Oh wow!  Wow wow wow!  My first Gen Con was amazing!  Met so many great people and played so many games.  Went to a lot of seminars and learned very useful information with a lot of great connections.  Honestly, it went too fast.  It’s only 4 days and now I know to come in early for Day zero stuff and stay later for Sunday stuff.  Got to play a lot of BloodRunes and while I’m pretty set on the game mechanics remaining unchanged, I met some guys who loved the game so much, they played like 5 times and we came up with some pretty valuable changes to the game.

For starters, we played with allowing players to stack Lesser Wards on top of each other and that actually made game play more interesting.  Also, I am playing with making hexes slightly easier to pull off. Most people love BloodRunes but if there are any complaints, they’re either about Hexes being really hard to pull off and not being super satisfying, or it’s about putting up wards and having them immediately removed by a Hex.  The contradiction of these complaints has made me leave the game as is so far because, to me, that means the game is balanced.  Sometimes Hexes are super easy and sometimes they’re super hard.  However, looking back over my ratios, the hexes are, by design, the most difficult spells to cast.  In some games, that leads players to completely disregard the hexes all together which is not what I want. So I’m looking at possibly making them a bit easier. More playtesting is required to see what works best.

The changes that are definitely going in based on feedback from Gen Con:

1. Lesser Wards (wards that block one player at a time rather than all players) can be stacked on your ward space so that if you cast all three lesser wards in a 4 player game, you have created the full ward.
2. Stacked wards may only have one of each direction in a stack. You can’t have two wards against the right caster, for instance. The Full ward against all three players may never be stacked.
3. If a discard hex is cast on a stack of lesser wards, the caster of the hex will choose which of the lesser wards gets discarded.
4. If a steal ward hex is cast on a stack of lesser wards, the caster of the hex gets the entire stack of wards and puts them on his space. He can add to wards he already has, but can still not have more than one of the same type. If he will, then he discards the duplicate wards.

I’ll keep you updated on any other changes to BloodRunes and I’ll be posting subsequent updates for each day of GenCon. It was so much fun and I’ve been antzy to share with you everything I got to do!  🙂

Have you ever been to GenCon?  what was your experience like?