Stabcon games

Stabcon the twice yearly Stockport based gaming con has been and gone - and it was good.  There was the normal madness and drinking and this time we got to play perhaps one of the funniest games of "Aye Dark Overlord" ever which almost made me pass out.  I was laughing so hard that in infected and crippled another player..... It's not really a game - it's just an excuse to tell stories - just like Baron Munchhausen....

But a stabcon also means new games.

Manhattan Project
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/63628/the-manhattan-project
A worker placement game - based (loosely) around making nuclear bombs.  It was fun - I'd certainty play again - and it does have the cutest little artwork ever.  However nothing really new.
http://boardgamegeek.com/image/1044359/the-manhattan-project

The Castles of Burgundy
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/84876/the-castles-of-burgundy
A very good game that uses dice well - in that the dice define what you can do  but no matter what you roll you get to do something (helped with with a good chunk of manipulation things).  Want to play this again - was tempted to buy it.

Trajan
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/102680/trajan
By the same person who designed The Castles of Burgundy - and proof that he has a very strange brain (oh and is the person who created the odd but excellent The Name Of The Rose that I want).
This game takes the "action roundel"  and does something very odd with it.
In your normal action roundel you have a set of actions around the wheel - a counter somewhere on the wheel - and can move forwards a number of spaces to do that action.  Often with the ability to mvoe further if you need to.  This is one from the very playable game Antike - http://boardgamegeek.com/image/212148/antike.
So Trajan does two very odd things - a picture will help here.
http://boardgamegeek.com/image/1162199/trajan
You have six spaces and 12 counters in six colours.  On your turn you select one of the sets of pieces and move round the board putting one in each action space - where ever you place your final counter - that's the action you do.  So in that picture - if you selected the pieces near the boat icon - you put one piece in the two columns , and another in the helmet and that's the action you'd do.  If you picked the two columns (with five pieces) you'd go round putting in pieces till you got to the ship and then you'd do that action.
Which is pretty confusing (and very based on Macala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala) and hard to plan ahead.

But I've no mentioned the colours - those are related to bonus tiles.  So in that picture - you see a tile with bread on it and a little orange dot and a green dot at the top.  If after moving your bits around you can get an orange block and a green block in that space AND that's the action you do then you get that bonus tile - which generally does funky stuff (including free actions) and provides victory points.

Which made my brain drible out of ears trying to a) work out what I wanted to do and b) the impact on future turns.  Because it's all about setting things up - I need to move a yellow there - and then an orange that activates that - so I'll drop a orange here on the way past to do that - and then next turn take this action which will allow me to take that action and do the bonus.  This of course assumes that's an action you actually want....   I strongly suspect that this was the root cause of me getting so significantly drunk on the Saturday night as I needed to cool down my brain.

Ace game - I'd of brought that if there was a copy there - even if I've no idea who in Leeds would play it with me without either breaking down and crying or suffering horrible analysis paralysis.

We did get a play test of giant stone head version 3.01 - and it was broadly good.  However oddly enough it's made me want to change some other pretty fundamental stuff as I try and smooth out the game and stuff that got added in to solve problems is pulled out.  But the details on that can - I think  wait to another day as this is long enough already.  But not to long as I'll need a copy for this coming weekend and my friend from Amsterdam who is really going to look at the new version and go "what have you done!