FallCon - A Cornucopia of Gaming

Registrations

Registrations are coming in fast and our game events are filling up quickly. If you intend on getting into our moderated events, we would strongly recommend you register as soon as possible as we already have several full, or nearly full events.

Full Events:
Circus Maximus
Small World

Games we expect to fill within the next week:
Advanced Civilization
DBHx: Waterloo
Rise &Fall
Agricola
LeHavre
Descent
Dominion
Galaxy Trucker
Rails of Europe

Auction Info

We've added an Auction Info section to our Information pages. There you will find our selling conditions, procedures as well as the Item Submission Form for download. If you want to speed up your submission process, fill out the form prior to your arrival at the Con and have the games and form ready for submission.

We also created a geeklist on BGG to list the games you intend on bringing to the auction.

Michael Schacht's China board game was published in 2005 and is a redesign of the popular game, Web of Power. The heart of this game is an area majority mechanic where players use cards to strategically place houses or emissaries in key provinces.

China:

• Designed by: Michael Schacht
• Published by: Uberplay
• Number of players: 3-5
• Playing time: 45 minutes
• Player ages: 12+

China comes with a nicely illustrated double-sided map for both 3-4 and 4-5 players. Also included are wooden house and emissary tokens in five different player colors.


Each player in Schacht's China board game is a power-hungry regional ruler seeking to become the next emperor during political instability and unrest in ancient China.

In order to achieve this players build houses, send emissaries to neighboring provinces and seek to win by subtle influence and creating territorial alliances.

The game revolves around the careful management of cards that determine where a player can place houses and/or emissaries. The board is divided into 9 regions of 5 colours.

Before the game starts, each player is given tokens of a particular color and 3 cards.

Now the game begins...


A simple way to explain this game is by using a 3-2-1 rule. That is:

• From a hand of 3 cards, a player may play between 1-3 cards to
• Place 1-2 houses/emissaries in
• One region only

Since there are 5 colors of territories and 9 territories, each card corresponds to two different territories. For example, each green card will correspond to either Han or Yan territories.

Only the purple cards which correspond to the territory, Chu, have one name on them.

Once a player has taken their turn, they replenish their hand to three cards. Cards may be taken from a selection of four face-up cards or from the top of the draw deck.

If there are no more cards in the draw deck, the discarded cards are then shuffled to create a new draw deck. The game ends when the draw deck is exhausted for the second time.

The China board game uses an area majority mechanism to allocate points.

Each territory is scored when all the house spaces in the territory have been filled up. The player with the most number of houses in a region, will score points equal to the number of houses in the region.

The player with the 2nd most number of houses will score points equal to the number of houses that the 1st place player has in that region. The 3rd place scores points equal to the number of houses that 2nd place has.

Finally, after all territories have been scored, the emperor will visit each of the 15 boundaries between territories and score points for the number of emissaries in both provinces.

The tricky part of this game is to know when to place emissaries and when to place houses!


Schacht's China board game is an excellent introduction to an area majority scoring mechanism. It is a fast-playing game that finishes well within 45 minutes.

Play is tense, especially when figuring out which regions to fight over and which regions to let go of.

The territory cards act as the game clock and subtly influence the player's strategy.

The game at a glance is pretty simple but repeated plays will reveal interesting nuances. Repeated plays will reveal a nice tense core to the game.

Happy gaming!
Thushyanthan

Published in 2002, Mexica is the third game in the "Mask Trilogy" utilizing the action-point mechanism.

Mexica:

• Designed by: Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling
• Published by: Rio Grande Games
• Number of players: 2-4
• Playing time: 75 minutes
• Player ages: 10+

As a publisher, Rio Grande Games makes excellent board games. Mexica is no exception! The box has a beautiful design and inside you will find inside a gorgeous and beautiful game board.


Mexica is the name that the Aztecs used to refer to themselves. The board game, Mexica, is about creating the home of the Mexicas on the island on Lake Texcoco.

As one of four leaders of the Aztecs, you will spend action points on your turn to wander about the island, building canals, dams, bridges and temples to create the magnificent city of Tenochtitlan.

Players score points depending on how great their temples are in built city districts. Use your action points cleverly to establish your presence and win!

Now the game begins...


The game is divided into two phases. In each of the phases, every player gets a certain number of temples in various sizes from 1-4 points. The bigger the temple, the more action points it will require be built.

Any unused temples from the first phase can be added to the temples in the second phase. In the first phase, players are required to found and create 8 different districts of various sizes. The first phase ends when:

• all 8 districts are founded and
• at least one player has no more temples remaining

When this happens, players play until all have had the same number of turns. Then the scoring of all founded districts will occur. In the second phase, players are required to found and create 7 more districts.

The second scoring is triggered in the same way as the first scoring round. This time, however, all land areas are scored as well. On your turn during the game, your Mexica has six action points to spend. With these action points, you are able to traverse around the island, build temples, found districts, create canals and dams and build bridges.

A district is created when a section of land is bounded by canal tiles. Your Mexica founds a district only if the player marker, the Mexica token, is present in the district. Temples can be built only in areas where a player's Mexica token is present. Scoring is done on a majority basis.

The player who has the temples of the most value scores the highest points. The second place player scores half of the 1st player's score. The third place player scores half of the 2nd player's score. All scores are rounded up.

During the game, players will have a general idea of strategy but will need to be able to quickly react to other players' placements that may affect their plans.


Mexica is an excellent introduction to the action point mechanisms developed in Kramer's and Kiesling's previous "Mask Games". Mexica is fun and interactive and plays in about 75 minutes. It is quite strategic and there are many ways for creative plays.

The other aspect of this game is the visual and tactile nature of the board and playing pieces! At the end of the game, it is breath taking to take a step back and just look at the board!

Happy gaming!
Thushyanthan

Howdy folks!

This is the Third installment of our first interview series with local gamers, designers and game shop owners. The first series is with members of the Game Artisans of Canada, a homegrown Alberta group of boardgame designers.

They are officially joining us this year at FallCon to showcase a lineup of their best prototypes. All of these games are fairly late in development, there are no raw designs, and some of these games have already been submitted to publishers! Now you have an opportunity to play the game and offer your comments on the game play…before it even goes public!

This Interview is with Dylan Kirk. Dylan (AKA Wen Xiang) is a local Calgary designer who currently lives and works in Shanghai "doing all sorts of things". He will not be running any official tournaments this year at FallCon, but I am sure if he is able to attend he will be seen floating around the open gaming area with his recently published game Genji. Perhaps you could get him to autograph your copy!

What are your current favorite three games and why?

Go. This is the masterwork of all games. No other game comes close to it in purity, strategy, and philosophical depth. The interplay of atsusa and moyo, of extension and penetration, and of strategy and tactics make this a game for the ages. It's a game for the whole brain; a game to live, not simply to play.

Xiang Qi. IMHO the best of the Chess family. With only a half-rank of pawns, the games start fast and have a tendency toward the offensive right from the get go. The cannon is a unique piece and adds another tactical layer to the play: not only can you force the opponent onto the defense through aggressive play, but you can, through the creative placement of your cannon, deny him the opportunity to defend in certain places.

Viktory II. Admittedly, I would probably rather be playing a good, tabletop miniatures wargame than anything else in the world, but as a working dad I simply can't get the table time anymore. Nowadays, I have come to love ViktoryII as something of a replacement for my tabletop wargames and Star Fleet Battles. ViktoryII is fast, aggressive, has elements of both tactics and strategy, and forces the players into strategic compromises.

I agree Go is a fascinating game. I once read that the fastest way to learn Go was to lose your first 200 games as quick as you can.

How long have you been playing games? What’s your earliest recollection of playing a game

Started with chess at the age of 5 or 6, and that game is still my earliest recollection. I remember clearly being soundly beaten by my dad and not letting him away from the table until I had exhausted all possible board configurations to try to save my king. Of course, when all was said and done, I cried like a little baby. Obviously the loss didn't affect my future love of boardgames.

Have we heard about any of your games yet? What is the status of them?

Genji has been on store shelves for a while, and I have a few other games in the pipe, but nothing else is on the road to publication at the moment. I'm currently doing work on a space combat card game, a custom deck of cards with six suits, a game about Soviet collective farming called Kulak, and an abstract wargame about the Long March.

 

How long have you been designing or tinkering with designing a boardgame?

Forever. When I was in Elementary School I would get books about games and try to build the boards. In grade 6 I started into Dungeons and Dragons in a big way, and we of course made house rules for that. I had also started work on an Ironclad wargame in grade 6 that allowed players to build their ships with points on either a Monitor style or Merrimac style hull. I designed a couple games in Jr. and Sr. High school, and then in University during my war history degree my friends and I did all sorts of unholy things to Axis and Allies.

What was the first boardgame you designed? What ever happened to the design?

I'd have to say the first complete boardgame I designed was in Jr. or Sr. High. It was an abstract that allowed for different moves based on the configuration of your pieces on the board. I may resuscitate that one for a print and play game, it was actually rather good as I recall.

Where do you start the design process?

Experience. I start with an experience I want to have. For example, I want to know what decisions I might have to make as a commander of a tank troop, so I'll want to play a game that simulates those decisions adequately to satisfy my curiosity. If no game does so, I make my own.

For my space combat game, I did a lot of research regarding what games were out there, and the large proportion of them didn't seem to encompass the experience I wanted in the game. I started to design my own that was a break from the games I researched. Sometimes reading about something on wikipedia will excite me enough to think "I wonder what went through his head when he made that decision?" or "what would I have done when presented with a similar set of circumstances?". Then I will build a game with that theme and mechanics that try - as close as possible - to recreate some of the problem solving that went into that situation.

What's the creative spark that gets you excited about one of your designs?

The "eureka" moment when theme and mechanic begin to sing in tune. That point after a lot of sitting around and reading and sketching and card layout and charting turns into one beautiful whole.

What are your favorite game mechanics?

I haven't any. I kind of reject the idea of design from mechanics as too tactical an approach. Mechanics must fit the game, not the game the mechanic. If a mechanic that emerges in my game fits a certain classification, that's not intentional, it just happened to be the mechanic that fit. Even if I use mechanics that have been used before, I still design them from the ground up each time.

What themes (if any) are your favorites?

History, war, and politics. That's what I've studied my whole young life, my whole school career, and it's what I continue to do today, to a degree. The problems and experiences in these subject areas are simply limitless.

Can you let us in on any designs you are currently working on?

Well, I am certainly ready to get down to play testing this space combat game, and I wish more people would give me feedback about a little abstract I made called Block Kriegspiel. I've also got this card deck in the works, but there's no secret about that one, it's mainly revolving around how fast I can do the art. Every card will have its own Norse mythology picture on it. The art is somewhere between Alphonse Mucha, Nordic knotwork, and Marvel comics.

Sounds interesting Dylan. Hopefully if you can attend FallCon we will see some of these prototypes. I would really like to try your Space Combat game, and the Long March game sounds interesting as well.

Thanks for the interview Dylan, good luck on your future designs!

Peace