by Ambie Valdés

Over President's Day this year, we decided to host our own board game convention in the Bay Area! My friends and I had been discussing starting our own convention for a while, since we had some difficult times at KublaCon with finding table space to play games. We decided to brand it with Board Game Blitz, since we could! This year, we were able to get a small conference room at a Holiday Inn in San Mateo, and we capped registration at 50 people. I had a really great time playing games all weekend and meeting a bunch of new friends!

Over the weekend, I had 33 game plays of 26 unique games. I got to play with over 20 different people, a lot of whom I had never played a game with before!

One of the awesome things about Blitz Con was that I was able to play a game with Crystal for the first time in person! Crystal flew in for the weekend, and we got to hang out for the whole convention!

by Ambie Valdés

Some of my favorite games are social deduction games (like The Resistance: Avalon and Deception: Murder in Hong Kong), so I was excited to try out Rebels Unite! when I got a review copy for it.

by Ambie Valdés

This year was my husband (Toby) and my first year at BGG.CON, and it was amazing. I tried out 53 distinct games, 49 of which were new to me (some were really quick dexterity games). I'm obviously not going to go over every game I played (you can see what I played here, but here are some highlights of the convention for me.

One of the best things at BGG.CON is the library. The library is HUGE. A whole conference room is filled with board games on all the walls, a lot of which are brand new games from Essen! There was also a section in the main hall with a lot of the hot games set up so that people could play them. Because BGG.CON is right after Essen, it was great for trying out all those games I've been hearing about the past month.

by Crystal Pisano

by GenCanterpillar

When I was born a couple days ago, I learned that there was a board game convention made just for me! I guess it's more of a can'tvention though. For those of you who don't know, Gen Con is a huge board gaming convention held every year. But there's also GenCant (named after me, of course), which is for all those people and animals who can't attend Gen Con in person.

The first thing I did was get my badge. Apparently I'm a Very Important Guest! I must be, because I'm pictured on the badge!

by Ambie Valdés

As you may have heard in the podcast, I went to Dice Tower Con in Orlando this year (my third year at Dice Tower Con). Out of the two different board gaming conventions I've been to, Dice Tower Con is by far my favorite, just because of the awesome open gaming experience - both in available space and in the amazing library.

This year I didn't go to any of the events (I didn't want to wait in line for an hour), so I spent almost all my time doing open gaming. I also wandered around the vendor area (some demo gaming, some buying games), went to the flea market, and visited the world's largest McDonald's with Flip the Table!

My 'vacation' was exhausting. Over the course of the 5 day convention, I played 56 unique games, 49 of which were new to me (a lot of learning!). Each day I played 10 or more different games. I also got to cross a bunch of games off of my list of 'games I want to play.' Obviously, I can't go over all the games in this blog (well I can, but I don't want to), so I'll just go over some highlights.

by Ambie Valdés

KublaCon is a gaming convention held on Memorial Day Weekend in the Bay Area, California. Since I live 15 minutes away, I go every year. I believe KublaCon started out as an RPG convention - it has an online system for signing up for different RPG events, and it has a lot of rooms for RPGs and miniatures gaming. But it also has some tabletop gaming, which is primarily what I'm interested in. This year, I spent a lot of time playing games with old friends and new friends.

Throughout KublaCon, I was able to play 25 different games, 10 of which were new to me. Since there are way too many games to talk about, I'll just mention some of the highlights (and show the pictures I remembered to take).

I started off the convention Friday night with Millennium Blades (Amazon), a meta card game about a collectible card game (CCG). You get to draft cards, buy cards, make a collection, and make a deck to play in a 'tournament' against everyone. There are a whole bunch of cards - with a starter deck of 118 cards, plus 12 packs of boosters (12 cards each) added each game to make the main store deck, that's over 250 cards in the game! Also, there's tons of variety, so in the 3 rounds of play, I made 3 different tournament decks, all with different types of combos and ways to get points.

Hello, and welcome to Board Game Blitz! We are a group of women dedicated to making quick board gaming content. We have a YouTube channel and upcoming podcasts. Stay tuned!