Blitz Con 2018 Recap

by Ambie Valdés

We hosted our second annual Blitz Con this year over President’s Day weekend again. Last year we had 50 people, but this year we grew to a little over 100 people! We had a much bigger space and there was always plenty of room to play games.

I got to play 46 plays of 34 different games, with about 30 different people (and a bunch more in the Two Rooms and a Boom games)!

I’m not typically a picture taking person, so I lapsed into my normal self and didn’t take that many pictures during Blitz Con. But I did take some pictures of some of the games I enjoyed playing!

My favorite new game at the convention was Dinosaur Island (Amazon). A few people brought copies, and I got to try out the deluxe edition! The deluxe edition has heavy metal coins, individually shaped dinosaur meeples, and a special “Fast Pass” slap bracelet first player marker! All completely unnecessary but awesome. I really enjoyed Dinosaur Island because it’s exactly the type of game I love! It has an interesting theme - you’re building a Dinosaur theme park and trying to get the most points from the visitors you get in your park. It has good strategy and planning - there are a bunch of actions you need to do in order to get your park built up, like researching DNA and the dinosaurs, buying attractions, getting security levels up, and making the dinosaurs. And the theme and mechanisms work well together! Also, it was neat because Toby and I both built different types of parks (he went for a restaurant-filled park and I went for a carnivorous dino filled park) and ended up with very close scores.

Another game I was excited to play was Hunt for the Ring (Amazon). I had played the first half a few months ago, but we hadn’t played a full game. Hunt for the Ring is a hidden movement game where one player plays Frodo and everyone else works together as the ringwraiths to try to find where he is. You have to find him multiple times to get his corruption level up. In the first half, Frodo is going to Bree. In the second half, Frodo’s actions are pre-determined by cards, and that player controls Gandalf instead, and Gandalf can scare the ringwraiths. I was a ringwraith (the blue one) and the game was very close and tense!

Surprisingly, I only played one 18xx game at the convention (although I did play some other economic games like Ponzi Scheme and Container). I played a 3 player 1889 game with Toby and Ben D, an 18xx player we had met online. We hadn’t played 1889 in a long time, and I think usually we always have a beginner when we’re playing it, so it was interesting to play with all experienced players! Ben ended up taking control of 4 companies near the end, shuffling them around to get permanent trains on all of them and buy a diesel, but since the bank is so small it ran out that operating round! If it hadn’t run out, he could have shuffled more and dumped a couple trainless companies on me, which would have swung the game a lot! It was really fun seeing him do neat things with controlling so many companies.

A bunch of people I know from different places came to the convention - people from Twitter, BGG, friends, and coworkers. It was neat seeing everyone playing games and having a good time! My coworkers played a bunch of the Play to Win games, and they won a couple in the raffle! There was also a flea market on Saturday where I missed out on getting Word Slam, but my coworker was able to get a couple games for himself.

Overall, I had a fun time at Blitz Con, but it was also stressful since I was helping organize it (I won’t bore you with organization details). The venue wasn’t ideal. You had to go outside and into the main hotel to go to the bathroom, and it was only one stall. Also, the hotel food wasn’t great, and we ended up going across the street to a Korean/sushi place for food (that restaurant was actually decent). But the gaming was great and I had a lot of fun!

Share: