Kingdom-Con is San Diego gaming convention and sadly this year, the tenth, is the final year as the organizer has decided to cease operation while he still loves doing it. Held in a hotel in Mission Valley Kingdom-Con.

While the convention boasts nearly every style of gaming available my sweetie-wife and Is tuck to the board game room where you can check out games from their library and play with other attendees, of which I am told there were in total about 1300.

Here’s a quick run down of the games we played.

Epic Roll:This game was terrible. The theme is adventurers in a D&D setting racing to the top level. It supports only three players, doesn’t understand its theme, (really Skeletons are a tougher monster than Mummies?) and the outcome is entirely luck driven.

Elder Sign:A game of adventurers desperately attempting to stop the rise of a great old god. It’s a dice game but with much more strategy than Epic Roll however I did not quite understand the rules when my Sweetie-wife and I tried it so the game was not a success. I’d like to give it another go with a better understanding of the mechanics.

Invader Zim: Doomsday Dice Game:My sweetie-wife and I played this just the two of us and while I enjoyed it she did not. Based upon the popular cartoon players either are working as Zim and Gir trying to destroy the Earth with an outlandish devise or the players are either Dib or Agent Darkbootie trying construct an equally outlandish device to shield the Earth.

Betrayal At The House on the Hill/Baldur’s Gate: Two variants of the same game mechanic but with different themes. Collectively players explore either an old Mansion or a fantasy town and its catacombs encountering events, gathering item, and uncovering Omens. Eventually enough omens trigger a ‘haunt’ and one player becomes the monster or villain and has their own victory condition while the other players as, a team, win by stopping the villain. This was decently fun.

Lords of WaterDeep: A worker placement game that takes place in a D&D setting with the players battling to become the power behind the secretive factions controlling the city of Waterdeep. My sweetie-wife and I played two games and I player a late night game with another attendee. I thoroughly enjoyed this game and find that the worker placement mechanic is quite fun.

Hogworts Battles:This is a massive game with seven sub-games. Set, obviously, in the Harry Potter books and movies, the players are the
young heroes cooperatively battling to stop the forces of evil from taking over the magical school Hogworts. Each sub-game is a year at Hogworts and gets progressively more difficult. We played 5 of the seven games, losing to the forces of darkness in year five. This was quite fun but the 5 years took about six hours to play out and had we won years 6 and 7 would have had to have been played the next day.

And finally

Thanos Rising:A cooperative dice game thematically set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each player leads one of four super hero teams, Avengers, The Guardians of the Galaxy, Wakanda, or Earth’s Sorcerers as they attempt to prevent the mad Titan Thanos from collecting all six Infinity Stones and killing half of all life in the Universe. A game with a simple mechanic Thanos Rising is a surprising tough game with a fair amount of tactical thought required. I lost about half the games I played in with the wins being mostly down to the wire affairs.