KC, Rita, and I safely arrived in Dallas tonight for BGG.CON. This will probably be our last convention to exhibit until Essen next year, and our goal is to play games as much as we sell Havoc. I'm scheduled to play at least Antike and Indonesia this weekend. Also hoping to get in at least one game with Mark Johnson and I need to spend some time with my friend Yehuda from Israel.

(I may add photos more frequently than I blog. You can follow the photostream on Flickr to see cool pics as I upload them.)

We had a brief lay-over in Denver on our way to Dallas so I brought out Gloom. I bought this because of the cool see-through card mechanism and the mostly positive review over at Have Games Will Travel. We also like to sample print quality, and I noticed that the game was made in India - I suspect PlayingCardsIndia manufactured the cards but I could be wrong.

KC and Gloom

We only got a single turn into the game, but I think we understand how to play. Simple game with a great theme: inflict as much misery on your family before delivering untimely deaths to them all.

We are very unimpressed with the quality of the box and the cards. Much of the text is unreadable, the cards show creases and streaks right out of the box, and it seems like the game is unlikely to last for more than 10 plays or so. Apparently some folks on the geek agree with this assessment. Now I'm not saying we could do better - this has to be a difficult design and production challenge. I just wish the end result looked better. Maybe we'll get a chance to play through it tomorrow.

The hotel here is very nice, other than the fact that we got stuck with smoking rooms. They ionized the air pretty well and I can't detect a trace of smoke in the room. So I guess we are a step ahead of Essen. Here's the view from my room.

Westin City Center in Dallas

Tomorrow morning we'll setup our meager Havoc display at around 11am in anticipation of the vendor area opening at 1pm. I'll be teaching a group how to play Antike around 4pm and hope to get in a good amount of gaming tomorrow night. We also have a batch of prototypes from KC and others to try out each evening at 7pm.

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