Gaming cons are very interesting places to try new games, which might sound strange but it’s true! Complex games are too complex for gaming cons to get a good idea if it’s good, Long games are too long for a gaming convention to get a good idea if it’s good, and party games at a convention are too different from your normal game night situation to know if they’re good…

This is our experience with Caution Signs, we played one round of it with Wise Wizard Games end-boss Debbie on the UKGE press evening. Debbie is always great and the game seemed fun. So a day later we hung out with kids from friends at the open gaming area, we suggested it and we had a fun albeit stressful time. Recently we had some friends over and played it again and suddenly it was PERFECT. We laughed a lot and still talk about some of the drawings a full week later. Nothing of our UKGE impressions would suggest it would go over so well and would inspire a comic.

If you never played Caution Signs it’s very simple. Everyone at the table, except the guesser, gets a drawing board, and two triangular cards with one adjective (hungry, fancy, slippery) and a noun (angels, hedgehog, janitor). You get twenty seconds to draw your “flexible cow”. Then all the adjectives and nouns get shuffled together (and some extra get added) and it’s the guessers turn to see if they can guess all the drawings on the table.

It might not sound that special but designers Scott Brady and Danielle Reynolds knocked this one out of, at least our friends groups, park.

This week we played loads of good games we want to give a quick shout-out. For the first time in eight years, we played Chaos in the World, which is showing its age but we all had such a good time, we’re trying it again in a few weeks. We also played Floodgate games upcoming word game Landmarks three times in a row. It is a bit like Codenames with a cooperative and a team-based competitive mode which both evoke very different emotions, the cooperative mode felt a lot more tense for us. But if you’re going to GenCon you should definitely check this one out if you enjoy word association games. We also played two games of Robot Quest Arena which is the perfect light ‘event’ game because of its simple rules but over-the-top production. Lastly, we won the training scenario of Sky Team on our first try (since trying the prototype at Spiel two years ago), and it deserves its nomination for Spiel des Jahres. It is an easy-to-understand but tense co-op game that hopefully see more people get into cooperative games.

This weekend Rachel is playing her first 18xx! I hope she’ll like it enough to go pick up a side project we have brewing…