FallCon - A Cornucopia of Gaming

Next in the series: Martin Wallace's critically acclaimed A Few Acres of Snow.

+ Asymmetry: The unbalanced starting allotment of resources between the French and the British forces pushes each player to different desires, requirements and strategies out of the gate.

+ A Multitude of Strategies to Explore: Do I focus on a heavy expansion strategy? Or develop the existing villages into Cities? Perhaps about a Military beatdown to control map area? Or do I just raid eveything my opponent has, leaving him weakened?

+ Historical Theme: Growing up on the eastern coast of Canada, I am familiar with the area, but really didnt spend any time thinking about the history. Now I know a lot more about that time period.

+ Artwork: The art design is clear, clean and well done, without too much clutter, making it easy to follow. I also like that they oriented the city names towards the respective players.

+ The Deck Management Design: Deck building in this strategic context allows for all sorts of decisions to be made and helps set up your various strategic options.

- The Online "Broken" Argument:  I'm not going to wade in too deep into to muddy waters of this discussion. Personally, I find that the amount of things to explore in the game space provided by A Few Acres of Snow far outweigh the possibility of a single dominant strategy. I enjoy trying something new every time I play: next game I might go for a City win, or I might see how far up the western side I can make it. Winning is less important to me than exploring.

Darren Bezzant

Next up in this quick review series: our 2012 People's Choice Game, Academy Games' 1812: The Invasion of Canada.

+ Novel Turn Order Mechanic: The turn order mechanism of drawing the next player's cube from a bag ensures that you have to be on your toes at all times.

+ Clever Militia Retreat/Runaway Mechanic: Retreating militia are lost for this battle, but they will likey come back later in the game.

+ Asymmetrical Dice Combinations: The differing dice combinations that exist between the 5 different forces, allows for very different gameplay between the players.

+ Plenty of Historical Flavor: The card sets for each force also provide asymmetrical game play while also providing accurate historical context.

+ End Game Options: You can try to plan for an early end game by timing the Signing of the Treaty, but at the uppermost, the game will only last 8 rounds. This ensures that you can get a game played in around 90-120 minutes.

- Plays best with 2 or 5: While possible to play with 3 or 4, the game requires players to play multiple forces under these conditions, which I feel is less than ideal and can cause some balance issues in gameplay. 

Darren Bezzant

10-22-Red-4! We're pulling a scheduling audible! 

The primary reason is to respond to the low number of sign-ups for Wits & Wagers, and Time's Up. These are 2 games are among the best party games out there, but our convention historically hasn't focussed on these types of games and it's clear we don't have the demand for these types of games yet. As such, we've decided to combine these as well as Dixit into a single time slot event in our grid schedule. Perhaps more importantly, we've also decided to make these party games (only these 3, and only during the Saturday evening slot) open and free to the public. This provides us the opportunity to open the door to a wider audience and lowers the threshold to entry for people interested in checking the con out.

The combining of Time's Up, Wits and Wagers and Dixit into a single timeslot creates an opening in our schedule that we've decided to fill with Edo, a strategy game that has been getting good reviews on BGG and our own FallCon grapevine. So if you were holding out on Saturday, keep in mind you can go into your myfallcon.com account and change your registration to reflect a change in preference. 

Hope you take advantages of both changes!

Jasen Robillard

FallCon is pleased to announce that, after the extensive prototype playtesting and evaluations, our judges have selected the Finalists in the 2012 Canadian Game Design Award Competition. Out of the eight semi-finalists the judges have picked the following four (in alphabetical order) to proceed to the 2012 Finalist Round:

• Coven by Paul Saxberg 
• Orc Tribes by Michael Xuereb 
• SuperVillans by Orin Bishop 
• Quarantine by Mark Klassen 

Congratulations to our Finalists! 

The Winner for the 2012 Canadian Game Design Award will be announced on Saturday September 29 during FallCon's 25th Anniversary Ceremony. The Winner will walk away with a $500 cash prize, courtesy of Valley Games, Panda Game Manufacturing and FallCon. 

Very much looking forward to making the announcement!

Brent Lloyd