And here we are at part 3, wherein I will talk about sessions 3 and 4. Mostly because I ran my game during session 3, and didn’t take any pictures.

I had 4 people join me for Mathemagician’s Duel, and they picked it up quickly. After both pairs had played their games and gave feedback, we decided to try a 4-player game, which I didn’t have specific rules for yet. This was super helpful and I got some great suggestions. They played a 4-player team game, and it went very well. I’m looking forward to writing down the 4-player team rule set and trying out a 3 and 4 player free-for-all.

That was the last session of the day, so it was time to think about some mingling, some open gaming, and going out for social time. While I was hanging about, I ran into my friend Vicky! She and her friend were playing a game, but when they finished, I ran them through a game of Mathemagician’s Duel. Her friend is a high school math teacher, so his feedback was quite helpful as well.

The next morning, we were right back at the games! My first session on Sunday was a game called Escrime, which is the French word for “fencing”. And guess what? It was about fencing! I thought this was cool, of course, especially since a couple of years ago I had considered making a fencing card game. This one set up pretty much the way I would have done it, with a couple of meeples on a piste, and cards to choose from for the actions you wanted to take. You had your next two actions cued up, face down on the table to indicate your intended actions.

The intention of this game was to teach the basics of fencing to people who were not familiar with the rules and concepts, including priority. Priority is when you determine who has the “right of way”, or “right of attack”, meaning if opponents hit each other at the same time, only one of them earns a point. The fencer with priority is the one who started an attack action first. You lose priority if your attack is parried, or if you retreat away from your opponent. It can be a difficult concept for new fencers to learn, so incorporating into game play where it can be practiced is a good idea. This game is still in the early stages, so there are still some issues and mechanics to be worked out (which I pretty much solved with my suggestions, but ultimately it’s the designer’s decision how to precede), but it’s a good start. I did have some great parry/riposte exchanges with my opponent, who was Sean, whose tank was the first to explode during Tank Brawl the previous day! He was a great opponent, and we had some great conversations and discussion while we worked out some details of the game together.

I’m going to save the last two games I played for the next blog post. I realize that this was was a bit short on pictures, so have a picture of me looking like I know what I’m doing: