I spent a lot of time at Origins at the Playroom booth. I got to talk to the president of Playroom Games for quite a while about my games, and he accepted the prototypes. There’s still a lot of room in between the world as it is now and the world with my games published, but overcoming my fear of rejection and getting the games out there was a good step for me.

I also got to demo some of Playroom’s new games. Two were by Reiner Knizia. Knizia’s games have a very distinctive feel to them. The theme is secondary if not entirely incidental; the games tend very balanced between the players, with victory coming from making the very most of your resources, making careful sure to make the right move at the right time. The more compelling one was called King of the Beasts. There are 6 kinds of cards and a common pool of 5 available to both players. On your turn, you get to take all of the cards of any one kind; then you may take one kind of card and split them between the board and your private stash. The game is over once there are 6 animals of any one kind on the board, at which point you get points for having that kind of creature in your stash. So the key is finding the right balance between keeping the cards for yourself, to get points, and putting them on the board, so they’ll be worth anything at all.

I also saw, but didn’t have time to play, Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot, which looks really good with a depth belied by its cute title. I’ll try to take a look at GenCon.

Next time I’ll talk about Bridge and “Abridged,” the simplification/variant that I got to play.