Greeting from Vegas: Dice Tower West Update

We're halfway through the Vegas experience at Dice Tower West, things are going well! Here's a quick update...

We have a good group of PLAAY gamers here in Vegas with us, including Jule Sigall, Blake and Caleb Wilson, Steve Carey, David Siskin, Jason Aldrich and Scott Johnson. Jule has put together a set of all 64 teams (!!) headed to the upcoming NCAA college basketball tournament, we have had great fun getting them on the court with the full-play hoops game! First game played, Villanova (Jule) defeated San Diego State (Steve) 80-77. Yesterday, we had Colorado (me) and Washington State (Jule), the Cougars holding off the Buffs 75-73. It's been great putting the game through its paces, I think it's going to provide a lot of tabletop thrills for hoops fans. Still some cleaning up to do on a few things. Some of the Unusual Results, for example, are clear about the odd thing that just happened but unclear about what happens next. We'll get that spruced up, there are some other similar things.

We put a focus on demo-ing a new non-sports card game that we have been developing, called "Myth Mash!" We've had it on the designer's showcase game table the last few PLAAY-Dot-CONs, it's nearing its final form. GREAT response from the DTW crowd, super encouraging. We'll do a PLAAY Space episode at some point to show off the final game.

Golf Tournament: Steve Carey ran away with it, with a course-record-tying 8-under par 64. That matched Jeff Tomlinson, Ethan Muslin, Kevin Sieg and John Wise at last year's PLAAY-dot-CON (where the course debuted). I say Steve ran away with it, it was actually Ben Crenshaw. Since we had some non-sports gamers playing (this is, after all, a hobby board game meet-up), I felt like it was easier to have them choose a real-life pro golfer and play the game as that golfer's "caddy" rather than asking them to create a card of their own, not having played the game and being without insight on what the golfer qualities mean.

Dodgeball Tournament: Super fun, and we definitely turned some heads in the main gaming hall with regular outburst. Similar to what happens with the golf game when someone sinks a difficult birdie putt (or misses a "gimme" putt!), there's always a collective expression of "wow!" Same thing with dodgeball when someone makes a difficult knockout, or drops a catch attempt. After I explained to everyone how the game worked and conducted a couple of sample exchanges, we held a draft using all the players that come with the game. We had six coaches, I spread out all the cards and we did a "snake draft," 1-2-3-4-5-6-6-5-4-3-2-1. Once everyone had seven players, the fun began. And it WAS fun! We decided that if any ONE team won all three of its games, it would be the champion, hands-down. If two teams were 3-0, we'd have a playoff.

As it turned out, we had three teams finish at 2-1 (John, Aaron and Manuel) and three at 1-2. Manuel had a chance to finish 3-0, and had a big advantage over John in the final game, but John pulled it out with TWO big catches turning the tide. We used net points as the tie-breaker--the winning team earned one point for every player remaining on the court when the last opposing player was eliminated. That put John and Aaron into the championship game, which we set up as a "three-on-three." Velarde was the star for Aaron, personally delivering three knockouts to give Aaron the Dice Tower West Dodgeball Championship!

Tonight is our "official" full-play hoops event, I'm excited to get the game on the table in front of a group that's a majority of non-PLAAY gamers. We'll demo the game with either the WNBA cards we offered during the holiday sale or Jule's NCAA tournament cards.

It's been very cool to see Score Cards on display! As you may know, we signed a deal with RNR games to distribute Score Cards world wide, so the game is now in their hands. The game looks very similar to what we offered PLAAY gamers in 2023, except the RNR version comes with a score pad and pencil. Pretty neat! If you missed out on getting Score Cards from us, not to worry--you should be able to get a copy soon ate your favorite local game store.

Much more that I could write (and also a BUNCH of photos!), but it's time for me to head down to the PLAAY booth! More soon!…