SaltCON was Gaming Goodness

There was a lot of board gaming goodness in Salt Lake City last weekend. With attendance double from the previous year, hundreds of people – old and young alike – came to SaltCON on Friday and Saturday to play a ton of board games and card games.

Everywhere you looked, the game tables were full. They were full with people playing games they loved and full of people playing games for the first time. There were tournaments of popular games like Dominion, Munchkin, and Word on the Street and there were new games getting played for the first time anywhere. A lot of the fun for me was seeing parents – moms or dads – with their children at a game table enjoying the chance to play games that they’ve never tried before.

Perhaps the most played game was the newly released board game by Gryphon Games called Pastiche. SaltCON was the worldwide release of the game in part because the designer, Sean D. MacDonald, lives here in Salt Lake City. It’s a game about mixing paint colors to produce famous works of art. And by the way you play your tiles, you can collect different color cards. Then you use those color cards in combination to produce different works of art for points. While I didn’t get a chance to play Pastiche, I did play the role of spectator during the tournament and liked what I saw and think our family would really enjoy it.

A new game that I did get to play, that I’ve been looking forward to for months and will be released for sale in just a few weeks from Z-Man Games is Trollhalla. The designer is Alf Seegert and he also lives here in Salt Lake City. He was also the designer of Bridge Troll that came out last year and that we’ve enjoyed playing, so I was excited to see another troll game from Alf. I was also happy to have Alf be the person to explain the game before we played it. In this family board game, the trolls have journeyed out from under their bridges and are now off pillaging islands. I really liked playing Trollhalla and it has a great balance of luck and strategy. And even though I came in last place, I’m really looking forward to playing it again. So keep your eyes open for a full review on Trollhalla soon because I’m sure this is one our whole family will enjoy too.

Another part of SaltCON that I really enjoyed was the chance to be a judge in the ION awards. The ION awards are presented to the best new game designs. I was part of the judging panel for the Family Games category and we played the 4 finalist games on Friday. The winners were announced on Saturday evening and I was very pleased to see that the winner of the best new family game was the one that had the top spot in my book as well – Snake Eyes. It’s a dice game so there’s a lot of luck involved, but the way it plays was a lot of fun and I could see our kids playing it over and over. So here’s to hoping that it gets picked up by a publisher and makes its way to store shelves soon.

Overall, it was a great weekend of fun games and meeting a lot of nice people. Everywhere I turned, there were people smiling and inviting you to join them at their game table. Thanks go out to all the organizers of SaltCON and I’m already looking forward to next year.