I went to BochumCon on the first January weekend! BochumCon is a small invite-only convention focusing on longer, more complex games (often with a historical theme) organized by designer Matthias Cramer. Here’s how it went. First of all, it must be noted that the organization of the con is top-notch, aiming to reduce all kinds […]
I went to BochumCon on the first January weekend! BochumCon is a small invite-only convention focusing on longer, more complex games (often with a historical theme) organized by designer Matthias Cramer. Here’s how it went.
First of all, it must be noted that the organization of the con is top-notch, aiming to reduce all kinds of friction so that your full attention can go to a good time of gaming:
- Tables, rooms, and meals are all provided by the same venue.
- All the longer games are scheduled before – attendees say which games they would like to play, and the organizing team does some heroic spreadsheet sudoku to get all the gaming groups together.
- As players know what they are going to play, the expectation is that everybody familiarizes themselves with the rules beforehand so that as little time as possible at the con has to be spent with rules teaching.
For me, the plan was to start with Weimar (Matthias Cramer, Capstone Games/Skellig Games/Spielworxx) on the first day, play Here I Stand (Ed Beach, GMT Games) on the second, and Kingmaker (Andrew McNeil, Gibsons) on the third – a nice spread of different games, and I was delighted to have one I was familiar with on the first day after a long trip, a long one and a new-to-me one on the second and third day when I’d be better rested.
As I was the only player with previous experience at Weimar in our game, I volunteered to play the reputedly challenging Zentrum. My government coalition with the SPD solved most of the problems of the Reich, but had a hard time suppressing the Communist revolution, and – even worse for me – the SPD tended to score all the points for our successes. Thus, our government split up in the second round, and I tried my luck being the junior government partner to the nationalist DNVP. As the extremist parties cannot restore republican order against each other even if they are in government, that thankless task was left to me alone, and I did it with as little enthusiasm (no points!) as luck (rolling nothing higher than a 4 on around a dozen die rolls). Our Communist player smirked and established Councils in Berlin, Hamburg, and Essen for the victory at the end of round 2.
As the game had ended so soon, we had enough time for a second! This time around, I would be the DNVP. I got barely anything done in the first round while the government parties mopped up the KPD and removed all the unrest and poverty from cities. However, they got cocky in the second round, and played too hard with foreign policy, amassing threats to the Reich as a whole. As I had scored a few points from my strong presence in the streets by then, I gambled on my coup to be the straw to break the Reich’s back – and succeeded (all my die rolling mishaps from the first game entirely reversed)! Once more, the game ended after the second round, this time in a DNVP victory.
Each game took around two hours, which left us with enough time to play a shorter game in the evening – in my case, a learning round of Arcs (Cole Wehrle, Leder Games). More on that below!
I had played Here I Stand at BochumCon in 2024 already – the requirements of player count (ideally 6) and playtime (loooong) make it an ideal convention game. This time, we had the full six players (last year, no fewer than three of our six had fallen ill just before the con), me being allotted the Ottomans.
The Hapsburgs hit me with events early on and then declared war on me on the second turn – yet our Mediterranean conflict was indecisive (which I counted as a blessing). Not a good start, yet not the worst: The Protestants were horribly contained by bad Reformation die rolls and aggressive Papal debating. The Pope, consequently, scratched at the victory threshold from turn 2 on! Yet a Papal victory on turn 4 was forestalled when the Hapsburgs abandoned their newly-started campaign in France (which had gone awry with emperor Charles V captured) to allow the French to catch up. My Ottomans had picked up a few points here and there and were ready for the lunge in turn 5: Another two piracy VP, the long-awaited campaign against Hungary and onto the Hapsburg capital of Vienna got me precisely to the 25 VP I needed for the Ottoman victory.
As always, Here I Stand was a big hit with everyone around the table – the three rookies as well as the more experienced players. Our five rounds of play took around eight hours, so after dinner we had once more the opportunity for a shorter game. I put my Arcs learning from the day before to practice with a few of my friends from Boardgame Historian. Arcs is a very clever meld of mechanisms – a trick-taking, majority-scoring weuro, in which – it’s a Cole Wehrle game – players have very ambiguous relations to one another: “Great that you put Keeper up for scoring instead of something else at which I am doing worse… but hey, now don’t hoard all those relics, I want points, too!”
If Arcs is a very modern game in its mechanisms and its presentation, Kingmaker, which we played on day 3, is quite the opposite – as should not surprise you, given its original publication in the 1970s and the only moderate modifications to it in the new (2023) edition. That means a high amount of swinginess – your nobles can just be called by a random event card to deal with a Scottish raid halfway across the map (where they may be set upon by their rivals). And when you think you are the biggest bully on the block and can just push everyone around in battle, maybe you draw a card that makes the battle indecisive, and instead of you rolling over your opponent, they slip away, seize king Henry VI in London, and hold a parliament at which they award all the titles and offices to their cronies.
And then he reigns supreme until the other two players ally against him, crown Richard of York as rival king, combine their strengths and march on him… but when they have beaten him in battle and seized the entire Lancaster royal family, they switch sides and behead their own Yorkist pretender!
This beer-and-pretzely experience (we started at 10am, so neither were consumed during the game) contrasts starkly with the treatment of the Wars of the Roses in Plantagenet (Francisco Gradaille, GMT Games) which I played last year at BochumCon: Plantagenet pits one king against one pretender, each joined by their (mostly) stalwart loyalists. Kingmaker situates the players one level below at the English nobility, where a plethora of ambitious dukes and earls gleefully plot how they can gain control of a royal puppet to fulfil their lust for titles and offices.
Both of these very different (but complementing) perspectives and the emerging narratives of the Wars of the Roses are plausible, and go to show how games can enrich your understanding of history.
My evening game on the third day was a test of Matthias Cramer’s prototype The Promised Land on the Israeli-Egyptian conflict from the 1950s to 1970s… too early to say much about it except that the cleverly interlocking systems definitely bear the designer’s signature.
Before departing on the last day, I managed to sneak in one last game – Heat: Pedal to the Metal (Asger Harding Granerud/Daniel Skjold Pedersen, Days of Wonder). I am a big fan of the two designers’ clever Cold War games, but hadn’t played their newer racing-themed fare before. Heat compelled me with its minimal rules overhead which still provided a lot of tactical depth and its evocative mechanisms – downshifting before corners (and upshifting afterward), and, of course, the delicate balance of how to deal with the psychological stress on the driver and the physical stress on the car (the eponymous heat).
As this was my second BochumCon, I knew most of the other attendees already – and was delighted to catch up with them and play another game (or, in many cases, our first one). I also got to meet a few very interesting people for the first time. So, in addition to games, I had some very interesting conversations – on games, history, and life.
Thanks to the organizing team for the invite and the great con experience!
