Gen Con Vlog Day 3: Calm Before The Storm

0:00 Hey everybody. Welcome to the Saturday vlog.

0:16 Hey everybody. Welcome back to Gen Con. Today is day three. So the con is more than half over at this point in a sense because Sunday's not really a full day. But Saturday is the biggest day usually. Maybe Thursday, but Saturday everyone's here. It's the first day usually to sell out. So we'll see what's happening. It's currently 7:00 a.m. in the morning. Let's get started.

0:43 Saturday early morning and it's not even open yet, but the you know exhibitors are getting ready. But look look there's an addition to this booth. Well, yeah. I I It was the It was a It just a a glance. A fleeting glance of your uh sweatiness. But look. Oh, yeah. Let's not Yeah, we can move that. But look at the addition. That's not one. That's not two. It's not three. That's four Dice Tower Awards and a bag of something. Uh but yeah, look.

1:15 Minutes till we open. There's no mistaking when you're standing in the Pandasaurus booth here. A lot of orange, a lot of pandas, a lot of saurus-es. This is one of the games I'm seeing a lot of hype about. A lot of people rushing to kind of get in line for for Grey Loon here. Worker placement game where you place in between different cards. So this is a reworking of an older game Speerium. So yeah, I'm curious. It looks It looks really good in person actually. It looks generic-y medieval, but clean and I like it.

1:43 It's a very wet morning this Saturday and there's a whole lot going on. We got This is the front of the hotel. The Dice Tower van tried there. And I'm pretty sure we're being invaded from space. I don't know what that's a lamp.

1:59 Ladies and gentlemen, Cardhalla on Saturday morning. Look at all that. Shark. And over there is a sneep a sleeping Snorlax a sleeping Snorlax. And I think a Pikachu being built on his belly. That's I'm amazed at the creativity down here. Look at this.

2:28 Take a look at this Warhammer booth and oh my goodness is this real fire indoors? That is amazing special effects.

2:38 Oh yeah, yeah.

2:39 What if photo writing? Uh so yeah, we printed some of the cards and

2:43 cool. Yeah. No, I don't have to bring out my reading glasses. I'm not as young as I used to be.

2:47 Okay, so question one where every piece has their own powers.

2:53 Are you good?

2:55 How old are you?

2:55 But you now know what that is because I showed it to you. You know what that is.

2:58 So yeah, thank you. You just You just killed my headless horseman, so

3:02 Yeah.

3:03 Be gone. That's not gone. That is That's not

3:06 He's already lost his head.

3:08 No, you hurt somebody.

3:09 I've not yet begun to uh

3:11 I've not yet begun to disappoint you.

3:14 All right, I attack.

3:15 You want to try it? And the goal of the game is simple. It's pretty simple here.

3:19 Get out of there. Don't acknowledge him. Don't even look at him. I don't need to. I'm just looking at the devastation of the board.

3:26 So a minute ago when you used to

3:28 You got to be a bone.

3:29 The bigger one wins. If you attack, you take the space. If you defend

3:34 That's him, right?

3:34 You stay there.

3:37 All right, just played Broken Fate here. This is a fun strategic I I really like what's happening in this is in this fact that you are seeing your pieces, they are seeing their pieces. You don't know what their pieces are. You only know what your pieces are. And higher numbers beat lower numbers, but there's also individual player powers for each company. So, what happens is you will strategize and spend your energy tokens in order to get across the board in order to get in the winning space. However, what will happen invariably is you will plan something out and then you will forget what number you had revealed to you. So, then you go in and try to attack him and you get blown up. But, all in all, such a fun experience of just memory, strategy, energy management, and player powers. So, that is Broken Faith. Super happy I got to play this here at uh Gen Con.

4:26 So, here we've got demos that they're doing of Fantasy Zombicide: Dead Man Tales, but it's about to get even better cuz I have David here who's about to open this up for me so I can take a look at these miniatures, these painted miniatures, without the glare of the glass.

4:42 Now I have all the pressure of opening this up.

4:44 taking much too long. No, it's fine, David. And you got Y'all are about to be blown away. These things look so good that they look fake. These are real painted miniatures. I mean, I could do this, of course, but not everybody can. Look at this cat. Look at this guy. It's half orc, half lobster. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to I'm going to just kind of show you guys Oh, hey, look, it's Swabby. I think that was his name in the campaign. Just look at this. This is a mutated shark with zombies coming out of it. This is insane. Saturday is definitely less crowded than other days, for sure. I'm able to walk here without bumping into people, which is nice.

5:34 So, but still people around buying games. Ooh, metal coins for Kemet, which is perfect because that is like a pure pure gambling game. Like, if you if it existed in a Vegas casino, I wouldn't blink an eye. Cats. I just realized that I hadn't visited the Red Raven booth yet during this whole convention. And so, I always love to come by and take a look at the Red Raven games. Many of these we've already played on the channel live, and so you've seen them, but always always a cool place to visit. Creature Caravan, one of the new version or one of the newer games from Red Raven. They have the deluxe components. And this is me scoop all metal coins for five bucks.

6:20 That's really really cool. Look at her. Look at her making this little video, thinking he's so cool. I wish I was Chris E. I don't think any of these hats would work for me. I don't know, maybe. I don't have a witch hat. Here I am at the Ravensburger booth, and the thing that caught my eye, they got a lot of goodies up here. They do Lorcana, of course. And the thing that caught my eye is right here behind this gentleman checking people out. That is the new Illuminer's Quest. That's the cooperative ones. They put out two of them so far, and now they've got the third one here, which is as you can see, Winnie the Pooh themed. They're always neat. I really like them. It definitely helps to get Lorcana to the table if I don't have to have an opponent.

7:09 Second word.

7:14 Here.

7:15 Your word can't be part of the word.

7:18 You can hold it.

7:19 Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

7:20 That's your job. I'm just here to

7:24 R

7:39 I'm here at All Play teaching Gibber Jabber. This is from Cassie Sykes, published by All Play. A great guessing party game where the clues are given out one letter at a time. The only problem is you got to get into each other's minds to figure it out. Which you'll probably mess up, but it's a game that's actually more fun when you mess it up than when you get it correct. Small, cheap, fun, Gibberish Jabber.

7:59 Our animals escaped our zoo. We need to get them back in before the guard shows up. Okay? In this game, we're going to try and get our animals from the outside of the zoo all the way to the center. Everyone's going to start with a player board. It's going to be one to four players.

8:12 This is real stained glass over here. Look at this. Ooh. You can even see through it. It's amazing.

8:20 Where would you put it?

8:22 This is one of the ballrooms over here with plenty of tables and stuff set up. There's people doing RPGs, there's people playing big heavy games, old Pandemic like the first edition, people playing History of the World. Uh and I noticed all the tables are labeled, so I'm guessing there's some sort of like pre-registration sitting guarantee of a gaming table to play at.

8:42 Here at the Song Pepper Games booth Saturday, and they've been kind of blowing through their stuff. They still have some things left, but they sold out I think of the Glasgow train robbery, so I just wanted to show you a little bit of this. Which is very cool looking as pretty much all of their games are. They always have this amazing art style and graphic design. Here you've got some really cool wooden screen printed pieces.

9:09 I found another tea company on the way over to Lucas Oil Stadium. Super excited about these. I'm thinking about peach berry cobbler.

9:34 Here's the booth for Cataclysm Arcade who's getting a whole lot of buzz recently on crowd funding. They've got a cool looking booth here. Clearly lots of people playing the game, checking it out. It's a trading card game that you can play out of a single booster pack is the idea. And it looks interesting. It's got a cool theme as well. So lots of activity, lots of you know, hubbub going on here which is lovely to see.

9:59 It's going to keep to two wheels. Let's say it's clear. It's going to keep to those two. Players will have just one action. They choose one of the two. Then let's say it's now Mike moving this is doing those two action and we choose one of the two. The the the flora token, you have put two flora token. It's not So, let's go with the the action. When the five turner are done, it's the end of the round and we'll have four rounds. You can go there and then make a I will work for this one and some cards.

10:40 Okay. So, can multiple people be

10:43 Hey there everybody. I just got done playing Arctica here at the booth from This Way Games. I played an earlier version of this at Essen and they've made some changes already, adjustments and I loved it at Essen. I love it even more now. From the designers, publishers of Ice, one of my favorite games of all time. I got to tell you I think this has the opportunity to be even stronger. I really love the look, the gear mechanism. It's so smart. We played an entire game with Teach in 90 minutes here at the booth. I have a lot of really good impressions over this game. Can't wait to check out the final version.

11:32 I get I get nervous when I do that.

11:45 There's a lot of crap.

11:46 So all of this is from Witcher No Man's Land, which is coming out. Actually, not a lot of information yet, but more info coming out in September. Now, I mean, this resin pour and like the actual background is like super super stunning, but yeah, the actual figures and everything looks great. Is that Jerry? That's Jerry right there.

12:19 Hey. Yes, she's talking about this portal.

12:27 Wait, so this portal portal right here? And I'm going to grab this. That's me. That's you. Just kidding. I'm still going east. It was the right It was the wrong character. I'm getting this purple book. And then my other character is going east. Going to wrap around and grab this purple book.

12:45 Nice. Two spell cards.

12:47 Two spell cards. Let me see. What's your direction? Wait, can I see your card? Can I see your magic card? All right, I just played Seeker of Spells, your little known wizards who are running around, bouncing off walls, running into each other, stealing each other's books. Uh it is pretty fun, chaotic, jumping around game. So, had a good time with some kids with this.

13:11 Ruh-roh, Raggy. It's everyone's favorite mystery-solving pooch. It's Scooby-Doo.

13:21 So, I have never made it up to this space before. All the times I've been to Gen Con, this is the quiet room. Uh clearly, I'm not going in here taking a video because that would be against the purpose. But how cool is that? A place of quietness. And then I think over here to the right, I believe is the craft room. Now this one I can go in and peek at. Also never been in here before. So let's see what some of the crafts they're doing.

13:52 Ooh, it looks like we're like making mosaics out of fabric. Those are pretty cool. This is all like sewn in or something. Some fancy fancy looking mosaics.

14:07 This is a manufacturing booth here at Gen Con, but it looks like they've got Mordred that's coming from Seamon. I honestly don't know much about this. But I figured there's not people standing in front of it and it looks like um whether it's a prototype or a pre-production or a production copy, I'm not sure, but sure looks pretty, so I thought I would show off some of the pieces here. So you can get an idea what the game is about. Happy people at the Dice Tower booth. Look at this. Look at all the happy people. And Sean over there. Sean's around.

14:53 Happy people and Sean. Now Sean's happy.

14:57 I'm good now.

14:58 Um You know what? All right. I'm going to just try these three.

15:07 Yep.

15:08 And then Wow.

15:13 I DON'T KNOW. I WOULDN'T BE SURPRISED MORE people will move the explorers all the way to the temple because they want to try and get as many as they can. I

15:23 play games to disrupt. I don't ever play to win. We tie a thousand times. All right. All right. All right. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'm just setting it aside. All right. I'm just remember Zippo. Oh, wait. Sorry. You got zero. I got zero. You got four.

15:44 This game is ridiculous.

15:46 GG, everybody. GG. GG. GG. Just finished Trail of the Temple. I don't want to say I rocked it, but the guy I was playing with, teaching the game, I scored 41 points. He said, "I've never seen 41 points." I'm not going to also tell you the guy after me scored 45, but they were impressed for a moment. This is awesome. So, here we got Papers and Games, where we just recently won some uh Dice Tower Awards, in fact, and they're showing off uh showing off some of their upcoming things like Class of '89 here. We got Class of '89 right there. Looking very interesting, very cool. Then over here, we've got another upcoming game. This is Small Batch right there.

16:34 Obviously, in the world of distilled, as it says, looking pretty cool. One of the things that happens all over the place at Gen Con is people selling their trading cards. Two booths, much like this one, where they are selling trading cards here in packs and whatnot. They're also then buying singles from people. They'll get an offer and see if they want to sell their singles. So, that's going to be happening all over the place, actually. Uh you can come and sell the cards you're not using and get new ones. And everywhere you go, there are tons of pins. Every one of these are selling them or giving them away with purchases. So many pins. A few manufacturers show up where here's Long Pack, where they make games. Panda is over in a hotel. There's other ones. You can also get hair.

17:22 Huh. I have a few friends who need to come here. So here I am walking around the hall today and wouldn't you know we're starting to see the Dice Tower Awards in the wild. These guys, 20 strong, just won the best solo game. And so there's the award. And it's it's lovely to see. Great game. Love it. All right. Well, the food lines aren't too bad right now in part because of the torrential downpour that just cleared up. So you can see it's pretty wet out here, but I'm going to try to take advantage of the shorter lines, short-er lines. This noodle noodle cup line is still a little long for my taste. So we're going to look around here and see what we got. It used to be that coming to the art section was a place to go where there wouldn't be crowds, but that is no longer the case. There's lots of people looking at all the interesting pictures that are here.

18:48 So it's open gaming in Grand Ballroom 5, but first I was distracted by this really really beautiful view over here of the K Kawai baby grand L47. This model is woo, this is hot hot stuff. So Shelfie is something that's being premiered here at Gen Con and it's otherwise it's a bit of a collectible type of an item where you are going to have these boxes. They're going to contain these little mini versions of games that you're going to put in a mini shelf shelving unit I should say. And uh it looks like it's been doing quite well here. We've got also they've got kind of like a larger scale version of it here which is kind of cute. And so you can see some of the stuff you know what you're getting but then they also blind buy you know bags and things along those lines but I think you know a lot of board gamers are collectors and so this does kind of feed into that collector itch and I think it's a funny touch that the Gloomhaven doesn't actually fit in the shelf. So get a kick out of that.

20:01 Here we see people playing

20:03 Cat and Tower.

20:05 Is it going to fall? Come on let it fall. Let it fall right when I'm recording.

20:08 No just leave it up.

20:10 Okay.

20:10 IT'S OKAY.

20:15 OKAY IT DIDN'T FALL THAT'S SAD.

20:18 EVEN AMONGST all the big crowds here at Gen Con I still did it. I found Waldo. It's Waldo ladies and gentlemen. All right so it is Saturday. I do believe today is the last day for the flea market and this here is the line for said flea market. The reason for this being every day the prices at the consignment store here drop a little bit on a per item basis and I guess uh it's happened today is the last the last one and there's just tons of people waiting to get in there and check out what's left. I've been in there I was in there yesterday and there was some interesting stuff but obviously today is the best day to get those things.

21:08 And you attack so you go in and

21:09 Tokyo, which gives you another point. Now, you have one energy. One pretty cool aspect of the Asmodee booth is this kind of walkway that they've got, the one ring. So, you can walk through. Let's do this. I'm going to do a filmed walk through. Oh. Oh. Oh.

21:42 Now, upstairs on the second floor, a lot of people miss this. So, there's Traveling Tom's Coffee. Um we have nitro yerba mate, and then we have the super bowls, which are not a sports game. Uh we're not kicking footballs or throwing them around, but instead, we are making acai bowls. Some tasty stuff over here.

22:03 All right. So, we're fiddling around with the next turn system, and it's this set of coasters that tell you whose turn it is. It's currently Brent's turn. Brent, are you done with your turn yet? How would we know that you're done with your turn?

22:14 Well, I will push this button when I'm done with my turn, but I'm not.

22:17 Are you not? You're still taking your turn?

22:18 Sorry. Yes. So, I'm going to draft this rat, and then it's the next turn.

22:24 What?

22:25 Here we go.

22:26 Now, it's your turn.

22:27 Okay. I'm going to try to make it speedy. I'm going to play the sweet trophy.

22:32 All right. Not This is not the only thing that these amazing next turn coasters do. It also has this cool app that says, "I'm the winner." And it has keeps track of all the stats, and it sends those stats to everybody on the list, so that they all know that I won the game.

22:52 Hello.

22:53 I'm trying to figure out which one I'm going

23:03 Shoot up the signal flare.

23:05 I got 14. All right guys, got five. Just wrapped up this game and guess what? I got that win. Finally, after like three years, I have won a game. Had a lot of fun playing this deduction style game. As you know, deduction style is not usually my go-to mechanism. This one surprised me. Family weight, reveal a tile, try and figure out what your hidden combination is. Had a great time. Be sure to check out Got Five. At StarWin Design, they also have some of these dice earrings. Pretty cool.

23:48 So, it's late, after hours. The exhibit hall is closed. You know, there's nothing left to do at Gen Con anymore. Not a thing. What are all these people doing here? Well, this is all the rooms. So, you can see the Marvel Multiverse room over here. Tons of role-playing tables and stuff set up throughout. Very, very cool displays. Uh Monte Cook Games over here. A lot of role-playing. Elder Gods of Appalachia. Bumping. Super busy. What about over this? Oh, this is well, this is still the I'm not sure that's just as bumping if it's bumping. Busy. Okay. Uh well, that part can get cut out if need be. But, how about the Cosmere role-playing game? Bumping and busy. Are you seeing a trend here, folks? There's more to Gen Con than the exhibit hall hours.

24:33 Butter.

25:29 Uh thanks for watching another video here on the Dice Tower. Uh we really appreciate you stop by and checking our things out. Thanks so much for joining us today. And hey, if you really like what we're doing here at the Dice Tower, then there are different ways to support the Dice Tower. One of those ways is through Patreon. We have links in the description to this video. We have links to lots of other things we do down there, so definitely check it out. But either way, we're glad you watch us. Tell your friends about the Dice Tower. Until next time though, I'm Tom Vasel and I hope you enjoyed this video.