Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Bogencon ’26 – Dune; Struggle of Empires (BG Espresso special)
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- Pick Up & Deliver 839: Bogencon '26 Dune; Struggle of Empires (BG Espresso special) Transcript Editor�s note: game titles will be edited for capitalization and put in boldface the first time they�re mentioned. Welcome to pick Up and deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. [ Intro music ] Well, greetings listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. It's very warm. Temperatures are supposed to get above ninety in the afternoon. I'm out in the relatively early morning. It's just going on nine a m walking up to the post office and back, which is a longer walk than I usually take normally. It's like the library or the game store. The post office is further than either of those. So if these episodes are a little long, you can blame my walk. Also, I have a lot to talk about. So there it is. Well, I recently, just this last weekend actually went to a house, a house con, what you might call a cabin con, except we didn't go to a cabin. We went to one person's house. This is a convention I've been to a number of times. I think I've mentioned it on the podcast. Uh, it's called Bogencon. It is hosted by, uh, prolific board gamer and former podcaster Scott Bogan. Uh, his podcast did the board game show ran from June twenty twelve to December twenty seventeen with the illustrious title of Pooping Out Cubes being the title of the last episode. I aspire to that level of creativity myself. Anyway, Scott, uh, hosts a board game convention at his house once a year. This is the ninth one, and part of the idea is that you have to have played a game with him in order to go to the convention. So I can't invite any of you. Uh, it's his convention anyway, so I couldn't, but, um, I thought I would share a little bit about the experience, what games I played, and talk a little bit about this in case you're thinking of hosting your own game con, something I might do at some point, perhaps, but I haven't done that yet. I do have my design partner and good friend Rob, uh, does host a yearly convention himself in the, in the autumn that I always go to. So I've already got two of these I go to do I need a third? Maybe I do, but we'll see. Anyway. So first I thought I'd talk a little bit about what is it that I think this event is held in, uh, central Wisconsin. So it's about two and a half hour drive for us, maybe three hours if I'm driving slow and it's held at the host's house, there are one, two, three, four, five gaming tables set up, and there are points during the con when all of them are being used. Usually, actually, I think there's a sixth in the basement. I didn't go down there this year, but so there's five or six gaming tables set up and I don't know how many people are invited. Probably thirty is my guess. Not everybody can come the whole time. Some people come just Friday, some people come just Saturday. Some people come to both. It's a two day convention. That's a Our two day event starts around one p m on Friday and goes till the till we decide to end on Saturday, which in the last couple years has been about midnight. Okay, so I thought I'd point out four things that I think make this game convention really fun. The first one is Scott is excellent at planning this event. He's very meticulous in figuring out how is it going to run, who's going to be invited? How's it going to work? He uses a Google spreadsheet to share information about what's happening at the convention, particularly what games are being played. So he asks people who are interested to say they will host a game or set up a game, and then he puts that up on the, um, spreadsheet and you can sign up for it. He uses he has everybody text him or email him to sign up rather than making the spreadsheet editable. I get that could cause trouble if somebody accidentally deletes someone else's name or something, that's a problem. I generally would say a shared editing, a shared editable spreadsheet would probably be fine. But yeah, I can see where there might be trouble with that. It works fine though, to text him if this were a much bigger event, it would probably be annoying. But yeah, so people sign up for the games they want to play. And you also welcome to just bring games and play games as they come up, which works just fine as well. Um, so careful planning. He also has a whole tab on the spreadsheet that's just about planning for food, planning for drinks, planning for times, coordinating with other people. It works pretty well. The second thing he does really well is I believe anyway, it's a very curated group of gamers. So like I said, in order to come, you have to have played a game with Scott, which means he's sort of vetted you individually, and I presume he thinks carefully about who's going to make a good participant in this event where you're playing with strangers, you're getting to know people. There's a lot of flexibility, but everybody I've met at this event is just a delight. They're all very friendly, very engaged, very thoughtful, seem to share the same values. It's a really pleasant group of people, and that's not something that happens by accident or by casting your net too widely. So I think curating the group of people you invite is probably a crucial piece of hosting a home game convention. The third thing, the third thing I have is a corollary of the second. And it's good attitudes. I think Scott does a really nice job of cultivating a welcoming, friendly environment. He says hello when you get there, reaches out in some of the same things you would do at a game gathering in a public place, but of course it's going to be amplified in the private space. But Scott just does a really good job of welcoming people in, introducing them around, if need be, thanking people for their help. Even though he's doing most of the work, uh, getting the event set up. So a combination of all those things really works well to make the environment make the environment shine. Uh, and then finally, I think the meticulous planning piece fits really well when you have the clear timeline element is great. Having the pre-planned planned games at a specific time, having somebody designated to lead them works really well to get stuff going, to have things work out the way they need to. Excellent. It was a good time. I played a whole bunch of different games, and what I thought I would do for the rest of the episode is talk about what games I played. Pardon me. I'm walking by a group of roofers. They're not wearing safety ropes. So the games that I played at Bogencon can be grouped into three groups. There are what I'll call regular games. Games I have played enough regularly within the. You know, they aren't dusty. They're games I'm familiar with. Then there are, uh, dusted off games. There are some games that I played at Bogencon that I played before and dusted off, and then there are two new games that I played this year at the event. So start with regular games. I played a bunch of rounds of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring � The Trick-Taking Game, but we only played... We were just basically playing one mission. We played number twelve, which is a very challenging mission. Played it several times. It was. It was fun as always. It was pretty late and I think one of the guys was really tired. So he was having some trouble really navigating, uh, the careful nature of trick taking, but that's part of a cooperative trick taker is you're all kind of working together to get on the same page. And I thought that worked really well. And we ended up beating that mission, which was hard to do. And so, uh, really delighted with how that turned out. Had a good time with that one. I also played Dice Miner, which is always a fun little dice drafting game that went over gangbusters. We played strike, which is there's nothing wrong with strike. I like that game a lot. It's excellent for. We have a little time between games. Let's play. Let's knock out a few silly games. That was really fun. We played Strike and we played Chicken! in that same way. I'll talk about chicken in a minute because that one is, uh, dusted off. And finally we played several rounds of The Gang. The gang is a really interesting game. It's a cooperative game where you are trying to determine who has the best poker hand. I think it's pretty fun. I, the one of the other people at the group was sort of said he was sort of played out of the gang lately. He probably had played it a little more than he wanted to. I'm not there yet, in part because I'm so bad at it. It's interesting to me to try to get better. I wonder if next time I play poker, if I'll be better at poker because I've been playing the gang. Probably not. Probably not. Nonetheless, uh, a good time was had by all of us in those plays. I dusted off three games at Bogencon and tried two new games. So let's start with the dusty games first. I dusted off chicken. Chicken is a competitive dice game by Scott Almes. I think it was 25th Century Games. As the publisher, I'm not sure. It's got a really neat sort of duotone tritone art style and a whole bunch of cute colorful dice. At its heart, it is a push your luck dice rolling game equivalent. In a very similar vein to, like Zombie Dice, you are rolling dice and trying to get symbols. Basically, if you roll chickens, those are points. If you roll eggs, those dice, you're gonna you're gonna take more dice from the pool. And if you roll foxes, those are bad. You can reroll one time any dice that you want except foxes. Those are locked. And if you if after your second roll you don't have three foxes showing, then you score the points of what's available. Except if you rolled eggs. The eggs. You automatically take the dice and roll those into the pool if you do a reroll. I think you can only do that once. Now I'm told that there's an alternate version of chicken where you can push your luck. You can keep rerolling dice that aren't chickens or foxes as many times as you want. We did not play that way, but I think that would be an interesting way to play it. I bet it makes it more fun, particularly because you could just have rounds where you roll blanks and that's that's no good. I mean, it's fine. There are also a bunch of special dice in the �eggspansion� that, uh, Rob had as well as well. And those are fun too. Chicken's a cute little game. I think it's slightly better than zombie dice. And so. Yeah. Consider playing it if you get a chance. That's chicken. Next up, I dusted, we dusted off Skull. Skull is a game. It turns out I haven't played in two years, ten months, and twenty days. Skull is a push your luck game. That is almost a parlor game or almost a folk game. It's been around for a long time. You can play it in bars just using coasters. And it's a sort of betting game where you are. Going around making stacks of coasters, and then you are betting on how many coasters you can flip over before you reveal a skull. It's a pretty simple game. Each time you successfully make your. If you don't get overbid and then you successfully make your bid, you get halfway to winning. So if you do that twice, you win. If you mess up. If you reveal a skull, then you lose one of your coasters so you have fewer flowers. Or maybe you lose your skull in order to make bets. It's a simple game. It can take fifteen to twenty minutes, depending on how many people you have playing and how good they are. It's a fun time, I think. Definitely worth checking out if you haven't played it. It's a nice little push your luck game. The art is beautiful. And finally I got a chance to play Glory to Rome. Glory to Rome is a card game. It is the first real credit game and by many considered to be his best. I think innovation is his best. But glory to Rome. A lot of people really like that one. It is best at multiple players. It's not a game I really would want to play at two. I think matinee shines at two, but I think Glory to Rome works better with more players in the game. You are using cards to do actions. You can follow actions created by other players. If you have the cards to discard, you can always just pass and draw a card or draw multiple cards. And your goal is to get yourself in a place where you have enough points that when the game ends, you will win. There is a variety of different cards. Actually, every card has a different power on it, but these are multi-use cards, so you can use them in a variety of different ways. The art is lovely and easy to understand. I think the gameplay itself is really solid overall. Glory to Rome is a really good game. I enjoyed it quite a bit on my play And we played actually twice. I'm hoping to get it into rotation more regularly because I think it's really fun. There's a lot of nuance to it. It's got some bite, it's got some thinking. It's a delight. That's glory to Rome. All right, so let's talk about some new games. There are two games that I played that were new at the con. The first. Both of these are games I signed up for coming in, although one of them is not the game I thought I was signing up for. Um, one of the players posted a thing that said he was bringing Dune from 1984. I did not think about it very carefully and remember that the Avalon Hill Dune game is from the seventies, so I thought we were playing the original Dune Avalon Hill game. No, what we were playing is the movie tie in roll and move game Dune, based on the David Lynch Dune movie. Whoa, this was weird. Okay, so in this game, you play one of four factions. You're the Fremen, you're the Harkonnens, You're the Atreides or you're the Emperor. And each player has three characters on the board that have health stats. And on your turn, you're going to roll dice. And you can either move one character the sum total of all the dice that you've rolled, or two different characters, the total or the value of one of the dice that you roll. There's an inside track that is sort of in the city, but every turn that you spend in the city, you have to spend one of your spice and spices are relatively. It's the resource of the game or one of the two. And then in the outer track, you're out in the desert, which doesn't cost resources to play, but it's very dangerous. There's a whole bunch of stuff out there that can get you in trouble. And basically your goal is to be the last person standing. Each player has three characters, and many of the spaces have the possibility of just outright killing a character or severely wounding them, and it takes a lot of effort to charge them to heal their health. And it's really easy to lose health. Basically, the gameplay loop. You roll your dice, you move your characters, you do whatever it says on the space, and then you can spend spice to buy equipment, cards and spice harvesting devices. Uh, the spice harvesters are nice because then there are a number of spaces where you can harvest spice. And the more harvesters you have, the more spice you get. At the beginning of the game, the characters seem very fragile. As the game goes along, you can acquire equipment on the characters that make them more dangerous to each other, but they generally don't get less fragile. There were shields, but really, the shields just protect you against lasguns, which were barely used at all. This was a silly game. Like really swingy. Clearly you're going to roll dice, you're going to move. You're going to roll more dice. Some of your characters are going to die. It's very silly. The layout and design was amusing enough. I think it you know, it reminded me of the David Lynch Dune movie, which I enjoy. So if you like David Lynch's Dune, this Dune movie really fits the feel, the look and feel of that movie. This game does. There's also a whole bunch of thematic stuff about the different equipment that you have. The game seems tied into the ideas of Dune. It's not a good game in terms of like deep strategy. It's very raw and frankly, it's too long. Like we're playing. It was going on. One player was down to one person. All the other players had two or three people left alive, and our characters were just getting more and more strong. We were like having battles and coming out of it, and nobody had been hurt. And so then we just have to like have another battle. So I just started attacking as many people as I could with my characters. I'm like, Either I'm going to win or I'm going to lose. But either way, the game will be over. And what happened is I took two of the other players out, but in doing so, my characters got weaker and weaker. Because every time you're in a fight, you often take damage from both players. So then the third, the last player was able to come in and mop me up pretty, pretty handily, Which is kind of in keeping with Dune getting two factions to fight and then swooping in and taking control after they've weakened each other. That feels very dune like. I had more fun with it than it seemed like I should. It's not a game I would go out and buy, but if I found a copy at Goodwill for two dollars, I absolutely would buy it. And not just for the kitsch, but actually because I think it's amusing to play. So that is Dune from 1984. And finally, I got a chance to play a game that's been on my shelf of opportunity since 2024. This is Struggle of Empires from Martin Wallace. This game was given to me as a birthday gift. It is the Eagle Gryphon Deluxe Edition and it was really fun. The broad remit is: It is the seventeen hundreds, and you are one of seven major powers in Europe. And what you're trying to do is expand your empire by colonizing. Now the game makes a nod toward the idea that colonization was bad, and that the transatlantic slavery slave trade was sort of the worst facet of that otherwise very, very bad thing. But it sort of says like colonization was bad and the transatlantic slave trade was terrible. We're going to call it Gold Coast. What do they call it? Gold coast markets. And that was kind of it. Then the game is just like, well, you're gonna play as colonizers. And I guess from one perspective, if you're going to make a game about this and you're not going to make the game include very much in the way of the personal experience, like this game does not go into like famines in India caused by the British, by British trade or the effect of the transatlantic slave trade, for example. Right? This game is all about being a European power and doing whatever it takes to make it. You can play without participating in the transatlantic slave trade. There's. You really just have to do a couple things and then you don't do that part. But you can't play without participating in colonization. This is a game that puts you into that position. So sort of having made peace with that or being willing to handwave it away, we then had a very enjoyable time carving up the world as seventeenth century European powers. The game had some. There's some really interesting mechanisms that I think make the game fascinating to play. One is that at the beginning of each of the three ages or the game calls them wars. You bid for turn order, but the turn order is doled out to factions at a time, and those factions have to be in opposition. So the game has an alliance system where each. During each war, which is roughly a third of the game. Everybody's going to get five turns to do two actions each. So you're getting ten turns in a war, thirty turns in the game, or thirty actions in the game, ten actions in a war, fifteen turns, uh, on your turn. You can't attack anybody who is one of your allies. And so if you have somebody you're competing with who's stronger than you, you want them to be your ally because then they can't like push you out of the region you're in because they can't attack you. Now, uh, many colonies are susceptible to either colonial riots or piracy, which is a way that you can create strife in your allies spaces and then attack them. But it's a relatively limited element. This game is relatively complicated, but actually not so bad. I think by the by the time we got to age the Second Age, everybody pretty much understood how the game worked, and then it was a matter of really tackling how to do well with it. I think the game, this game was really fun. It definitely shows Martin Wallace's creativity as a designer. The ally system is really interesting and not something I've encountered before. I like the way that the game allows some of the board to be in contention each round, but not the whole board. I like the limitation of the actions that you have. There's a terrible misprint on the player boards that makes it somewhat hard to understand one of the actions. They've published updateable printable things, but I haven't printed those yet. But I will do that, actually, because I think that that would make a huge difference in the playability of that part of the game. Otherwise, the Eagle Griffin production of Study of Struggle of Empires is really, really good. The tokens are all nicely made, the screen printed meeples are delightful and overall the game was really interesting. Definitely worth playing if you get a chance. And if you don't mind playing a game about being world colonial powers. Well, I think that wraps up my Bogencon report. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are about game conventions, about the three games I talked about the two games I dusted off the. So basically about Glory to Rome, Dune nineteen eighty four. Struggle of empires. Any of those. I'd love to hear your thoughts on those games. If you want to reach out to me, the easiest way to do that is on boardgamegeek guild #3269. I have an email address brendan@rattleboxgames.com that I check sometimes. And, uh, I play games on board game arena and yukata.de as wombat929. I'd love to hear from you at either of those places. Uh, in the meantime, I want to say thanks for joining me in my walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [ exit music ] Brought to you by rattlebox games.