Yesterday was the third GameCamp event, and the first ever BoardGameCamp.  150 people descended on Richmond to make, talk about and play board games.  At most conferences I’ve been to, speakers are announced in advance, don’t change, and don’t allow audience involvement beyond a token, “Any questions?”

This was not like that.

As soon as I arrived (a little after 9am) one of the organisers dashed over to me: “Have you got your dice yet?!”, thrust two in my hand and dashed away again.

Easily the nicest, best quality dice I have ever owned. And that is not a sentence I ever expected to type.

After some breakfast, coffee and general milling around in bewilderment that so many of us were awake so early on a Saturday, @greenburger kicked the day off  with a welcome to Whittaker House (eBay, Paypal and Gumtree’s HQ).  @Trippenbach followed on with a cracking speech on why we play, before @JamesWallis explained the day in more detail.

There were three options, and we could spend as much or as little time as we liked on each:

1. Make: The GameHack competition. Form a team, make a boardgame, win an incredible prize.
2. Talk: Host a talk on whatever you like, or join someone else’s.
3. Play: Check a game out of the lending library of 91 (!) rare, unusual and brilliant boardgames. Then play it.

Despite immediately realising that there wouldn’t be enough time to do everything justice, here’s what happened when I tried.

1) Make (GameHack)

The brief:  Design a boardgame to fit on one side of the Cadbury’s Christmas medium sized selection box lid. No additional playing pieces or paper can be included. It has to be competitive, suitable for ages 5-12 and playable by 2-5 players.

The prize: Subject to Cadbury’s approval, your game is printed on the Christmas medium sized selection box, and you’re credited by name. The box has an approx. circulation of NINE MILLION (yes, really). You also win a load of chocolate.

Needless to say, there was a LOT of interest.  Here’s our team, getting stuck in:

From L-R: @peterjlaw, @kimonsatan, Anna (sorry only know your first name), me (hello!) and @mink_ette.

We didn’t enter anything in the end, partly because we had too many people in our team, partly because it was really hard, but mostly because it was difficult to resist the siren call of 91 boardgames saying, “Play us… play us…”

Though maybe that last bit was just in my head.

2) Talk

What with all the time spent sort-of-but-not-really designing a game, and my desperate hunger to play as many unusual games as possible, I only managed to make it to one of the talks on offer: an introduction to ancient Egyptian boardgames (particularly Senet) from Egyptologist Margaret Maitland (@eloquentpeasant).

It was great!

Turns out boardgames are over 8000 years old and even predate writing.  Games and gaming are at the heart of our civilisation and what it is to be human.

Senet itself managed to survive relatively unchanged from around 3100 BC to the first century AD (difficult to imagine Cluedo having the same staying power), and Margaret attributes this in large part to the cultural attitude of the ancient Egyptians towards any sort of change (namely, it’s bad).

The game is played over 30 squares and is similar in some ways to backgammon in that moves can be divided up between your pieces, you want to try and block your opponent’s pieces, etc.

What I found most interesting was how the game was originally created purely as a mechanic – pieces and squares were only minimally descriptive (if you land on the ‘good’ square you get a point; if you land on the ‘bad’ square you’re set back).  Over time though, a narrative was developed on top of the mechanic in order to give it more meaning, based on around the Egyptians’ biggest fear: death.

Now the game had a story. You were the sun god Ra, journeying through the underworld and battling dangers in order that you could be reborn at dawn and the sun would rise again.  The squares on the board were re-labelled to reflect different deities and dangers.  No longer was it simply the glyph for ‘bad’, now the square had the glyph for ‘water’ on it and if you landed on it you ‘drowned’!

As yet more time passed, the game’s story even began moving back the other way: from being inspired by religion to actively influencing it.  Senet became an analogy for what the gods themselves were doing.  It wasn’t alone – an older game Mehen (where the board was shaped like a snake), despite having died out as a game centuries before, somehow endured in the collective consciousness to the point where a new snake god eventually entered the Egyptian pantheon. His name? Mehen.  His role? Protecting Ra as he journeyed through the underworld, linking right back up to Senet!

The other interesting takeaway that sparked a great discussion afterwards was all about ancient games and rules.  Once you unearth the board and playing pieces from a 5000 year old game, how do you figure out what the rules were?  In the case of Senet, apparently Egytologists have managed to roughly piece together how to play it based on carvings in tombs and all manner of snippets from secondary sources.  But for Mehen, there’s almost no idea how the game was played, apart from that it probably involved ‘capturing’ pieces.

Made me wonder what kind of alternative rule-sets might be developed if you gave someone only the board and pieces to a modern game they’d never seen before. Can you reverse engineer Monopoly from just seeing the playing pieces (doubtful)? Could it lead to an even better game (probably)?  What rules would someone come up with if you combined bits and pieces from different games and told them it was all from one game?  How will THE FUTURE look back on today’s board games?

Lots of food for thought and big thanks to Margaret for such an excellent talk.

3) Play

As soon as I saw the massive stash of games in the lending library (91!) I realised that my board game education had been sorely lacking.  All my life I’d been eating the equivalent of steak and chips with salad (Risk and Chess with Scrabble) which, though very tasty, is far from a varied diet.

It was high time to expand my palate with the sushi, fajitas and stir fry of the boardgame world!  (This food analogy is getting a bit laboured, move on – ED.)

Dixit

Easily the breakout hit of BoardGameCamp.  By the end, everyone was talking about it. And with good reason – it’s ace.

I won’t go into too much detail on the rules, but in essence it’s a game of descriptive bluff where you need to be cryptic, but not too cryptic, in describing the image on a card.  (More detail on the rules at boardgamegeek.)

What I personally loved about it was that the deck of cards you play with are so beautifully designed.  In order for the game to work, each image has had to be drawn in such a way that it has a superficial description as well as the potential to be described in a more abstract way: as an emotion, pop culture reference, song, idea, colour, whatever!

Just as with lego you can build what’s on the box, and then go on to combine the blocks in a loads of different ways, so too while playing Dixit I was thinking of what else I’d want to do with the cards.  Maybe a story game, where each player is dealt a hand and has to come up with a narrative linking them up? Or using them in brainstorms to come up with plots or characters?  Or as inspiration for the colour palette of a website?  Lots and lots of possibilities.

Not only did Dixit fire up my imagination, it was also a blast to play (even though I came last).  Can’t recommend it highly enough and it was the perfect game to start with.

Infinite City

There were five of us playing this tile-and-peg based game, and we began cavalierly placing tiles with little regard for strategy (the game was new to us all).

However, Infinite City has a deceptively shallow learning curve and it wasn’t long before it all become rather competitive.

It took about an hour to finish and, if there hadn’t been other games we wanted to try, a re-match would have been inevitable.

More info on Infinite City at boardgamegeek.

Snorta

“We’re about to play an animal noises game, want to join us?”

How could I refuse an invitation like that? I sat down, and was promptly given a small plastic barn and a cute plastic animal to put inside it.

Essentially it’s a glorified game of Snap, played with pictures of animals, rather than a standard deck of cards.

The twist is that rather than shouting ‘Snap’, you have to make the noise of the animal of your opponent which, given that their animal is hidden in a barn, means you need to remember what everyone’s animal is, and their corresponding animal noise.

Quite a simple idea, but surprisingly difficult and very hilarious.

“Hisssssss, no wait, moooooooo! Moo?  Erm, hoot hoot… ribbit? IT’S RIBBIT RIBBIT!!!”

More info on Snorta at boardgamegeek.

Playtesting

No sooner had we finished Snorta when we were kindly asked if we’d mind playtesting the new games that had been put together for GameHack.

My game involved players performing challenges (tell a joke, recite your name backwards) in order to win the right to ask yes/no questions to locate a missing mince pie.

While we played, the official judges (including Graham Linehan and Andrew from @TerrorBullGames) came to each table to find out more about the games, and then went off to confer and pick the winner.

Sadly, the mince pie game didn’t win, but big congratulations to team Chocolate Drop, who walked away with the glory (and several kilograms of Cadbury’s finest).

Catacombs

I had just enough time to play one more quick game before the end.

Catacombs is a very recent game (from 2010!) that uses a classic fantasy setting with dungeons and monsters and heroes. The twist is that rather than using dice to decide combat, you have to use your finger to flick your heroes into the monsters to kill them. Archers flick slightly smaller circles at enemies and wizards can flick fireballs and the like.  It’s very addictive, very fast paced (at least the way we played) and very, very fun.

Along with Dixit, Catacombs is definitely straight onto my to-buy list.

I didn’t catch the name of the chap who brought it along, but whoever you are – thanks! One of my highlights of the day.

More detail on Catacombs at boardgamegeek.

The end

Afterwards most of us decamped to the pub where conversations (and some games!) continued apace.  I ended up with several additional tips for games to look up next:

• Apples to Apples (tip off from @JamesWallis): Apparently, if you like Dixit you’ll like this.
• Dread (tip off from @Glinner): Horror role playing with a jenga tower adding real life tension. If it collapses on your go, your character dies!
• Settlers of Catan (tip off from EVERYONE IN THE WORLD): Seems to be, in essence, a much better version of monopoly for people who hate monopoly.

I know I’ve missed loads of stuff, so if you were there and played anything else particularly amazing, please let me know!

Massive thanks again to everyone who was involved in the smooth running and organisation of such a brilliant day (Steve Green, David Hayward , Jeffrey Sheen , Philip Trippenbach, James Wallis + others).

I’ll definitely be first in line at the next one, branded dice in hand, ready to roll.

What? I couldn’t go the whole article without at least *one* pun.

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More BoardGameCamp photos from Trippenbach and Weefz.
Write ups from Boardgames in Blighty, Jonny Nexus and Sarbjit Bakhshi.
More on Egyptian boardgames from Eloquent Peasant herself.