OmegaCon reflection

By Tim Johns

OmegaCon is Geelong’s board game convention. This year, it was held on the weekend of International Tabletop Day, in partnership with St David’s Uniting Church and Geelong Library. It was the second time the convention has run in this format.

The Geelong Library was the venue for Saturday’s main session, and the room overlooks one of Geelong’s parks and out over the bay back toward Melbourne. It makes for a spectacular location for a day of tabletop board games. The rest of the weekend (Friday to Sunday) was held at St David’s Church.

My family and I were fortunate to attend OmegaCon this year.

For the main event on Saturday, we packed a bag of our games we were keen to play/willing to teach and headed in. My wife and I had decided one of the things we wanted to do at OmegaCon was experience a new worker placement game – a style of board game where the players each have a set number of workers they can assign to take actions. The players must plan out their actions to achieve the goals in the game, while considering what actions the other players might also want to be taking. We both enjoy the thought patterns these games create, as well as the satisfaction of sequencing actions and achieving goals.

When we got to OmegaCon, we found our friend Ryan was already set up ready to teach Caverna – a highly regarded worker placement game about dwarves. In the game you have to balance farming, mining and adventuring to score points. We hadn’t played this game before, and enjoyed having someone experienced teach us, along with other new players to play with. A great time was had by all. Caverna deserves its reputation – it was excellent.

A personal highlight for me was seeing my six-year-old son enthusiastically and accurately teach one of his favourites (Sushi Go) to a family with kids about his age who had heard there was an event upstairs at the library and come to check it out. If you haven’t played it, Sushi Go is a card-drafting game where you choose the best combination of Sushi-themed cards to score good points. Recommended for all ages (basic reading and maths required).

I also had some great conversations with people who weren’t necessarily there to play games, but who wanted to find out about games and understand what we were doing. I was able to give some people recommendations for games to play with their family and friends and get them set up to learn how to play. One lady (a teacher) was keen to talk about how games could be used in the classroom setting. Learning to play games can help people of all ages develop key social skills. With the variety of games available now, it’s also possible to find games directly applicable to most subjects – spanning maths, science, economics, politics, history, geography.

At the end of the day session, we packed up the library, placed an order for pizza and headed back to the church to continue on into the evening. After a meal with other OmegaCon people, my wife and I had the opportunity to try Hues and Cues – a game we had never heard of. It is a party game (ie. a game designed for a larger group of people). Our game had 10 players – most of whom I hadn’t met before. The objective of the game is to guess which colour is being described by a one-word clue. The clue giver looks at a card and chooses a single word to describe a colour – some good clues were ‘Barbie’ and ‘Cadbury’. If you guessed ‘pink’ and ‘purple’, you could play this game. As the player, you have to place your marker on the board as close to the colour as possible to score well. What shade of pink is Barbie?

In the spirit of the best party games, it created a relaxed environment where you could experience the game with the group. Laughing at clues as you try and figure out what they mean, adjusting your guess if someone else went where you wanted to, figuring out why someone thinks BluTak is grey … party games can be great for connecting with the people you’re playing with, and Hues and Cues is a great example.

Another highlight from the evening sessions was the live role playing game session. Role playing games involve a group of people coming together to tell a shared story using the rules of the game as a framework for how to interact with one another. Playing in these games is one thing, but they can also be very entertaining to watch. RPG live streams are popular on Twitch and YouTube.

The OmegaCon session was a unique story in the style of Delicious in Dungeon (an anime that can be described as MasterChef; if the participants were the characters from a fantasy story, locked in a dungeon, cooking elaborate concoctions to survive). As host, Will took the players on a journey through the dungeon; collecting the ingredients to prepare a delicious meal for a contest. Innocuous enough; until they tried to harvest sentient mushrooms, had to fight the fierce crystal elemental guardian and frantically escape from a collapsing cavern while clutching a chicken.

Sunday connected the church community of St David’s with the gamers of OmegaCon. We joined their church service then shared morning tea, and set up to play more games. I played a game of Foundations of Rome, using a very elaborate copy of the game with 3D models of Roman buildings. It’s a great tile-laying, city-building game with multiple ways to combine buildings and score points. My wife taught some players Wrymspan. It’s by the same team that designed Wingspan, but with dragons instead of birds. Both games feature excellent engine building game play and fabulous artwork.

All in all, we had a great weekend.

The OmegaCon team has already started planning for next year. We have joined the team and are looking forward to making OmegaCon even better. We’ll play lots of games, and meet lots of people. We’re working on improving our communication, and building stronger connections with the gaming groups we know in Geelong.

OmegaCon 2025 will run from May 30 to June 1, with the main session on May 31. 

Come along, whether you want to meet other players, play some games, learn something new or teach others one of your favourites. If you can’t wait until then, consider joining a local gaming group near you.