Palabra

So I finish dinner, then I wander about the hotel lobby here at Worldcon, and see a sign saying “Gaming Registration This Way.” So of course I follow it. At the end of a series of posters I find a room where there’s some kids playing something loud, a few scattered tables with Carcasonne and german board games, and one very eager guy waving me over.

What he thrusts into my hands when I get there is a card game called Palabra.

It’s like the bastard child of Scrabble, poker, and rummy, as the marketing blurb says. You draw cards from a pile. Each card has on it a color or two, a letter, and possibly some stars. There were shapes as well, which are “suits.” Your hand is seven cards, and from it you try to form straights (sets of successive letters), words, or flushes (all of a suit). Your score based on the value of the letter on the card times whatever stars you manage to put down in the hand you play, times a multiplier for having them all of the same color (which also confers other benefits). There are wild cards, and you can also build on other people’s words or steal points by shaving their hand (putting down one of your cards on top of an already played hand and replacing one of the letters).

I was roped into a game mid-stream, but it proved to be pretty entertaining. So I bought a copy. Apparently it’s been around for a long time, but this was the first time I’d ever seen it.

If there’s a downside, it’s that you do have to keep careful score on a sheet of paper, since points determine the eventual winner. And there are a lot of rules, but not really any more than in poker or other card games.

After that, I went and hung out in a bar with Alice from Wonderland, and Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi, whom I had never met before, and a bunch of other people most of whose names escape me (but as you might expect with that crowd, there were people from the EFF and from Wired, of course), and we endured people poking pool cues into our heads and made much fun of the Hooters beauty pageant that was playing on the TVs.

I go to so many gaming conventions that it is odd-feeling to walk through this large one populated by people who are clearly “of the same tribe” so to speak, and not recognize anyone, nor get stopped in the hallway by people who know me. (I have trouble walking ten feet at GDC). Kinda refreshing and different. There are more long beards in SF fandom than in game fandom, that much is clear.