A BGG.con highlight: The Spiel's Spiel-A-Thon

Hosted by The Spiel, the Spiel-A-Thon event raises funds for The Spiel Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to donating quality board and card games to children’s hospitals and senior citizen’s centers. 

This was my first time participating; Jeff had convinced me to sign up with him. I hadn't entered before because I was too intimidated -- I didn't know nearly as much about boardgaming as others, after all.

What I found, however: even people like me could enter and still have fun. I get the impression that each year, the game is a bit different. This year, each pair of contestants were put in a row of four pairs. A set of questions was read aloud as well as displayed on a screen at the front. Many of the questions focused on gaming, of course, but there were also other generic trivia questions.

Your challenge was to pick the question whose answer (always a number which was 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4) moved your team's marker ahead the distance you wanted to move. Sometimes it was advantageous to move fewer than 4 spaces because of the skipping ahead rule: if your marker landed on another team's marker, then you had the option to stay where you were or skip ahead.

Jeff and I ended up winning the first round in our row and moving to the semi-finals because we had been in last-place just before the last question, but skipped ahead of everyone else because of our final answer. We got eliminated in the semi-finals but still had a ton of fun.

Plus we got some cool custom Spiel-A-Thon dice! And an adorable Duck Duck Go rubber duck, thanks to the generosity of Amy Pile of APE Games.

Anyway, I definitely want to sign up for the Spiel-A-Thon next year. Stephen Conway and David Coleson (hosts of the excellent podcast, The Spiel) plus Mark Wilder were great game show hosts. :-) Jeff and I enjoyed it so much that even after we were eliminated in the semi-finals, we stuck around to watch the finalists play.

If you've never participated in the Spiel-A-Thon at BGG.con, do consider it at next year's convention!

My photos from the Spiel-A-Thon:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/debbieohi/sets/72157625429134270/