OrcaCon 2025 - Day 3

This morning I was waffling on the decision whether to go or not. I knew I would feel bad not going having spent the money for a 3 day pass, but I also felt a bit uneasy just going on my own. It would have been nice to have gone with friends who want to be there for gaming. Still, I went with at least going for trying a few more games and for seeing if I won any of the Play-and-Win games.

Gimme that Sushi!

First game I was pulled into doing a 3 player game of Sushi Go. I’ve played and own Sushi Roll so the concepts were pretty similar. Here you’re doing 3 rounds of drafting a hand of cards, there are small combos but otherwise it’s a very simple and straightforward game of collect and score.

I found myself often leaning into the collecting the most Maki roll cards just because my first hands had those high 3 value cards. Also tried my best to go for the triple Sashimi set. I basically ignored pudding until near the end of the 2nd round where I got at least one to sort of pressure one of the other opponents to waste a draft for it. They didn’t do that in the last round and ended up taking the negative points at the end, which mattered for final scoring.

The end result was a pretty close game, but I won with a total of 48 points.

A game of Good vs Evil

Then I got to try Knight Fall, a game about Knights vs Demons that has multiple ways to play: competitive teams, cooperative, or doing campaign scenarios. It’s from publisher Red Raven Games who have made the critically acclaimed Sleeping Gods and more, so due to the pedigree this game was on my radar. From what I remember hearing from news outlets this game is like a release or something of an earlier design I believe.

Oddly I felt that learning the game was harder than it should be, quite often I was wondering how certain setup should be for solo and it took me a lot of page flips to finally find answers. But overall, piloting the game eventually became smooth. It has an interesting enemy deck where each card has a primary and secondary effect and so you flip two cards and just do the enemy’s action to the best of its abilities. The one confusing and unanswered thing that occurred was if a player needed to be rotated but they were in the center tile of the map. It mentioned to move out relative to targets, but that didn’t really make sense what direction that should be for a player. I ended up just justifying starting north as default.

I really liked the character I played and I like the design of the knights. Each of the playable characters have their own abilities too which adds asymmetry. The card system is simple: you have a hand of cards and you can choose to use them in a multitude of ways, with situational primary abilities, general but useful secondary abilities, or as a basic wild action. As far as I could tell there isn’t really any interaction when its not your turn, you kind of just have to wait for the entire board state to resolve before you can do anything.

I can see this as a maybe own and would be interested to see what the campaign is like.

Mega corporations build out the moon

The third game I played was LUNA Capital, it’s a puzzle-y drafting game where you expand your personal region of the moon using cards and then place tiles onto spaces to help you score points. After 12 rounds, you’re basically done.

One nice thing about it is that within each of the 3 phases the amount of stuff you get when you draft increases from round to round. This means that the opportunity to get what you want increases while adding a little bit of complexity of having to deal with more stuff.

For solo I do feel like it’s odd that the bot will never take the left most draft option. Also, I was frustrated with how the short term shared goals became effectively impossible for me because I never got enough of the Commerce buildings to pull it off and the difficult of their placement.

Splendor but make it with Marbles

I've played with marbles for a lot of my childhood and came up with all sorts of little games to entertain myself with. I no longer have that collection but I still feel that marbles are pretty neat. Gizmos uses marbles with a dispenser as a means to have randomized resource offering. So at any time there's six marbles that are offered and you can sort of peek to see what's coming next.

At its heart the game is very similar to Splendor in that you're collecting resources to build your tableau. You take one action per turn but as you're building your engine you start getting chained combos, allowing you to do more every turn. The game ends when a player has built 16 gizmos or 3 of the Tier 3 gizmos and you get points for your built machines and other bonuses.

For solo, played a simplified variant where the bot operated with D6 and D12 rolls. It's a pretty simple game but I do like the toy factor. I kind of wish the cards were more interesting in terms of abilities/effects. Might have to look into games that use marbles in interesting ways, kind of like the match 3 PvP game that my husband and I tried out at PAX 2024, Power Well.

Collecting dragons, eggs, and points

For the final game of the convention I was able to join a game of Wyrmspan with 3 others, which was a really nice change of pace from playing solo games.

When the goals and everything were shown off I totally had a plan to go for those end of round goals. And yet hilariously as I took my turns I completely veered off course and mostly played off of what I was getting. In particular, my strategy shifted when I got the Northern Gryphdragon card which really let me accelerate around the Guild track for benefits.

Round 3 was particularly fun as I comboed off hard, getting so many extra actions that one of the players remarked at how many coins I had used on my playmat. Hilariously there was a dragon that I played and initially read as having all the differrent sizes but I glossed over the fact that it wanted it all in the same cave, so I missed out on those points.

In the final round, I sort of lost steam in terms of action economy and was the first to pass, but overall I felt like I did as much as I could and regret not taking a picture of the final board. The scores were surprisingly tight: 65, 91, 94 and 95! It was a mix of elation at winning but also embarrasement, especially for winning against the new player, who I felt was playing really well, by 1 point.

It really cool was seeing a lot of recognizable games being played, some that I own or have played and others that I had a passing interest in. Unfortuantely didn't get any of the Play-and-Win games, there were three or so rounds of lotteries and most of the ones I could have won were picked up in the first round. Near the end of the con while I was playing Wyrmspan they did a "first come first served" for the remaining games. One player bolted off and was fortunate to get a game they were hoping to get.

Overall, that was a really fun time at the convention. I sort of wish I played more with others but I'm glad I had the experiences that I did. Also, I'm technically 14 different played games out of 12 days of the year so I'm ever so slightly ahead of pace for trying to go for the farther "game-per-day" milestone. We'll see how far we get.