Candid thoughts on pixels, polyhedrons, and paper.
I’ve learned quite a few things during my first adventure to GenCon, so I came up with what I think to be the 10 most important things for your average con-newbie to know before embarking into the epic sea of awesomeness that is GenCon. I hope it does someone some good, I hope my experiences can help others avoid some of the pitfalls I ran into along the way
The last day of gencon started out hazily, as I only got 4 hours of sleep the night before uploading pics to prep for my blog on the hotels crappy wireless connection. It was less than adequate and sleep deprived me didn’t think of just using my phones 3G connection to get the job done, hindsight is 20/20. We checked out of our not so comfy Comfort Inn around 8 and @momanatrix ate one single bite out of a stale bagel with cream cheese (which was probably expired too) and we decided to just skip breakfast. We got to the con early, so early in fact that I could park in a parking garage on ground level, which was a first.
We planned to make the last day one filled with shopping for souveniers for our gaming comrades who couldn’t make it to the show, and family members who weren’t necessarily gamers but deserved something brought back to them. This was a confusing endeavor as we couldn’t find the perfect gift for a few people – particularly my mom who isn’t a gamer in the least unless you count pac man or tetris. At this point I had a sick kid, and my wife was also feeling sick from the bad food and empty stomach so we were probably only there for 3 hours tops. I did make it a point to capture a lot more photos on the last day, get some videos (which I’ll be uploading soon) of a massively cool dungeon setup as well as just some of the general chaos that is gencon.
I stopped by the Green Ronin booth and talked to one of the Dragon Age writers for a short bit, he was a nice fellow can’t remember his name but he almost had me convinced on buying the Dragon Age RPG DM screen but, I figure I better hold off a bit and wait and see how my group turns out. As much as I love buying new stuff, I hate having it go to waste on a shelf. Also hit up a booth where a guy had everything 50% off, the last day of gencon is the day to find the best deals people! It might be slim pickin’s by the time sunday rolls around but a lot of people are eager to not have to ship/haul back massive loads of product and start bargaining it seems.
Sorry about the delay in posting my recap guys, after spending some quality time on the LEGO pyramid with another little girl who was obviously sick we spent Saturday night and all of Sunday dealing with our extra-cranky sick kiddo.
I slept in on Saturday and then headed to the Claddagh Irish pub to meet up with my fellow Obsidian Portal emissaries for some lunch and good times, not realizing the pub was 21+ my wife had to take our son down the street and eat separately which was a total bummer but hey, just more knowledge to keep in mind for next year.
After arriving, I got to meet Micah and we ended up having a great chat with our waiter who is an ex-gamer due to his DM moving away after college, hopefully after speaking with us maybe he went home and cracked one of those RPG books back open and gave some thought to finding a group again. Turns out I was the only person to show up to the Emissary lunch so I got the honor of holding the Ennie Obsidian Portal won last year and getting my pic taken with Micah. I won’t go too far into details about what we shot the shit about but I will say I probably could have kept talking to those guys for hours, also props to Micah for picking up the tab on our delicious lunch!
After that we hit up the convention again, I managed to get a bunch more good pictures and actually take part in some game demo’s on the show floor. I really must say that Fantasy Flight’s lineup is quite nice, although a lot of the games do tend to seem to bleed together to the point that some stop standing out. I’m looking at you Talisman, Descent, DungeonQuest, Runebound, RuneWars, etc. The quality and production values of their games seems hard to beat though, though I do believe Privateer Press is right on their heels regarding those same qualities.
So my second day at GenCon really wasn’t much of a GenCon day but I’ll tell you all about it anyways. I hit up the children’s museum with my son and wife, spent quite some time there dragging him to and fro. He had a good time for the most part, the line to get in was super long and I’m super glad I had a coupon to get him in for free.
Anyways after that we hit the hotel again and recouped a bit and then headed back to GenCon. After spending a short bit in the main hall, I didn’t have enough time to spend to make my epic ‘which game to buy’ decision before they closed the hall down, also bumped into an old buddy from high school.
I did get to meet @JasonMarker in the flesh afterwards though and that was one of the high points of my day – super cool guy, great conversation was had. Afterwards I wanted to go to the Ennies, so i made my way towards the grand ballroom and then after getting to the room where they were to be held I immediately had a mental flash forward in my mind as I looked inside – a quiet room, darkened and classy where an announcer would call out the categories and present medals to the winners and then speeches would be given. Then that same image flashed again where my son was roaring and whining up a storm and disrupting the whole ceremony, there was a 99% likelihood this would happen so I turned right around and headed to grab some food. So I decided to just skip the Ennies and just read about them on twitter, kind of a bummer I know but Congrats to ObsidianPortal and all the other winners, it feels awesome just to be privileged enough to wear the Obsidian Portal shirt around the con.
