RECAP: September NJPA Board Game Meetup

Yesterday was the September meetup of our game group (NJPA Board Game Alliance). It was the biggest crowd yet and loads of fun, as usual.

Championland games
The day started off with a test copy of Famous Missions. It was the basic deck with very little artwork and one or two cards that were switched out before production. Charles was a great judge, really getting the most out of the players. Alan, Steve and Molly fought to the end until Alan broke the 3 way tie with his good cop / bad cop duo of Oprah Winfrey and Ozzy Osbourne.

More Famous Missions games were played, but I was playing other games at the time. I did hear someone yell “I’m gonna vomit!” while they were playing. Good stuff.

George, Marty and I tried out the new unnamed battle game that I’ve been working on. It’s simple and pretty fun. George has about 100 expansions already planned out to add depth and strategy. I’m testing out a different format for this game. It’s going to be printed on custom sized business cards, 2″X2″ and 2″X8″. The tests went well.

After about 10 hours of gaming and lots of pizza, we ended with a sleepy-eyed / brain-fried six player game of Starts With / Ends With. 3 of the players didn’t score a single point. We all struggled with a word starting with “I” and ending in “C”, and Joe won with a 16 letter word that I can’t remember.

Other games
I played Livingstone, Dominion, and Carcassonne (with Princess & Dragon / Inns & Cathedrals). I watched a Munchkin, Scotland Yard and a few games of Hit the Beach (renamed later as “Pound Sand”). I sent Carolyn to buy Wings of War, and saw a little bit of gameplay. And I watched George and Alex spend an hour trying to figure out how to play Utopia only to pack it up and move on.

I also watched Alex demo an updated version of his awesome game Turbo Crash, and George ironed out the kinks (and was destroyed by Alex) on his game Illuminarium.

So the next game day is Saturday, October 17th at The Loft in Audubon, NJ. I want to do something cool with Famous Missions, since I’ll have the full real game in hand by then. If we can get some solid artwork and a name for the battle game, I could have that ready too.