Fillers during Ropecon

Before jumping to writing tournament reports from Ropecon, I'm going to write down shortly two other games I played there.

On Sunday, after three nights of a maximum of 5 hours of sleep, I was tired and giddy and fidgety all at the same time. An acquaintance called me over to play some Mah-Jong, though I was planning to go to Eden demo game.

I got totally lost in the mechanics of Mah-Jong.

In my awkward state of awareness, the ages old game was a mind-blowing experience.

We had only one player (four in total) who had actually mastered the rules. He felt almost like a wizard when he told rules on the go. You, mere mortal, could only vaguely understand what was going on and the deeper understanding of basic rules felt like they were just beyond your grasp.

But still. It was sweet.

Somehow I managed to win the first game (we all played with open hands) by pulling exactly the right tile for me late in the game. I didn't really understand why did I win or where did the points come from, but as far as I could tell, it was a bit unexpected victory out of the blue sky. "Tsumo" or something like that.

Second game was played with closed hands. I still couldn't exactly figure out where the points came from (I thought that having 4x same tile as a set was a victory point but no...)

One player did this "riichi" thing (I'm not sure about spelling here at all) late in the game, and removed a tile from his hand. Two players, me and another one, wanted to take that tile, and because it was the exact tile we both required for a victory point, we both got it. Weird. But it resulted in a shared victory.

And then we played a third game that ended by this "tsumo" thing by another player.

Still, after three games, I wasn't exactly sure what to do to actually score points. But I guess I had learned at least the basics (how to play and collect sets).

And then... No Thanks!

I got to play a game of No Thanks (a fast and easy card game) when I was thinking if I should start to get going home. Gameplay was really easy and I'm not exactly sure what can I write about such a simple game.

You draw a card from deck which has a score in it. If you take that card, you get that many minus points. You have tokens with you which you can place on the card and skip decision to next player. If next players doesn't want to take the card, he or she places another token on it. And the thing goes on like this until someone takes the card AND the tokens on it. And then draws another card, until deck is empty.

We played only one game of this (total players 3), and I lost horribly. I blame this on the fact that I drew the 35 (maximum number) point card when I had only four tokens. I took it without placing even a single token. I knew I didn't have a chance.

And next card I drew was 33.

Then I tried to milk out as many tokens from other players before taking the card, but, well, couldn't do that for too long with my pitiful amount of tokens.

Anyway.

I did have a lot more plans to play different games in Ropecon, but on Friday I was amazingly tired and the day passed with not even a single game played. But there were people to meet and see, which is always nice too.

On Saturday I was playing Warmachine from 9 AM to midnight, so no real place for any other game then.

And on Sunday I was dead tired again and I had to leave early to catch a train (which I missed, by the way) so these two games were my only "new" experiences.

Still, an enjoyable convention. Next year I think I'll try to have good nights sleep on Wednesday and Thursday before the con to have some actual energy, heh.