Unpub 9--Day 1

I finally made it back to Unpub. Unpub is a conference where game designers bring their prototype games to be playtested by total strangers. I went as a playtester and tried out a lot of fun games that are so new they haven't even been published! Hopefully some will make it into print.

Unpub 9 playtesting room

I signed up as a Registered Playtester and received a bag of swag, including coupons for local restaurants. I would have used them but I was driving back and forth. The conference is held just north of Baltimore, so it was a forty-minute drive for me.

Swag and Bag

I played a lot of awesome games. Here's the list...

1. Compass is a two-player abstract game where players vie for dominance on a five-by-five board (the official version is seven-by-seven but the designer made it smaller for faster playtest play). Each player has a hand of three cards drawn from their own deck. On a turn the player places one card and draws a new card. The cards have an octagon in the middle with one, two, three, or four arrows pointing to the sides or corners. The placement rules for the cards are simple. After the first two cards are down, any card must line up on a side with another of the player's cards and one of the player's cards must have an arrow pointing to that spot. The trick is the player can play on top of one of the other player's cards if the new card has fewer arrows than the replaced card. Play continues until one player can no longer legally play a card. Then the cards are counted and whoever has the most cards showing wins.

Compass

This game has the essential elements of an abstract game. The rules are simple. The components are clear. It feels a bit mathy in a good way. Even though I was not very good at it, I liked it and would definitely play it again.

2. Fields of Battle is a sniper-versus-sniper game. Each player has a three by six grid of tokens where the sniper is hiding. Each turn a player either takes a shot at the other player (with only six rounds of ammo, it's good to be patient) or moves one of the items on the board. Wind tokens let the player swap orthogonally; rabbit tokens let the player swap diagonally; squirrels make a circular movement; snakes move in a line. The one tree on the board can't move (naturally). The player has to do two things: (1) position his sniper well to keep him hidden but able to shoot his enemy and (2) figure out where the other sniper is in the other field.

Fields of Battle

I found the game challenging. The layout is compact and got very restrictive very quickly. The tokens are set randomly with the allowance that each player moves their tree to a new spot, hopefully making a useful swap with another token. The components, even though home-made, worked really well.

3. Road Trip is all the fun of playing the license plate game without the hassle of actually having to go on a road trip. Two to four players take turns moving around a board collecting plates and marking them off a dry-erase map of the United States (which also includes a bit of Mexico and Canada). Some of the plates are "wildlife" plates that move the player up the wildlife track, scoring points for every two wildlife plates. The map is divided into sections. Players get points for completing sections. The main way to score points is with cards that are used to identify sections that will score. The assigning of scores to sections makes the strategy much more complicated.

Road Trip's prototype box

Game set-up

My final map

The theme of the game is fun. The board changes each turn so the route from start to finish is always different. Some spots on the route have two plates rather than one, which may be too overpowered in the beginning of the game. Collecting lots of plates early on can give a lead that can look insurmountable. Without playing the game more times, I don't know whether that really is the case or not, but it sure felt like it from one play.

4. BattleHawk is a flicking game where two or four players face off against each other for dominance in a quadrant of space. Acheiving dominance can happen in three ways. First, one side can wipe out all the enemy's ships. Second, one side can take over the five satellites in the quadrant. Third, one side can capture the other's flag and take it back to their home base. Players have to choose moves carefully and plan for a winning strategy. The ships are fun shapes (like a crescent, a football, a squid, etc.) and are able to either tag up at the satellites to take them over or shoot at enemies to destroy them. Firing weapons involves flicking other items, discs or cylinders, in a variety of ways.

The write-up

The game

This game is a lot of fun. The theme is light and it has enough variety to let each game be a unique experience. The various victory conditions reward different playing styles and abilities.

I finished my Friday night playing at this point. As I was walking out, I stopped by the Panda Game Manufacturing table where they had an awesome miniatures landscape set up.

Landscape

They were also giving away boxes of component samples. The stuff is high quality and packaged very nicely. I was surprised they were giving out such nice items but the audience at Unpub is more likely to be their customers, so it makes sense.

Chest of goodies

More on day two in the next post!