There was weirdness: no Wizards booth. Not that you need to demo Magic, but it surprised me that they didn't even bother with a booth for all of the other games. I don't think it's a healthy sign that the industry's leader has abandoned this con, even if they don't have the unabashed success they once did.

Also: no Upper Deck booth, meaning nowhere to demo Marvel/DC Vs. and nobody for me to beg for a comprehensive online rulebook. Doubly strange, that.

Here's a brutal runthrough of the major games we experienced at this year's show...

Doomtown: The usual tournament organizer was unavoidably detained, so I'm glad Mike and I opted out of the Championship Friday night (after experiencing the no-show on Thursday.) The guy did get in touch with some people at the con who managed to pull together a 12-player event, but without that one dude, I sort of fear for how any ruling conflicts were resolved. The guy who won this year's ad hoc tourney has cheated against me and others in previous events, so that pretty much confirms my suspicions. There's a very good chance that Mike and I won't bother searching this event out in the future, even though we both still love the game. I think that by the time you hit 12 participants, it's time to retire the banner.

Clout Fantasy: Speaking of inalienable truths of the gaming business, here's another: When you start giving away full retail starter sets of your collectible game in the convention freebie bag, your game is dead. I can't name a single game I've received as swag (or demoed, come to think of it) that went on to rousing success after handing out $10 stock for free. Clout Fantasy is just the latest name on that long, sad list.

It's one thing to give out a single free promo card or cheapie poster/playmat... but a complete starter set? You're sunk, meladdo. Even handing out free $3 booster packs is pretty much a coughing canary.

Did I mention how obnoxious this game is? It's all your least favorite bits of a miniatures game - the measuring, the fun-sucking interactions triggered by a dictionary of non-descript keywords, and oh god the measuring - compounded by decidedly boring visuals (same-old same-old fantasy artwork stuffed onto a poker chip) and a stupid deployment system (you throw them. So until you get good at throwing stuff, you might as well roll a random number and place your chips on the damn floor.) I guess the act of throwing poker chips is so inherently fun that these guys thought they could make another cookie cutter fantasy game out of it. This whole game is based on that one conceit, and it shows.

Looney Labs: Getting very stingy with the promo cards, these guys are. This year, they were giving out free Forest Goals for Fluxx... but to get any of the three Tree cards that match it, you had to win a demo game against them. Now, obviously the demo guys are going to play it so they always lose, but generally you're in a game demo with two to three other people. Sometimes people you know, sometimes not. So now only one of us gets the free extra card? Weak.

My guess is that they will sell sets of these promos in their online store at some future point (they usually do), so I'm not too bugged about it.

Still, the Looneys seem to be struggling lately, to my view at least. The second Chrononauts (the one I helped with!) has not been the seller they had expected, especially given the huge footprint they established with the first one. Fluxx is their only bona fide hit, and they're milking it like crazy with Eco-Fluxx and Family Fluxx and - coming soon - Christian and Jewish Fluxx (which is probably just a calculated response to their subversive Stoner Fluxx edition.) Not a bad idea. Look at how Cranium has turned itself into a whole family game franchise. Not to mention all the myriad versions of Uno, Monopoly, etc. Although, when they announce Elizabethtown College Fluxx, that's probably when I'm out for good.

Icehouse has always been a tough sell; $8 for one color set of pyramids when you probably need around four to actually play a decent game? The pricy boxed sets (for IceTowers and Zendo) didn't help. Downgrading Icehouse into a simple multiplayer game (Treehouse) that only requires a single set of pyramids is a step in the right direction. I have this image of a warehouse full of pyramids that they're desperate to move. I'm just not sure that the Treehouse game is the gas that's going to do it.

And don't even ask me about Nanofictionary, which is one of those "imaginative" party games where players' opinions determine the winner. I find those extremely distasteful. Until Looney Labs comes up with another game on par with the simple-yet-compelling Fluxx or the complex-yet-intriguing Chrononauts, I'm giving their library a 50-50.

Gloom: I've had this one for a while, but Mike picked up his own set from one of the many nameless vendor booths. Good game, once you get past the confusing application of active card text.

I recently bought the expansion set, which seems to have arrived on a different plastic stock than the initial edition. The expansion also has nicely opaque black dots on the card backs, whereas the original is unfortunately see-through. I wonder if they re-did the first set to address some of the physical clumsiness of those cards? I'll have to ask Mike what his looks like.

All Wound Up: This is a novel idea, but there's a reason it hasn't been done before. Wind-up toys just are not a reliable mechanic. In the demo, Chris's li'l zombie fell over as soon as he put it on the board, and the demo guy said "Whoops! That's legal! Has to stay where he fell! Guess your zombie was a little tipsy!" At that point, I think I'd rather have non-mobile zombie figures and just move them on the game board Candyland-style.

And there's this whole weird pre-round card distribution method that just boggles my mind. Everybody gets 10 cards. Then everybody passes 5 cards to the right. Then everybody passes 4 cards to the right. Then everybody passes 3 cards to the right. Then everybody passes 2 cards to the right. Then everybody passes 1 card to the right. I'm not even kidding. By the end of that, you're physically winded. Maybe that's what they mean by "All Wound Up." Only then do you attempt to move your zombie dudes, but even that is governed by a bidding system! It's like everything I don't like in one game. I just can't imagine this was the only way to effectively and fairly move wind-up zombie toys across a game board.

Zombies Second Edition: If this came in an even bigger box, I would have definitely bought it. Isn't that awful? I love the female zombie figures, and I'm sure they cleaned up some of the old card wordings... but I want the box to be able to old all four mini-expansions AND the 4th set with the zombie dogs. I guess they're going to have to do a Crate Edition to get me.

HorrorClix: we avoided all the Clix games because we don't especially like them. But we did get a free 2-figure demo set inside our goodie bag, so I did spend some time reading the rules while on the toilet. And I wish I had taken such an informative dump while I was still at the con, because I might actually have asked Mike to try this one out with me. The rules as presented in the demo are much more manageable that any other Clix game I've tried. Shame I could care less about the dorky horror theme.

I think that with each Clix release, WizKids inches closer and closer to making a Clix game I might actually like. Mage Knight: boring fantasy world, ugly figure paint, movement/range issues and a bank of indecipherable abilities all keyed by color. HeroClix: cool comic characters, better figure paint, movement simplified to a grid system, but still with the colors. HorrorClix: boring horror world, better figure paint, grid still in place, and now the color abilities are explained on handy reference cards that come with each character. Mash up a little Hero and Horror, and they might finally grab me.

Fullmetal Alchemist TCG: I like the anime (actually, I like the manga, but they're more or less one-and-the-same) but not enough to buy into the card game. Because - as has been the downfall of many a card game before it - it's just another featureless system that never really feels like Fullmetal Alchemist. It could be applied to any other license out there and be just as serviceable. I mean, the game's goal is to be the last man standing at various randomized locations so as to gather points. What's so Fullmetal about that?

The only mechanic that has a direct line to the property is the Equivalent Exchange function, which lets you dump cards in hand to pay for a card cost that you would not normally be able to afford.

I guess you're supposed to love the IP so much, that it doesn't matter what you're doing with it. See also: Case Closed, InuYasha, Marvel/DC Vs. and Lord of the Rings. And if you're interested in a list of games that I feel do a workable job of making you feel like you're inside the particular world of the license: Pokemon, Zatch Bell, Soul Calibur/Street Fighter, 7th Sea, Doomtown and Middle Earth. That's just off the top of my head.

Villainy: Great artwork, as I probably already mentioned. So many small-company games just half-ass their way through the graphic design stage. Hell, lots of big-company games have ugly, unreadable card templates and amateur artwork. So it is always nice to run across a game that is just plain nice to look at. And that, in fact, was what made me want to try out this game.

They sell three different decks, each built around a general supervillainous archetype. This initial run features a mad scientist, a gorilla mastermind, and a supernatural goth girl. The objective is to kill off everyone else, which you do by way of your many minions, your expandable secret base, and various special ability cards. The coolest feature is a giant monster (unique to each villain) that you have to gradually build out of four cards.

The game needs an online FAQ, though, because there are plenty of card interactions that are not easily explained by the included rulesheet. We played a three-man game that dragged on for over two hours... and the box quotes an average play time of 20 minutes.

Pirates: Our games looked amazing - thanks to the sculpted islands and full-on ocean playmat - but Chris and I had some pretty epic arguments about it. Right away, Chris wanted to do away with how the game determines range for each cannon. Which, of course, drove me nuts. He proposed simplifying it so that: if the center of a ship was within range to the center of another ship, then ALL cannons get an attack. Not just the cannons that would normally be considered within range. We played this way, which meant that we were giving the big ships an advantage, since they would always get to fire their full complement of guns regardless of where the target sat. Me, I'd just rather play the damn games as intended.

Which is exactly why Mike hates these sorts of games, because it always comes down a bunch of squabbling about whether Ship A is within range or not. I'll agree entirely; it's the pure asthetics of little pirates ships maneuvering around ecah other that keeps me coming back. It would be great if there was a definite, un-arguable method for calculating the range and moving ships across the field... but that's just not how Pirates is designed. I don't care how good of friends you are, when the crux of the game relies on defining imaginary boundaries, you're going to bruise some egos.

And no, I did not spend the $50 on overpriced Pirates boosters just so I could get the awesome 10-mast convention exclusive ship. WizKids, you really suck. Good thing we'll always have eBay, where some happy gamers are already offloading the "exclusive," which they probably stole off a loading dock three weeks ago.