Earlier this year I decided to host a small game day for the contributors of Lautapeliopas. I’ve been doing yoga, and the yoga school rents out the place. It’s a lovely place and good for small gatherings. For the first game day on 16.5.2026 we ended up with 21 people attending, which was a very good amount for the space.
This is my favourite type of con: a fairly small number of people but enough to play a variety of games, piles of games on table to look at and play, and nobody needs to do any administration during the day.
I played a mixture of new games and old favourites. Let’s start with the new:
Flip 7 is a simple push-your-luck card game, easy enough for just about anybody who can count the scores. This was a fun opener for seven people, which made it feel more like an event. I don’t see much need for this otherwise.
Rayroads is a very nihilistic space train game from Amabel Holland. The game always ends badly: either you exhaust the resources of your home planet, the local star collapses or a capitalist fascist eugenics doomsday cult takes over. We ended up exhausting the resources, which I felt very concretely: in the end, I needed the cheapest, most common resource, and couldn’t get any.
I’m not sure how much fun Rayroads is, but it’s an interesting experience. Fortunately, it didn’t take the two hours the box claims; I’m not sure it would be fun for two hours. I’m looking forward to further experiments with the system to see how fun a game it is. There is something delightfully weird about it, that’s for sure.
Feed the Kraken is a well-liked social deduction game. This isn’t really my genre, but with ten players, this seemed like a fun event. It was, but it would’ve been more fun if I had been able to actually do something in the game. Now I didn’t do much more than the guy who just watched us play. The experience was entertaining, though. I was a good sailor (always the most boring thing in social deduction games) and in the end could’ve decided the game as our win, but the captain didn’t choose me as the final navigator (after the two previous navigator candidates had jumped to the sea instead of making bad decisions), so the pirates won.
Challengers! Beach Cup doesn’t have a lot more agency in it, but felt much better. We had eight players for a proper tournament. My deck started a bit slow, I then got some wins, but it wasn’t enough: I had 27 fans and 29 was enough to reach the final. Experience won: the only player who had played the game before won the final. It was a close call, though. It’d be fun to see how this plays with just four players, and as an eight-player (or even more!) con game this is great.
Fresh Fish is something I’ve enjoyed, but haven’t played in ages – since 2012, to be exact. I’m not sure what I think of it. It’s fun, but it also feels a bit clunky. I suppose more experience with the game would make it flow better. I don’t feel terrible about selling my copy, but wouldn’t mind playing this more.
1846: The Race for Midwest is notable for being the game I’ve played the most without winning it. I’m now at 12 plays and zero wins. I need to print an A4 with huge text “DO NOT PAR FIRST COMPANY TOO HIGH” because otherwise I forget that, par the first company too high and lose the game. Guess what happened this time? But it was still a good game; with 18xx.games, we sped through the game in about 90 minutes.
Crokinole was requested and got played a lot. Coconuts wasn’t requested, but turned out to be a bit of a surprise hit.
