The good folks at Mayfair Games published their official Origins 2009 report. It includes a slide show of photographs, along with a narrative about their experiences in Columbus, Ohio, this year.
They mention that 2,500 people came through and demoed games at their booth.
They sold every copy of the Steam board game they brought with them.
Michael A. Stackpole is a fairly prolific author, having penned a large number of
I signed up for one of his sessions. After attending, I wished I had signed up for the others. Stackpole not only understands what beginning fiction writers (and experienced ones) struggle with, he also knows how to communicate solutions to those problems effectively. I think I learned more in the 1-hour session with him than I’ve learned in all the other creative writing education I’ve had. To give you an idea what to expect, I’m going to share some of what I learned from Stackpole during his Origins 2009 session. Out of respect for the author and a desire not to infringe on his copyrights (he sells a document with his 20 rules of writing) or affect his attendance at seminars, I’m only sharing part of the information here. If you want to learn more, and get more detail, I would encourage you to visit his stormwolf.com site or attend one of his seminars.
Stackpole’s first “Rule of Writing” is “Show, Don’t Tell”. This is something you hear in many creative writing classes, but Stackpole did a great job of illustrating the impact of doing it right. For example, a beginning writer will “tell” you what is going on, such as “Tom was mad.” That definitely tells you what’s going on, but you don’t have to actually think about the words. It’s better to “show” your audience how mad Tom is, by saying something like “Tom’s face turned red. He gritted his teeth and slammed his fist on the counter.” In the second example, you have to visualize what’s going on. Not only do you get the point (“Tom is mad”), you can also picture just how mad Tom is.
Stackpole also tells writers to use “Continuity Bolts” in their work to hold the story together and make it seem real. For example, if the main character in your story visits a local bar and has a conversation with the bartender while waiting on a friend to show up, use that conversation and the bartender character elsewhere in the story. Perhaps your main character needs to go to the post office to pick up a package. While he’s waiting in line, he might see the bartender buying stamps. This makes your fictional world seem more real. Similarly, if a television in the bar talks about some news story, the main character might hear people talking about that same story in line at the post office. These elements of continuity make your fictional world seem more complete and consistent, and reward readers for paying attention.
The rule that stuck with me the most was “He said, she said”. This refers to something I’ve always struggled with when I write fiction. I knew it sounded horribly awkward, but I just couldn’t see a way around it. In about two minutes, Stackpole pushed me right past that block and helped me understand what I should do instead. Lots of beginning writers construct dialogue in their stories like this:
“I don’t like it,” Tom said. “You spend too much time at that night club.”
“Don’t be jealous,” Jane told him. “I’m only dancing and hanging out with my girlfriends.”
Tom asked, “Then why did Fred tell me he saw you sitting with that guy from Accounting?”
All that “said”, “told”, and “asked” stuff gets repetitive and irritating after a while. But how do you make it obvious who’s doing the talking? Stackpole explained that one way you can do that effectively is to give your characters a unique style of speaking. Perhaps one character never uses contractions. Maybe one uses a lot of big words, while another chooses smaller, one-syllable ones. The above example might be rewritten as:
“Ticks me off, you goin’ clubbin’ like that every night.”
“That’s silly! I only go to dance and hang out with the girls.”
“Fred saw you sittin’ with a jerk from Accountin’. Why?”
In that example, Tom tends not to say the “g” at the end of words. He also likes to use shorter, more gutteral sounding sentences. Jane uses more complete sentences and a more formal speech pattern.
Another way to identify speakers is to have them name one another, as in “Oh Tom, you’re always saying things like that.”
You can also illustrate who is speaking indirectly, by showing actions they take while they’re speaking, such as “Tom picked at his fingernails.” right before he says something.
You can also hide clues in the context of the characters’ speech, such as “Being the chief of police has its advantages, eh?” If three characters are speaking and only one is the chief of police, you know who they’re talking to. It’s also likely that the next person to speak will be that “chief of police” character. These little clues help the reader figure out who is talking, who’s listening, etc., without having to explicitly use the words “he said”, “she uttered”, “she asked”, etc.
For example, another way you might rewrite the original scene:
He gritted his teeth. “Ticks me off, you goin’ clubbin’ every night, Jane.”
“Oh, Tommy! I only go to dance and hang out with my girlfriends.”
“Fred saw you sittin’ with a jerk from Accountin’. Why?”
In the first line, we know the speaker is male, and he is talking to Jane, even if we don’t know who that speaker is. In the next line, Jane tells us it’s Tom. Now that we’ve established that Tom and Jane are talking, the third and subsequent lines can just deliver dialog until someone new enters the conversation or an existing speaker leaves.
(My examples above aren’t intended to be great writing, just quick illustrations to get the point across.)
Stackpole also shared suggestions for making scenes and dialog do “double duty” and explained the importance of researching the topics you write about. During the seminar, he recommended authors whose work provides good examples of different areas of fiction writing, such as dialogue, plotting, characterization, and
At his seminars, Stackpole sells CD-ROMs which contain PDF (Adobe Reader) files. I purchased the disc for this particular seminar. The PDF contains the 5 rules Stackpole discussed in the seminar, along with another 15. The disc also contains a copy of a back issue of his “The Secrets” newsletter that covers “timely and classic” writing issues. For example, his June 19, 2009, issue (122) discussed how to prepare documents for the Amazon Kindle device
I’m looking forward to attending Stackpole’s seminars at Gen Con Indy 2009 in August and wish him continued success in his career.
At Gen Con Indy 2008, I spoke with someone who said that Eagle Games’ “Bootleggers” was one of the best board games she’d played in a while. I wasn’t able to play it there, but I did manage to schedule a game at Origins this week.
Bootleggers is set during the Prohibition era of American history, when making and selling alcohol was illegal. In the game, you play a crime family boss who tries to profit off bootleg alcohol. Each player starts the game with some cash, a truck, and a still. With these, you attempt to earn the most money possible. If you reach $100,000 before turn 12, you win.
On each turn, the players roll a die for each still they have. This represents alcohol production for that turn. If a player has enough space in his trucks, the player can haul the alcohol to a speakeasy and sell it. If the player has more alcohol than the trucks can haul, deals can be negotiated with other players who have available truck space. The exact nature of those deals is up to the players.
After the production and hauling phases take place, the selling begins. One speakeasy will buy all the alcohol the players can produce, but pays a low price for it. In the beginning turn, this is the only speakeasy that’s open for business. To open others, the players have to spend “influence” tokens they receive as they play. When enough influence tokens are in place, the speakeasy will begin buying alcohol from players. A speakeasy will buy first from the player with the most influence tokens there, then from the one with the second-most, and so on. Just how many units will be purchased depends on one or more random die rolls. The smaller speakeasies may only purchase one die roll worth of alcohol, while others may purchase four or five die rolls’ worth and pay more for it. In true mobster fashion, if you have the majority influence at a speakeasy, you collect additional money for all alcohol sold there – no matter which player sells it.
That’s the basic mechanic, though there is a lot more to it. There are cards which give players more influence, allow them to upgrade their stills to produce more alcohol, acquire additional stills, more trucks, etc.
It was a pleasant enough game to play, and at a current retail price of $20, it’s a relatively inexpensive hobby game to acquire. That may explain why it was sold out at last year’s Gen Con and at Origins this year. My quick take on it is that if you have some unlucky die rolls during the early phases of the game (which I did) it can be almost impossible to recover. By the fourth turn I was in last place and just couldn’t make and sell enough alcohol to compete with the other players, who had multiple stills and trucks in play. Other players had better die rolls early on and were able to leverage that early income very effectively in later turns.
Matt and I played through a two-player, two-ships-per-player version of Battlestations Fleet Action at Origins 2009. I’d like tell you a lot more about it than I’m going to be able to do, but I can’t. I can’t tell you more because even after spending a couple of hours at the table with this game, I don’t really understand much about playing it.
I have to be fair from the outset and explain the situation. Although Matt and I were not more than a couple of minutes late getting to the table, it appeared that the GM had already set up the game for three other players and had given them an introduction to the basic rules of play. He set the two of us up on our own board, effectively creating two separate instances of the game that he would have to GM. We (my table and the other one) were constantly pulling him back and forth to explain what to do. Since the game seems a bit rules-heavy, both tables needed the GM’s help constantly, even for the most simple actions. A “cheat sheet” of the core rules would have made things a lot better, I think. We couldn’t remember from one turn to the next how things worked.
Here’s what I mean by “rules-heavy” since your mileage may vary. Let’s say that you have ship A and I have ship B. It’s my turn and I’ve decided to fire my guns at you. (Bear in mind as you read this that the actual description might be wrong because I have an incomplete understanding of the game, but the gist of it should be pretty close to reality.) First, I have to look at how many squares we are apart. Then I add to that my shield level. Then add your shield level. Then subtract some other figure. I roll two dice to tell me if I’ve hit or not. Let’s say I do. Now I have to determine where I hit you. I roll the dice again. I look at the numbers on a chart representing your ship. I compare what I rolled to that chart. If I like where I hit, then we damage your ship in a straight line from front to back. If I don’t like where that hit, I can use character actions to re-roll the dice until I run out of actions or hit something good. Now, you have to add hull damage points to a chart in front of you. If your total hull damage is more than a certain number, you have to roll a die to see if your ship stays together or blows up. For each section of your ship that was damaged, we roll another die to see if the damage destroyed that section and/or the people in it. If it’s hit dead-center of the ship, we might be rolling 6 or 7 times.
Ship movement is also rather complex. If you want to turn your ship, you add your current speed to the size of your ship to get the number you need to beat to make the turn. You can reduce that number by using up crew actions. But it’s definitely not easy. We attempted to turn our ships several times but only managed to make one successful turn each, and that wasn’t enough to keep our guns pointed at each other. The smallest ship (which should have been the easiest to turn) was never able to execute a turn. I think changing speed might have even required a skill check, but I don’t remember for sure.
Combat in the game, apart from all the math and dice rolling, has rather a lot of interesting elements. You can fire a cannon, which basically cuts a hole through the ship from front to back. You can launch a missile, which takes time to get to the target, but does a fair amount of damage. You can use your teleporter to teleport a bomb to the enemy ship, or a crew member. The bomb explodes inside the ship and damages it. The crew member rampages through the enemy ship, attacking enemy crew members and possibly destroying modules. We were able to try out all these different options and they’re all variations on the same theme.
When I talked with the Gorilla Games representatives at a past convention, I was really excited about this game. It sounded like it would be a lot of fun and would give a “look and feel” of space battles from shows like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and Babylon 5. In fact, I wanted to buy the game on the spot, but stopped myself because has a $59.95 MSRP. For that kind of money, I wanted to be sure I actually liked it first. I’m glad now that I didn’t buy it.
I’d like to tell you this was a fun game, but I can’t. I’ve never even considered getting up and walking away from a game at a convention before, but I was very much ready to do so about 10 minutes into this one. If I hadn’t wanted so badly to like it, I would have. I can’t tell you there is anything really wrong with Battlestations. If you know the rules, it may well be an extremely fun game. But when you don’t know the rules and your only reference source is a GM who is busy explaining a different rule to players at another table, it’s an incredibly frustrating, seemingly complex, uninteresting game.
Having said that, part of me still wants to like this game, enough so that I will try it at least once more at a future convention. Maybe it will be there at Gen Con Indy in August. But if my next experience is anything like this one, it’ll be thumbs down for this game.
As I write this, the Exhibit Hall at the Columbus Convention Center is being dismantled, the vendors are packing up their stuff, and the gamers are probably finishing a last few games. Origins 2009 is over. It always seems to pass so quickly. Sadly, tomorrow morning I’ll be getting up and going to work as usual. No more fun and games.
You can definitely see the impact of the economy on the gaming industry as you walk around Origins. The lines I saw at the registration desk and event ticketing were less than half of what I’ve seen at the same time in past years. The exhibit hall (or “vendor room” had huge walkways, several tables to sit down in, and one or two empty booths. It felt almost desolate compared to a few years ago.
In the miniatures hall and the board game hall, there were huge numbers of empty tables no matter what time or day you were there. Very few of the games I played were full, and getting event tickets was eerily easy. I had no problem getting tickets to any game I wanted in on, and only one or two games had to turn away those with generic tickets. In some ways, it was nice. In others, it made me wonder if there will even be an Origins in a few years if things keep going like this.
This year I took part in a couple of seminars and several game events. My schedule included all of the following:
I’ll write more about each of these events in separate posts, to make it easier for readers to find the titles they might be interested in.
The Origins Game Auction
The auction at Origins seemed rather sparsely attended compared to five or six years ago. I blame that on three separate things.
The most significant of the above events to me is the change in auction management. The group running the auction in 2001 knew a lot about hobby games. They knew who designed them, who published them, what they were like to play, and what their approximate value was. They also took great care to share this in-depth knowledge with the auction audience. This made the auction more than just a “buy and sell” affair. It was actually quite an education in gaming history and economics. The group running the auction today may know a lot about games, but not much of that is shared during the auction from what I saw. This makes it a fairly bland event.
The requirement to have an “actual” auctioneer at the event introduces the familiar “auctioneer chatter” into the event. Personally, I’ve never liked the sound of an auctioneer prattling on and find it irritating and hard to follow. Even if there were some games I wanted to bid on, I wouldn’t sit there very long because I’d have to listen to that.
As for the economy, there isn’t much I need to say about that. In bad economic times like these, the prices will naturally be down compared to years when they’re better.
Conclusion
Don’t get me wrong. I love going to Origins and always have a good time. It’s great to be able to sit down and actually play games you’ve only read about, learn new things from people in the industry, and spend a little time away from home with other gamers. (Though Origins is only minutes from where I live, I don’t go into the downtown area very often so it’s like a mini-vacation where I sleep in my own bed at night.) I would strongly encourage anyone into tabletop games to go at least once. Although I’ve been a little troubled by the (possible) lighter attendance this year by gamers and vendors, disappointed by some screw-ups in registration and event ticketing, and upset that the auction seems to be dying a slow death, these are relatively minor nits in the big scheme of things and shouldn’t be taken to imply there is any serious problem with the convention. There isn’t.
I’ve just attended the first two days of the Origins 2009 Game Fair here in Columbus, Ohio. I’ll be going back in a little while for day three, and wanted to share some quick thoughts and experiences.
While we’re still looking at mid-week attendance (Wednesday and Thursday), it seems to me like attendance is down a little this year. One of the game masters I spoke with last night expressed the same concern. On the other hand, I’ve never noticed the attendance on these two days being especially high, probably because people are working and don’t want to burn too many vacation days. I’m told the exhibit hall felt a little light, too, though I’ve not been in it yet.
I have to vent a little and say that things don’t feel like they’ve been as well run at Origins this year as in years past. About two weeks ago I received a call from GAMA telling me that there was a “payment problem” with my event tickets. Since I placed the order online and provided payment at the time, that seemed odd but the call was legitimate. When I picked up my tickets I was asked to confirm that they were correct. I went through them quickly and they looked right. Later, I found that I had been issued two tickets for the same timeframe but different games. Since I couldn’t be in two places at once, it appears something in the system screwed up. Later, I found that one of the games I had planned to play wasn’t among my tickets. I’m guessing a mistake somewhere caused me to end up getting one ticket instead of another. One of my friends wanted the other ticket, so it wasn’t a total loss. Then, when I went to go to my first game at 1pm Wednesday, a miniatures game named “Border Patrol”, I arrived at the correct table only to find it wasn’t there. I couldn’t find anyone in the hall who knew where it was, so I ended up being unable to play. Not a great start to the con.
Wednesday evening I had the opportunity to play Munchkin Quest by Steve Jackson Games. It was run by the Amorphous Blob group. The GM was excellent, as has been the case with other of their events I attended. Munchkin Quest differs some from the standard Munchkin card game but is similar enough that you’d be comfortable with one if you’ve ever played the other. I was one of three people who “won” the game at midnight and received a copy of “Munchkin Fu” as my prize.
Thursday I attended Michael Stackpole’s “Rules of Writing” instructional session. I honestly don’t know if I’ve read any of his books in the past or not. Regardless, I found the session to be extremely beneficial. He helped me to see fiction writing in a new way, and helped me to resolve several things I have struggled with in the past when attempting to writing fiction.
Thursday afternoon my brother and I played Battlestations Fleet Action with the folks from Gorilla Games. I had wanted to try the game for a while, so I was happy to sit down and have a go at it. Unfortunately, our GM was divided between two groups of players and we were having trouble getting his attention when we needed it. The rules to the game aren’t especially complex but they are significant in determining how things play out. There were no quick reference sheets, so when we got stuck trying to remember what to do next, we were in a holding pattern until we could free the GM’s attention from the other group. The game is probably fun, but to be honest, I just wanted it over with.
Thursday night before coming home, I played Privateer Press’ “Infernal Contraption” with some other attendees, run by Roger Snow of Rogue Judges. As I’ve probably mentioned before, Rogue Judges (like Amorphous Blob and Red Shirt Games) does a great job running their events. You can tell they want people to learn the game, but more importantly they want things to be fun and fair. I’ll share my impressions of the game later, but suffice to say it’s fun, silly, and does require some strategic thinking. It incorporates a number of elements I’ve not seen in a card game before, such as cards you play once and remove from use for the remainder of the game.
Today, the plan is to play the Bootlegger board game and Stargate Silent Scream. I’ll let you know how that all turns out later.
