Hey girl. Heard you like overviews of inaugural gaming conventions. I got you.

This past weekend I went to LUG Con, which, it turns out, is not a strongman lifting competition as I previously thought. I showed up wearing knee sleeves and a belt on the first day. I looked like an idiot.

LUG Con stands for Level Up Games Convention. Level Up Games is a local chain of gaming stores with four locations around Georgia. The stores are fantastic and it was incredible that they created their own gaming convention. The convention ran from Thursday to Sunday, though I was only able to attend three out of four days.

Overall, I had a great time and will definitely be back if they return next year. Here’s an overview of what I did:

Friday – Vast Grimm

My first game of the con was Vast Grimm, an excellent game compatible with Mörk Borg, written by Brian Colin and Ross Brandt. It’s about the last survivors of humanity in a würm-infested universe. I had the pleasure of Brian running the game for us. Unfortunately for Brian, he had the displeasure of having me at the table.

Y’all, I was unhinged. I had a particularly rough day at work … and I made choices. Luckily, the rest of the table was also out of control, so Brian was forced to deal with us. There was chaos, würm drugs, robots accusing each other of not being robots, and the end of the universe. As I learned at the end of the session, air conditioning cannot stop the heat death of the universe. Is there a lesson in here about climate change?

No. These are two entirely separate things.

It was a lot of fun and Brian was very kind to us (and even gave me feedback on my own project’s teaser page (thanks, Brian!)). You should play Vast Grimm and have fun, too. The full rules are available as a pdf for free! But you should also just buy the physical copies. A lot of them have metallic covers that look so good, pics on the internet do them no justice.

Saturday – Daggerheart, Final Fantasy TCG, Netrunner, and Wyrmspan

Daggerheart. Sigh.

I’m not particularly in love with grid-based heroic fantasy. I have played a total of eight D&D games across my entire lifetime and bounced off every time. It’s just … not for me. It’s obviously for a lot of people. Good for them. But with a game like Daggerheart, that has such a monumental push by Darrington Press and promises “tactical depth with narrative freedom”, I had to know. I wanted to actually have an opinion on it.

It was good. Better than D&D. I disagree with some design decisions, but I also see why they made them. I think the cards are neat. But I wouldn’t go back. The GM did a good job, the people I played with were fun, but again, it’s just not for me. I had the most fun RP-ing with the other players, not so much the combat.

Maybe if I got to see more of the game than the tiny slice at a convention, maybe if the table were smaller than 6 players, or maybe if it wasn’t a very broad introduction meant for newer players, I might have a different impression. But I don’t think I’m going to try to explore any deeper to make those impressions, not when there are so many other games I would rather play.

You hear about these new-fangled card games they got?

Okay, none of these card games are new. Netrunner (Left) is a ‘Living Card Game’, which is a Netrunner specific-term that basically means that they release all the cards and it isn’t a gamble opening booster packs like SOME GAMES. Originally from Richard Garfield of SOME GAMES fame, it was licensed to Fantasy Flight Games, which stopped producing the card game in 2019. Since then, Null Signal Games has been keeping the game alive. You don’t even have to pay to play though. All the cards are free to download online. Print them out and have fun.

This game is wild. And great. It’s asymmetric play between a corporation and ‘runners’, and it feels it. Corps have all these resources and I seethed with jealousy as I kept everything together with luck and grit. A very nice man from Null Signal Games demoed it for me, and I can’t credit him because I’m a shameful wretch who remembers nothing. (Did I even go to this con? What’s my name? Am I am, Descartes?)

I also played the Final Fantasy TCG (Right), not to be confused with SOME GAMES’s Final Fantasy Set. This time, a man named AJ (I remembered, I’m the best person in the universe unequivocally now) demoed the game for me. It’s a lot like SOME GAME, but with its own quirks. Some of the art is lovely. Some of the art is taken from low polygon video games and does not hold up. Still, I enjoyed the match.

According to AJ, who promised he is 100% reliable and that I can trust him implicitly with all my secrets and social security numbers, the game is a lot healthier on the old wallet than SOME GAMES. I was tempted to check the local FF-TCG group out. Then I remembered I have filled my life to the absolute brim and am not allowed to pick up more hobbies. Like blogging. Cough.

Good news, everyone. I lost at Wyrmspan!

I’ve been looking for board games I could play with my wife, to convince her that I’m fun to be around and not a shameful wretch who can’t remember the name of the guy from Null Signal Games.

Wyrmspan moved to the top of the list. It fits all the criteria I need to charm my wife:
– Colorful and eye-catching
– Not too complicated for her
– Complicated enough for me

You excavate caves for dragons to live in, entice those dragons to make a nest there, and reap the rewards. There are so many dragons that you could play this game again and again without it getting stale.

I like that I don’t have to pay super-close attention to everyone’s board and I can mostly just focus on my own deal. I think going back and forth between two players would be ideal for time, and maybe one day my son will finally have the attention span to play with us.

Aaron of KennyCon fame ran the game and was an excellent teacher to myself and the other players. Shout out to Aaron and the legend of Kenny! (I had to google Aaron because I forgot his name (I’m a shameful wretch again, my wife will remain unconvinced.))

Sunday – Brindlewood Bay

Look. There’s something I have to type. It’s crass and unbecoming of me. But still, I must: “She brindled my wood till I bayed.”

Okay. With that out of the way, here was my last game of the con. In Brindlewood Bay, you play as elderly women who solve mysteries in a small town and eventually get themselves entangled in a dark conspiracy (see the tentacles above).

This game is a chef’s kiss. I own and have read the book, but never played until Sunday. The mysteries are great, and there are no pre-determined solutions, rather theories that the players come up with together based on clues they’ve discovered. It encourages Painting the Scene, where each player adds details to the story to enrich the environment and disperse the narrative burden. Jon, from the same shared universe as all of us, ran this game and also did an excellent job teaching.

I played a make-up artist turn disguise expert, widowed by a Russian ballet dancer/spy, and switched outfits with a passed-out drunk and fooled my disguise’s sibling. I made a lot of great puns and we caught the bad guy, who we decided was EVERYONE. Just like in real life, EVERYONE is bad.

What a great con. I am so excited to run Brindlewood Bay and Vast Grimm in the future. But not Daggerheart.