Orccon 2009 Live Blog: Valdora and more demos

Got a chance at my first new Michael Schacht game of the convention tonight. We'd made an appointment to play Valdora at 8:30 and were joined by another convention attendees. Valdora ("Golden Valley" or something like that in German) is an enjoyable pick-up-and-deliver style game with gorgeous components and a clever selection mechanic that is like turning the pages of a book to find the item you are seeking. I'll talk more about it in a podcast but I enjoyed Valdora and not just because I beat M.S. at his own game. ;)

I also taught Roll Through The Ages to a few groups of enthusiastic folks – Matt Leacock's (of Pandemic fame) latest has a lot of fans here and I just hope the retailers in the dealer room listened and brought enough to sell. All four people at the last game were swearing they would get one tomorrow morning (Saturday, when the dealer room opens). I also showed Ghost Stories with great success – although the players did not win. For me, Ghost Stories remains just as much fun when you lose as when you win. The nice thing is that it is easy to vary the difficulty with some tweaks like giving the players more life tokens or playing with the haunted space numbers a bit.

Tomorrow, we show off Valley Games' Supernova and Titan, FRED's Gem Dealer and Roll Through The Ages, NECA/Quixotic's Hogwarts House Challenge, Z-Man's Middle Kingdom and Heads of State, and many more. But I'm really looking forward to the Q&A session with Michael Schacht. There isn't much time to send in questions but if you do, I'll try to get them in. I'll probably do a follow-up show with him as well to ask all my questions that do not get in during the Q&A so even if you send them after 1 PM PST today, I might have time to ask him.

If I can get the darn pictures off my camera or Blackjack, I'll upload some soon.