27 April 2019. This is the day my dream has come true. What's
your dream, you might ask? Well, doing one of my favourite things (playing
board games), talking to one of my favourite designers (Friedemann Freise), seeing
some of my favourite people (gaming friends from Cambridge and Peterborough), in one
of my favourite game shops bookshops (Heffers). I would not have
imagined this 10 years ago, when I was still living on the other side of the
world.
(Again, friends' names will appear in my articles as
initials until they agree to appear as normal!)
This is the second time Chris and I have been to Heffers International
Tabletop Day. Like last year, the event started from 7pm and ran until 3am. Unlike
last year, we've come to know a lot of gaming friends since we started going to
meetups, and many of them were also there! I was super lucky to have secured
two (out of five) places for the playtesting with Friedemann. When we arrived
at Heffers, the queue was already quite long, and we saw Tom and R waving
at us. We talked to Yair and then talked to Tom and R briefly. They told me Friedemann
walked past them, wearing green (me too!). My heart started to race a bit – his
name had been so close yet so far - I've been so familiar with it since my
earliest gaming days, but it had only been a name on boxes!
The playtesting was scheduled at 7pm, so we went to the playtesting
table as soon as the door was open. The other players also joined shortly, so Friedemann
started explaining the rules (he didn't play the game as there were already 5
players). I was so excited that in the first 5 minutes I couldn't even hear what
he was saying! We playtested his new game Faultier (sloth in German) with a
green cover - how am I not surprised. In this game, you are a sloth who relies
on various animals with a range of abilities to move you around the map to collect
leaves. I will discuss the game itself in more detail in a separate article in
our designer series, because I wish to focus on my general experience from this
event today. Friedemann is one of the most intelligent people I have spoken to
in my entire life. He is also very funny (or at least he was entertaining himself) – you hear spontaneous bouts of
laughter from him every now and then. He listened to everyone's questions and clarified
rules patiently – 2 hours just flew by! It was a close one - 4 people scored
the same at the end, including me and Chris. So there was a 4-way tie breaker,
which was determined by 
Our Peterborough friends came in a large group as a tradition
to celebrate Tom's birthday (happy birthday again, Tom!). The Music section in
the basement was therefore reserved for the group and there were 3-4 tables
gaming at the same time. When we finished playtesting, people were already in
the middle of their games, so Aishwarya kindly lent me Fleet the Dice Game for
a 2-player game with Chris. It's a roll-and-write game based on Fleet and I
really liked it. There are many ways to score points and hence a lot of
interesting choices in terms of which engine to build (licenses, boats,
buildings etc). It does not lack player interaction either – when you choose a
die you also need to consider which ones to leave for other players. Other games
I saw people playing that night included Concordia (Andy, and Aishwarya etc), The
Faceless (Lloyd, Sara, M and Dave), and Echidna Shuffle (Tom, and R etc). There was no
signal in the basement, so I did not see Mi's message sent at 7.30pm which said
they arrived until 9.30pm. It took me quite some time to find them amongst 160
people! Mi and T then joined us for a 4-player game of The Estates after we
finished Fleet the Dice Game. 
After the game it was already past midnight, and there
appeared to be some kind of auction (like druids in the woods 😝)
going on at the Music section. It felt a bit like a loud and long version of
The Estates! Our friends from Peterborough had a long drive to go home, so after
some of them left there were about 8-9 people who decided to stay till the end. We
then joined forces for an 11-player (+1 game master) secret identity game: Blood on the
Clocktower. That was…chaos. Chris said he was the Fortune teller and saw the
boss between Mi and T. Then Mi and Se claimed to be the same good guy (which
makes one of them a bad guy) – based on what Chris said, people voted to get
rid of Mi and T. But neither of them was the boss! It turns out that the boss
was Lloyd, whom nobody suspected, because the information people relied upon was all misleading - I was drunk, Dave was poisoned and what Chris saw was the red herring (which was Mi, but he was
a good guy…). Having a bit of misleading information in a secret identity game would
be fun, but if everything is false, then the deduction breaks down.
It was already 2.30am so we said goodbye to people. We saw Yair
was still there when we went upstairs – looked like someone also decided to
go for the last man standing! Well, we didn't win any raffle this year, but I must
say that I left Heffers in high spirits – what an evening! 😊
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