Report by Bruno Faidutti.
[Ken: Bruno is a well known French games designer. Bruno, Catherine Soubeyrand, and several other French spielfreaks gathered in the countryside to play games, drink wine, and concoct strange variation of strange (but wonderful) American games.]
My little "Game and Cheese" convention report...
There were about 40 people, and we had lot of fun. Nice weather, hundreds of games, very little problems between dogs, cats and swans. Barbara won the tournament of Murder in the Abbey, Bertrand the tournament of Settlers of Catan, Marie Pierre and Faby the tournament of Igel Argern (you notice: three girls in the four winners, not so usual in boardgame events...). All left with the game on which they won, many thanks to the publishers of these three games (Multisim, Descartes, Doris and Frank). Oh, of course, Hervé won the tournament of Heads and Coins and left with a Saint Petersbourg underground railway token.
Though there were more than 500 games on the stairs of the big game room, a few of them were great hits. I've counted the votes from all the players. The top discovery is Reibach and Co (well, there are two Rheingold and Co votes, I assume they are for this one), because all the old Acquire addicts voted for it. Igel Argern comes close (well, I must insist that Hedgehogs Fucking in the Dark is not a correct translation). Carabande, Tic Tac Boum (Pass the Bomb), Elfenwizards and Kaleidos have also good scores. Settlers makes a good score both as discovery and as "the well known game I was glad to see again", but the 5-6 player expansion set makes the top score in the "big disappointment" category. The top one "old game I was glad to see again" is, as usual, Cosmic Encounter.
The longest game of this long week-end was a double Kings and Things Encounter (six players Kings and Things with a double set of tiles and things and Cosmic like powers, ask Serge Laget for more details on the rules), but the traditional Saturday night poker comes close. Great discussions on which poker variants are 'correct' and which are 'really too chaotic to play large amounts of money on them'.
Of course, the cheese was good, and the wild boar of Sunday noon. And wine was ad lib, so I've lots of fruit juice boxes left.
See everybody again next year.