The Great Great Plains Game Festival!
I had a chance to attend Great Plains Game Festival a couple of weekends ago. This convention has really blossomed in recent years until it has become one of the premier events in the region. It has play-to-win, multiple rooms of open-gaming, scheduled events, tournaments, a dedicated dexterity and giant game area, a vendor hall, an expansive game library with thousands of games to check out (courtesy of Board Game Wagon), and a weekend-long gamer garage sale!
Personally, I’m a big fan of scheduled events. I know many people are happy winging their convention experience, but I love to set something up ahead of time on the event schedule so both I and my players have a safe space and guaranteed game to play and avoid the anxiety and uncertainty of trying to find a drop-in game about to start or putting up a Looking for Players flag and hoping someone sits down. I love teaching games and it’s a great way to both meet new people and reconnect with people I only see at cons.
The latter is the case with Kieren, who has been attending my scheduled events for years now and joined me for all three games of the Feld Friday Marathon. I am an extreme and excessive Stefan Feld fangirl and always start off my conventions with an all-day marathon of his latest releases, favorites, and/or titles I haven’t played recently. This con was a line-up of recent releases: Nassau and Kathmandu from Queen’s City Collection and the epic civilization-builder Civolution. Starting at noon, Nassau is a dramatic re-working of one of Feld’s earliest designs, Rum and Pirates, retains the interesting worker placement mechanism of that game, and adds an entirely new dimension of sailing ships around the caribbean performing various set-collection activities. At 3:00 was Kathmandu, a completely new design and one of his lightest. It’s a yak-racing game and really quite delightful. At 6:00, I was joined by my friend Remy, who I last saw last year when we saw The People’s Joker together, and her wife, for Civolution. This is easily Feld’s most complex and ambitious design and I scheduled it last so that we could all play at a comfortable pace without feeling rushed to end at an arbitrary time. We wound up going until almost 11:00 and the result came right down to the wire!
Due in part to a timely tax return, I treated myself to a room at the convention hotel so I didn’t have to drive back home to Omaha at the end of each day. The Cornhusker Hotel is a wonderful space and the free breakfast included with the room gave me enough energy and stamina to get through most of the day! I had a scrumptious Colorado-style skillet on Saturday morning and a generous spread of breakfast buffet items on Sunday. I slept well both nights and my only regret was forgetting to bring my own creamer for the coffee. I slept well thanks to traveling with my own pillow and blanket and enjoyed the sight of the hotel staff having tucked in my teddy bear when I returned to my room later in the day for a snack.
I enjoy demoing games with a lovely table presence and obscure games people might not have a chance to access outside of conventions and that’s what I did on Sunday. I started off the day with a six player game of Last Light, my top game of 2024. The entire compliment of players were people I was just meeting for the first time, they all really got into the game, and it was an intense experience with two of us surpassing 20-points on the same turn!
Next up was my Zenobia II finalist game, Aguirre. I recently finished updating the game with revisions based on the feedback I got from the competition and wanted to try them out. Scott Brady, the designer of Boop, and his wife Nicole joined me for this and I got some really excellent and insightful feedback from them on the design. Scott promised to provide me with some resources and suggestions on how to improve the quality of my prototype for the purpose of pitching to publishers, which I’m looking forward to. Jackie Fox, the designer of Rock Hard, and I were talking on BlueSky recently about how our least favorite part of the game design process is making prototypes. We really hate it, lol! In my case, it’s because I am not a crafty person and despite teaching at graphic design college at one point in time (I taught the writing classes), I don’t have any skills in that department myself.
I took some time out for a play-to-win session of Wild Gardens, which was a really enjoyable romp through the forest foraging for items to turn into tasty recipes. It was a really cozy game and just the palette-cleanser needed after a heavy historical game about surviving tyranny! I didn’t win a copy, but added it to my wishlist.
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I wrapped up Saturday with Pez: the Card Game, an obscure trading card game circa 2000 designed by Mike Fitzgerald (of Baseball Highlights and Diamonds fame) about collecting Pez dispensers, filling them with Pez candy, and eating other players’ Pez. This is an obscure game I bring to nearly every convention because I love exposing people to it. It’s a forgotten bit of board gaming history and a bonkers game, resulting in laughs and appreciation for the unforgettable experience. I had six players for this session all from the same large family and they really got into it!
I wore my custom Carcasonne dress on Sunday and after breakfast joined Remy for a cooperative play-to-win game of Votes for Women. What an amazing game this is! As some states succumbed to patriarchy, the rest gradually strengthened their resolve for equality. As the last round began, it was clear it would be close and would come down to modified die rolls at the end. Some of those went our way and some did not and we faced the proposition of everything coming down to the last state’s roll: Pennsylvania. This time the state did not let the rest of the country down and patriarchy was defeated, a gamified result we can only hope manifests in the current world we find ourselves in.
As the con wound down, I anxiously kept an eye on the gamer garage sale room. I’d brought a large suitcase full of games to sell in an effort to free up shelf space for the stacks of unplayed games on my table. The largest game I was trying to unload was Batman: Gotham City Chronicles, I game I’d Kickstarted several years ago, played once and gotten frustrated by the terrible rulebook, and then spent several years accumulating the fixes the publisher gradually released to make the game more playable. But those fixes never inspired me to play it again, so I decided to part with the entire lot. However, after setting a price and even marking it down to what I thought was a steal, the game still hadn’t sold! Probably no one else wanted to lug a massive game home to take up shelf space, either, ha ha. So it was with reluctance that I rolled my suitcase down to the garage sale room to pick it back up when the garage sale ended. It was relief that I discovered then that it finally had sold in just the final last half hour! Phew! With the space freed up, I was able to clear off my entire table for the first time in a year!
There was time for one more game before the con closed its doors and I returned the favor of Remy teaching a game by teaching her Inhabit the Earth, one of my all-time favorites and another obscure game I love to show at conventions. Affectionately known as “The Stoned Animal Game”, I consider this Richard Breese title that flew under the radar his best game. It’s tableau-building race game with multi-use cards and is completely unique in the pantheon of board games. It went over very well and was a wonderful way to end the con. I drove home happy and fulfilled!
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