I made it to a local-ish tabletop convention this past weekend and played many a game. Long post, so here's Friday's games under a readmore.
Started the con off with Ruins, which was a neat card builder. It's also one of the two games from the convention that I intend to acquire. It's a pretty small box game, which is nice. It plays pretty simply, too. Deal out nine cards to everyone (it might be more at lower player counts), then each player can flip a card to its 'night' version to improve it. First player plays an amount of cards of the same value, then it goes around, trying to match the number of cards played while increasing the total value, passing if they can't. The wrinkle is that you have three money each hand to spend on modifying cards as you play them. You can claim up to two cards per game, which will get passed to you if dealt, but otherwise all the cards you've modified are going to go back into the common pool for everyone to use in future rounds. First to go out in each hand gets points. Modifications can make cards wild cards, increase their value, or do card draw things.
Next up was accidentally a game of D&D 5e, and that was probably the second worst rpg session I've ever had. The DM opened things with directly telling us we had to start off with rolling to escape our starting position, but that we had infinite rolls, and there were no consequences for failure; we just had to burn time until we rolled well enough. (Except for the PC who had been keelhauled before we were all dumped in the ocean to drown; he started out unconscious and paralyzed. And dying.) We got to learn about the awesome pirates who had the Pirates of the Caribbean curse, and then the keelhauled PC died without ever being conscious, despite our best efforts to save him, and he got raised as one of those totally awesome skelepirates. And then the evil empire that none of our characters had ever heard of attacked, with four ships each disgorging 1000 sailors, each represented by a single token. For our level one PCs to fight. When our casters didn't have spells, due to the exhaustion of nearly drowning. We watched the pirates wipe the floor with the 4000 people, except for the token of 1000 people that fell to dagger attacks from PCs. The pirates' continent-sized kraken and horde of megalodons didn't get involved. And then two hours were up and we were "only halfway done," despite the scheduled end, and I begged off because I legitimately needed to get some food.
After that was a sampler platter of a Classic Traveller game, showcasing salvage and cargo acquisition, space combat, and ground combat via search and rescue. That was a pretty neat game, and I'd love to see how it played in an actual campaign. I got to make some sweet gray market deals to help fill our ship's holds. It was a very different rpg experience than I'm used to, but it was fun.
I ended the day with a playtest of Einstone, an interesting tile placement game where the goal is to make hexagons of your color while trying to prevent your opponent from doing the same. You also get points for the largest contiguous grouping of your color. It was kind of chill, but it didn't really feel like there was enough meat on the bones for my taste. I'd play it while chatting over tea, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it otherwise. This game I got a picture of, in its end state:
