You can forward your #Origins2025 #Booth1203 Square receipt to [email protected] and we'll send you download links for the games you bought that come with PDFs.

#Origins2025 numbers all up from last year
#WargameHQ numbers coming soon

#Origins2025 numbers all up from last year
#WargameHQ numbers coming soon

You can forward your #Origins2025 #Booth1203 Square receipt to [email protected] and we'll send you download links for the games you bought that come with PDFs.

Day 5 of Origins is traditionally reserved for two things; traveling home, and Japanese or unique games with an old friend.

For a number of years I've imported a handful of games from TGM and I try and bring one or two to Origins. This has been a busy year for me and I haven't had a lot of time to go through rules, let alone work on translating and cross checking stuff. That said, I brought one about tea with me.

First off though, we opened with Hot Streak from CMYK (the same group that did Wilmot's Warehouse). The jist is that you are watching a set of minor league baseball mascots run their between innings race against each other.

The short is that you are placing wagers on a subset of potential card actions including three cards that are in your hand (and you pick one to contribute to the round). Once players have placed their bets, you just deploy the cards at random to resolve the race.

As lame as that sounds, it's possible it is the game of the convention for a number of folks and I admit, we were quite smitten with it. I think understanding that these races are effectively a comedy of errors and that's the intention.

After that, I pulled out a friend's copy of Shifty Eyed Spies (an early Prospero Hall title). I find this a hoot, if slightly brittle, at 4p and today's game was no different. The learning curve for a simple game is massive as you have two data elements with two other players involved (and those are dealt randomly which does unfortunately tilt the game somewhat).

One of these elements is the player character that you're trying to contact, and the other card is the location you need to communicate to a (different) player that is trying to contact you. All of this is done with facial expressions and that's it. Add on top of that if another player catches you winking at another player, they can steal the point out from under you. It's super weird and a unique design.

Finally, I pulled out Romantic Tea Trip. I didn't have paste ups yet but we used little pieces of paper to add translations to the cards. This is a resource management game with a major rondel component for the action selection system. Curiously, as the game progresses, you effectively gain actions via the ability to trigger actions on cards that have been removed from play via scoring. Super cute with the bunny meeples and artwork, and I'm looking forward to playing it with others once I get paste ups done to pass judgement.

#Origins2025

Day 4 at #Origins2025 is largely lecture day this year. There are a series of panels that a bunch of topics and I picked a few for an easy day time.

Started the day off with a talk with two people affiliated with NASA on challenges to living in space long term. First half was technical ones regarding CO2 filtering, water creation, just how much we have to supply currently and why. Those sorts of things. Second half was focused on soft/human constraints like mental health of being confined and alone (in transit), physiological effects (e.g. blood pumping long term in zero/low gravity), etc.

Second session was effectively "how do you take an idea for a TTRPG or boardgame and get into the habit and process of turning it into something usable" (which is my current stumbling block, aside from lack of time). Attached is one of their final slides that they opened with the line "learn to peg, pegging is fun, you can do it with your friends, it's how you succeed..."

(This evening I actually have games before the national security roundup discussion at 10pm)