checked out of the hotel) and make the 3-hour drive home.

Dragonflight 2024 was an amazing experience, though it was marred by too much enforced sitting around. Again, with people I don’t see very often, I love sitting around and chatting as well.

But the fact that we were forced to because we were trying to get game logistics sorted out was not fun.

Hopefully that won’t be an issue next year.

Maybe we’ll just bring a card table and a game topper right from the beginning!

I’m still going next year, if nothing changes.

Because it’s good to see people you like, and then pummel them game with them.