In the Beginning

So I thought that the best place to begin a gamer girl blog was to start at the source of All Things Games during the summer: Gencon, run by Gen Con LLC. It's a four-day event, held in Indianapolis, Indiana, and thousands of board, card, RPG and LARP games are played during this time. New games, old games, weird games and just downright hilarious games entertain over 30,000 people from all over the world.

What better place to start?

This year at Gencon, TONS of new games were rolled out for demonstration. One of them is called "the Lords of Vegas", brought to you by Mayfair Games. Each person plays a Las Vegas hotel owner, and the goal is to be the boss of the biggest casinos by the end of the game. The casinos are built from the ground up from parking lots, but beware -- if one of your opponents has their eye on your casino, with a higher die roll, they might be able to take it over! Lady Luck favors the rich in this game of deals, gambling and suspicion.
"Lords of Vegas" is one of the better board games I've tried thus far. Anyone who enjoys what my family calls "screw your neighbor" games (the games where the best solution will completely mess up another player, like a mean game of Uno) will LOVE it. The mechanics for "Lords of Vegas" are much different than anything else I'm used to playing. For example, during the game, any one player can trade anything -- property, money, etc -- at any time. In the game I played, I decided I wanted a property that was next to a casino I already owned, so I could extend it and make the casino bigger. The bad news was that the property I wanted belonged to another player. But I held a property on the other side of the board, next to one of HIS casinos. And the cost to build on both properties was the same. So I made him a deal, swapped properties, threw it a little money, and it was done. I could now revamp my casino to my heart's content.

There are other new items, not only games, that showed up at Gencon this year. Anyone who's played Carcassonne (Rio Grande Games) will remember Meeples, the cute little figures that can be farmers, knights, robbers and monks. (For anybody who doesn't know about them, here's a link: http://www.meeplepeople.com/products.php?cat=44 ) This year, the most adorable thing I've found so far are stuffed Meeples in red, blue, green, black, purple, yellow, orange and pink. Find them here: http://www.meeplepeople.com/proddetail.php?prod=PlushAll8

So that is Gencon, part 1. Welcome to powderpuffgamer, we're glad you joined us! :)