TABSCon XXXV

This weekend was the quarterly TABSCon event and Andrew dragged me out to it. By dragged me out I really mean he was willing to drive by my place and pick me up, which is really all it takes to get me to do things! We played some games and then hadn't played enough games by the time they kicked us out so we went to Sara and Duncan's place and played more games there. Woo!

All told I believe I played Innovation, Quarriors x2, Fruit Ninja, Zombie Fluxx, Galaxy Trucker, Castles of Burgundy, and Suburbia. Most were games I'd played before; most were games I really want to play again.

Suburbia was new to me, and is probably the one I want to play again the most. The game felt like a cross between Through The Ages, Vegas Showdown, and SimCity the computer game. Each turn you get to buy one tile with tiles getting cheaper the longer they sit around going unpurchased. The tiles represent buildings in your little piece of the city, and have different stats in terms of how they help you gain money or points. Tiles get better or worse based on other tiles that are already bought, or that will be bought in the future. But you don't play with all the tiles each game, so it's a bit of a crap shoot to figure out the actual power of a given tile. The game we played had all 6 airports in the game, which made them all really good since they scale based on number of other airports in play across all players. Restaurants anti-scaled with the number of other restaurants in play which was weird but interesting. The slaughter house, on the other hand, just scaled up with number of restaurants.

To top it all off there are a bunch of public and hidden goals worth bonus points at the end of the game. Most continuous civic buildings, or fewest lakes, or highest on the income track. This coupled with not using all the tiles means the game probably has a lot of replayability. Certainly one game was not enough for me!