RECAP: PLAAY-Dot-CON 2024!

Well, another convention is in the books. It was SO much fun, and as always--maybe more so this year than ever--the weekend flew by VERY quickly. It seems like a blur looking back on it. I didn't take as many photos this year as in previous years, and my record-keeping wasn't as thorough, I apologize for that. Instead, I tried to make it a priority this year to participate and engage instead of record and chronicle. I got in a game of Cold Snap Express with David Drais, played Season Ticket Baseball with Clay Dreslough, as well as some other activities. Some of the photos posted here, I grabbed from our community Facebook page, thanks to everyone who posted there.

Anyway, here's a recap of the convention, from MY perspective...

Wednesday 06.19.24

We had a number of early arrivals on Monday and Tuesday, but the big travel day was Wednesday, with about a third of the convention-goers arriving in a steady stream. Many were able to make it from the airport to Highlands Ranch in time for our "Super Early Bird" gathering at Enchanted Grounds, we had about 30 people in attendance. Lots of games going on, a group of folks played "HEAT: Pedal to the Metal," one of the best-selling Formula One games in the hobby game market, and its precursor, Flamme Rouge…

Above, Brian Hoxey, Sam Avallon, Travis Jansen and others enjoy “Heat: Pedal to the Metal,” while Al Wilson, Steve Tower, Kevin Sieg and Harvey Couch play “Flamme Rouge.” Below, James Cast and ST Patrick (center, seated)play football, Brien Aronov and Blake Wilson chat, etc.

I hosted an encore Demo Derby Smash-Down event, with a combination of in-person (Kevin Sieg, Jason Laumeyer, etc.) and in-spirit (Rob Gallamore, Al Shock) PLAAY Gamer drivers. Below, Kevin Sieg, Jason Laumeyer (thumbs up!) and Trevor Ferril…

Pete Adams was our unlikely winner--he was a seeming sitting duck at the end, having absorbed six external damage and four internal. Trevor Ferril had two shots at him to close it out, but ended up knocking himself out, handing the title to Pete! We had numerous trips to the Unusual Results chart ("Catch on fire! Catch on fire!...), but no flames, haha!MowMaster. HEAT. Bruce McFarlane's football miniatures game. We expanded the Super Early Bird "alt motor sports" theme buy running a couple rounds of MowMaster, our riding lawn mower competition game designed by Mike Fitzgerald.

After Enchanted Grounds, some folks headed to Coors Field to watch the Rockies take on the Dodgers, others made for Torchy's, the unofficial eatery of the convention, always great. Me and Sam wound up at a table with Al Wilson, Clay Dreslough and Steve Tower--good food, good conversation!!

Thursday 06.20.24

The festivities started earlier than in past years, as we booked a separate conference room at the hotel dedicated to pre-con game-playing. I arrived at 930a with a couple of tubs of PLAAY demo games, and it was ON! Wished that I could have hung out and played games, but there was quite a bit of last-minute preparations to be made, so I bee-lined back to PLAAY HQ to get things wrapped up.

The annual pre-con picnic at Redstone Park was, unfortunately, mostly washed out! We arrived at 430pm under threatening skies. We started up the grills early, good thing as the rain arrived around 5. It stopped after about 20 minutes, and I thought we might be good. But then the rain and wind started whipping up and, despite the covered shelter, a lot of us were getting pretty wet. So I climbed up on a picnic table around 630 and sent everyone home. Of course, about 20 minutes later the rain ended and the skies started to clear. Ugh. We ended up with a LOT of un-eaten hot dogs in our refrigerator!

After wrapping up the picnic early (and changing into dry clothes!), me and Sam headed back to the hotel where the game room was filled with activity. There was golf, basketball, baseball and football, as well as lots of game-related chatter. Below, Travis Jansen, Judah Williams, Bruce Berkowicz and Bruce McFarlane play a wild west RPG, “Fistful of Lead!” (That’s right, it’s NOT just sports games!)

I played Season Ticket Baseball with Clay Dreslough (I took the 1978 Giants vs. Clay's '78 Cardinals, Jack Clark was the hero in an 8-3 Giants win). Steve Tower got out his ukulele around 9 o'clock and sang the seventh inning stretch, which is always a fun moment in our get-togethers.

Friday 06.21.24

Friday morning, the convention began "for real." Everyone lined up to get their "swag bag," which included a copy of express soccer, the convention golf course (Pebble Beach), raffle tickets, a program and a set of "tiny dice." And we were off!...

Things started with our annual twin ice-breaker events: a sports game flea market, and the PLAAY-around game demo. The flea market was the biggest that we have EVER had, thanks to several bins of vintage sports game stuff brought by Kevin Geddes. (I picked up copies of the Strat-O-Matic and Cadaco pro football games!) Lots of PLAAY-Around action as well, as people took advantage of the chance to try out PLAAY games they have seen but never played.

At 1030a we gathered in the conference area for our Soccer Blast Express tutorial. I spent a half hour or so going over the development of the game, and then did a run-through of the rules. Following that, I held a similar tutorial for the new edition of Draft Duel, our "football drafting card game." Then we dismissed for lunch.

At 130p we commenced with our inaugural Soccer Blast Express event, christening bot the game and our new fictional soccer franchise, FLOTA (Football League of the Americas). The 2024 FLOTA Champions Cup Tournament was essentially, a three-stage tournament with all three stages held simultaneously. With nearly 60 people participating, the event featured all 20 FLOTA teams in three separate group stages. We gathered in groups of four, everyone played everyone else once, with the table champions advancing to the playoffs. With multiple copies of each team in play, there was a small amount of duplication for the playoffs, which we mitigated by assigning them to different brackets. In the end, Mexico City, coached by James Cast, was our FLOTA Cup Champion, defeating Sao Paulo (coached by Luke McEvoy) in the title game by a score of 1-0.

Interesting side note: James was one of two people coaching Mexico City, and while James won the championship with his version, the other finished 0-2-1. I think this demonstrated the balance I tried to engineer into this card set! (I will have complete standings and tournament stats as soon as I can compile the data.)

The Draft Duel Show-Down was designed to be less formal, so we ended up not crowning a champion. We had one group that opted for the "advanced" rules, where you drafted your team from a group of 25 players, and utilized the conversion rules that were part of the base game at the holidays. (Conversions are now an "advanced option," so as to make the game easier to play for non-sports fans.) Joseph Dowell, Bob Surprenant, and Bruce Berkowicz were among the "veterans" playing the advanced game, everyone else went with the standard rules. I oversaw a game between Joe Bryan, Steve Shaw and Clay Dreslough. Everyone caught on quickly, and much fun was had! (Incidentally, our professionally-manufactured version of Draft Duel will come out later this summer or early fall.)

After dinner, we had our Sports Game Panel Discussion, featuring Grant Fines, Joe Bryan, Gary Brown, Al Wilson, Glenn Guzzo and Clay Dreslough. The topic was "sports game ratings challenges and how to address them." For example, how do you approach teams which have markedly better/worse statistics than there won/loss records? Each designer chimed in with their thoughts, which were often reflected quite different philosophies. It was super interesting, and, I think, underscored that there are two sub-segments of the hobby: those who play sports game primarily for the statistics, and those who play for the narrative.

Following the panel, we broke into groups for our annual "Guest Designer Showcase," where all of our special guests demoed and/or discussed their games with convention-goers for a couple of hours: Glenn Guzzo discussed Strat-O-Matic baseball and football; Gary Brown demoed the new tactical fight cards for "Legends of Boxing 2" and held a heavyweight title match (I think it was Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman--if I heard right, Foreman was knocked woozy but managed to hang on for a LONG time before finally getting knocked out). Joe Bryan showed off his in-develpoment "Downhill Die-Cast Racing" game. Grant Fines demonstrated "49 Quick Decks Hockey." Mike Fitzgerald got out the latest version of "Battle of the Bands." I had a great time play-testing a couple of my own in-development games, "Battleground States" (electoral college strategy game) and "Show-OFF!" (Sort of like "America's Got Talent" in a "big-top" setting). "Battleground States," I'd like to get out before this fall, if possible--stay tuned!

Saturday 06.22.24

It dawned on me sometime during convention week that I had scheduled all three of our spotlight, "marquee" organized events on the SAME day, Saturday--golf, baseball and Prime Time hoops! Chad McEvoy told me (in jest) that it was the greatest day in sports dice games history! That's obviously over-stating it, but it WAS pretty big. Probably the biggest day of sports games I have ever organized, for sure!

We began at 9am sharp with the PLAAY Gamer Open Golf Tournament. I had Gideon Eames re-rate the Pebble Beach course to include some of the new boutique ratings we've developed in the years since the game (and original Pebble Beach house) was introduced. We created new full-color cards, in the Course Collection TWENTY design, filtering actual images of each hole at the real-life Pebble Beach. (For in-person personal/tournament use only, we won't be able to distribute these to the community at large for licensing reasons.) As always, it was a memorably exciting tournament, highlighted by our first-ever hole-in-one, sunk by Jesse Cheng on #7. It was an amazing moment, the whole room erupted into applause!

The tournament was won by Jim Surprenant, in a playoff hole with Keith Curtis, both finished 15 under (!). Jim got an Unusual Result--I was thinking, what if it's the "spectator hit with ball" result, what a way to decide the tournament! But, instead it ended up "just" being a great shot, gimme putt for birdie that Keith was not able to match. The photo below shows the group gathered for the playoff hole

During the lunch break, I held a "brown bag lunch" seminar reviewing Jim Barnes' 1978 publication, "Tabletop Action." Barnes published this as part of his Statis-Pro offerings for a brief period of time, and Pete Adams had picked up a copy "back in the day" as a teenager, held onto it all these years. It's fascinating reading, a glimpse back into a time when a lot of us formed the passion for sports board games that has stayed with us as we've gotten older. Part of the publication focuses on game play, part on game design, and a separate section on starting your own game company. All of interest to our group. I highlighted the things about the hobby that have changed (i.e., "play by mail leagues," sports game ads in magazines) and things that have NOT changed (importance of stats, playability) as well as diving into his as-published thoughts on how accurate a sports game needs to be, and the three essential elements that a sports game MUST have in order to be successful. LOTS of great discussion, and a really fun trip down memory lane.

After lunch it, was time for "Afternoon Baseball!"

For the first time, we held two concurrent History Maker Baseball events. Our 10th annual Time Machine Tournament was presented in HMB Express, as it has been for the last three years. We had 24 teams in this year’s tournament, six divisions of four teams. Everyone played the other teams at their table twice, home and away. The playoff field consisted of the six division champions and two wild card teams, drawn at random. (That random draw provided one of the weekend’s many memorable moments: last year’s champion Chad McEvoy had chosen a different Astros team for this year’s tournament, and finished 1-5 in divisional play. But, just as he was lamenting his exclusion from the playoff field, wouldn’t you know, we drew his team as one of the two wild cards!)

For the first time ever (express or full-play) the tournament was won by a team from the PLAAY Baseball Universe (Century/Continental/Baseball America), as Andy McEvoy put together a 9-0 run with the 2019 Vancouver Voyageurs, defeating Kevin Sieg's 2021 Los Angeles Dodgers 3-1 in the championship game.

Alongside the express tournament, we did an encore of last falls Cooperstown "Timeless Diamond Tournament" with full-play HMB. I divided the Cooperstown Complete card set into twenty teams of equal composition--legends, pioneers, hopefuls, footnotes and exiles. After a 30-minute "hot stove" period where managers could trade players, the mini-tournament began. We had three teams finish with three wins: the Privateers (James Hart), Neptunes (Jay Williams) and Emeralds (Dave Jackson). All received raffle tickets for their perfect record--(would have been awesome to play down to a champion, but how do you do that with three teams?)

Just before adjourning for dinner, we did our big drawing for Raffle prizes--sixteen prized in all!! It's always a highlight of the convention, everyone is always genuinely excited as each name is drawn from the box.

I mentioned the bad weather washing out the pre-con picnic as being one of the (few) disappointments of the weekend. The other one was me forgetting to take the group photo on Friday, when everyone was present--DOH! Every year we scramble at the end to get everyone together, so this year I thought it would be great to do it as the FIRST thing. Honestly, I didn't even think about it until it was mentioned to me Saturday night (or, there probably wouldn't have been one taken at all!). So, maybe a dozen or more folks are missing from this year's photo. I'm so sorry about that. I will make it a priority to NOT let that happen next year.

After dinner, we wrapped up the convention with a bang, holding a "Greatest of the Greatest" Tournament with the new "Prime Time" version of Highlight Maker Hoops. The concept is a bit unorthodox, but fit the parameters of our available time frame. I chose eight top teams from the All-Time Franchise Great Hoops Teams card set, and divided them East (Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago) and West (Los Angeles, Golden State, Oklahoma City and Utah). That arrangements creates sixteen different potential East vs West championship games. We set out all sixteen pairings (Celtics vs. Warriors, Celtics vs. Lakers, Celtics vs. Jazz, etc.) on game tables and had people pair up to play Prime Time hoops, 40-card quarters. Thus, we had sixteen "championship" games going simultaneously!

For this event, we did a couple of things different than standard Prime Time game play dictates. Number one, we allowed coaches to place chips as desired the entire game--no dice rolling to place chips. Second, we sidelined the real-life coach cards and gave each coach an identical set of three "coach approach" cards to use for the TV timeout motivation rolls. You could choose an even-keeled approach, a "chalkboard" play-calling approach, or basically just YELL at your team! Each had a different distribution of outcomes, advantages and disadvantages. Pretty fun. We'll make the cards available in this month's CONNECT e-newsletter.

Our winners are listed below, we'll learn which game was the ACTUAL championship game (and who coached the winning team!) on our Thursday Night YouTube stream.

For the record, no team won all four of its "championship" games. The Sixers and Bulls each won three games, the Celtics and Jazz each won one. Of course, we could get entirely different results if we were to play it again, as good as these teams are.

As always, it's hard to say goodbye. No different this year. What was different was that the hotel staff was in the meeting room promptly at 10p to start picking up chairs and tables, so there was no "hanging around" as in past years! I wished I would have snapped a picture of it, but at the very end--as the clean-up crew was disassembling the room, there was Michael Owens and Jesse Cheng sitting at a back table, playing Hockey Blast! Gotta love that: game-playing until the VERY last minute!!

Keith Avallone, Paul Fay, Travis Jansen!

Thanks to everyone who made this event so special, especially the convention first-timers: Joe Bryan, Brendan Cast, David Drais, Clay Dreslough, Zachary Evans, Paul Fay, Kevin Geddes, John Heckel, Brian Hoxey, Tim Lucas, Manuel Martinez, Bruce McFarlane, Brian Reising, Steve Shaw, John Siak, Ryan Strauss, and Albert Taylor.

Hope to see you all again next year!

Convention Event Game Results

Here are the results from (most) of the convention organized events. We’ve somehow lost track of the Draft Duel Showdown and “Timeless Diamond” score sheets, but are hoping to discover them once we’re fully un-packed from the convention!