Finally, dear readers, we come to the end of our adventure. This is the final installment of the chronicling of our grand journey to a far way land about 40 minutes from home. But, it’s not the distance of the journey that stays with us, it’s those we met along the way and the experiences we had.

So let us conclude…

After the final session, there was still time before everything was all done, so I wandered round and looked at some of the other games being played. I passed by a game whose box cover said “Investor” and showed a giant worm monster with teeth. That was interesting. When I looked closer, I realized that it said “The Visitor”, which I suppose makes more sense. As I watched, the game finished, and I was invited to join in for the next one, so I did.

In this game, players are little alien slug monsters who go around the board eating creatures to gain their abilities and get larger. There is one human on the board, and the game ends when a player’s slug monster eats the human, or if that doesn’t happen, the winner is the most evolved monster at the end of 5 turns.

At the beginning of your turn, you roll 3 dice, and you choose which colour dice to roll. The different colours have different effects, so you need to choose based on what you want to do that turn. You assign the dice to tasks. If you want to move on a path, you need to assign the die with the matching number to the pathway, but a blue die will let you move regardless of what number is rolled. If you use a green die to attempt to solve the puzzle minigame that lets you uncover creatures to eat, you get the green die back to use again in your turn. A red die can add the value of another die you rolled when you use it to attempt to eat a creature. You can also use the dice to activate the abilities of the creatures you have consumed.

I began by moving to a space where the previous player had uncovered a creature, but failed to consume it, because although it required a roll of 1 or better to eat it, it needed to be defeated by a blue die, and she had no blue dice to use. On my turn I made sure that I had a blue die available, so I ate the creature.

Later on, I moved onto an unoccupied space and needed to play the minigame puzzle to find and uncover the creature there. It works like this: There are 10 discs, each with a coloured sticker on one side. There are two of each colour, and they are face down. To uncover a creature, you need to spend dice. For every pip on the die (or dice) that you spend, you can flip over one disc. The goal is two find the two matching coloured stickers that are also the same as the top card of the deck. That is, if the top card of the deck has a blue sticker, you need to flip both blue-stickered discs. If you spend 10 pips worth of dice, you win automatically and get the top card (to be used later) and you uncover the creature on the board so you can attempt to eat it. If you don’t find the discs, the ones you did flip get flipped back over, and now it’s a memory game for the next person who makes an attempt. I kid you not, one turn I spent 8 pips of dice to flip 8 discs and flipped all of them EXCEPT the 2 green ones I was looking for. In fact, I failed at that game 3 turns in a row. Luckily, I had another die that I hadn’t spent yet, and luckily it was a 2. And yes, I did pick the two correct discs.

After running around a bit and eating some more creatures, I had these guys:

Note in this picture that I had earned the “Butthole” token. I got this by drafting more black dice than any other player this turn. The black dice don’t have any other special ability, although you can use them for generic actions. But the player who has the most gets the special attack. This attack lets you eat a creature by bypassing its defenses by going in its butthole and eating it from the inside.

When you have a total of 7 defense dice (contributed by your consumed creatures) you become a medium sized creature, allowing you to draft more dice to take actions during that phase of the turn.

I’m pretty sure I was one turn away from winning by chasing down the human and eating her, but another player got there first, but during the final turn of the game.

Overall this game was fun and just silly enough in a fun B-movie way. But that would depend on who you are playing with, of course. I was playing with fun people.

This game was made by Joshua Barbeau (probably no relation to Adrienne Barbeau) and Natalie Wallace of Chaotic Rogue Entertainment.   They are on Instagram, too. This game will be launching on Kickstarter on October 29th, so go and have a look for it!

Finally, I’d like to mention some of the people that I met on the weekend that may have not made it into the blog yet:

Firstly, Pam Walls and her team for putting together and hosting the event. I also want to mention Lock Watson’s game Cardspiracy, which Bill and I played last year, and seems to be a favourite among everyone who plays it. I had a good time hanging and chatting with Jeff Fraser of Strange Theory Games, and Rob at Coin Flip Games. If I missed anyone, it’s because I don’t have contact information, or forgot to write down your name! Anyway, it was a super-great time, and I look forward to seeing everyone again next year, or hopefully, before that at other events!

Thanks everyone!