Last Wednesday I flew to Indianapolis for my fourth trip to Gencon. Gencon is the Mecca of gamers, a huge convention devoted to role-playing games, card games, board games, miniature games, and all things related to “gamer culture” (like Origins, but bigger). It’s like a geek carnival, with gaming going on all day and all night, a huge dealers room, people in costumes, movies, seminars, an art show, minor celebrities, tournaments, and just tons of stuff going on in general.


Air travel is not my favorite means of transportation. I have no fear of flying, but I find it physically uncomfortable. Fortunately, the flight was direct and uneventful, and gave me time to get caught up on a novel I’ve been reading sporadically for a few months now. Once I arrived, I caught up with Zev, owner of Z-Man Games, and went with him and an assortment of Shadowfist players and other gamers to dinner at the RAM Resturant and Brewery, which was kind of a cross between Iron Hill and Bennigans. There were huge banners for various games hanging all over the resturant, making it a sort of Planet Hollywood for gamers. The service was slow, the food adequate, and I got to talk to a bunch of gamers about Shadowfist and gaming in general. Afterwards, I and the rest of the design team found a quiet spot in one of the hotels and got some work done on Shadowfist. No blood was spilled.


Gencon officially opened on Thursday morning. Since Zev had me scheduled to work the booth in the afternoon, I had the morning to wander around the dealer’s room. I started off just by walking around and taking it all in – There’s so much to see and do that it’s easy to get a bit overwhelmed. It’s also not something you want to just breeze through, as there’s just so much to check out. Here’s an idea of what the dealer’s room looked like:



The Dealer’s Room



The WOTC Area



The Upper Deck Booth


As it was, I spent a good check of time checking out the booth for the Camarilla, White Wolf’s Live Action Roleplaying organization. Now, I had no interest at all in the Camarilla. However, I was very interested in Kellie, who was working the booth. I think this picture explains why.



Seriously, this is even better than the “lingerie-as-outerwear” look I was singing the praises of in this post. I’m just saying.

When I first saw her I thought that maybe White Wolf was promoting some new Western-themed rpg. Really though, they could have been promoting a game called Accountant: The Spreadsheet, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Speaking of which, gaming is no longer the sole domain of unattractive, socially-malajusted, hygenically-challenged males. There were a lot of women gamers there as well, although that was true when I went for the first time in 2001 as well.

Anyway, I spent the rest of the morning wandering around the dealer’s room, and then the afternoon working the Z-man booth, although “working” consisted of demoing one game of Santiago. Really, I’d feel more guilty about this, except that I’ve essentially been working for Z-Man Games for free for the last 4 and a half years. Once the dealer’s room closed, I went back to the hotel room to chill for a bit, and then went to play in the Shadowfist Comrades in Arms tournament. I thought my “Clan” deck would be fairly uncommon. Instead, in one game my two other opponents were both playing Clan decks as well. Anyway, I didn’t win the tournament.


I started the day by playing a game of Princes of Florence in the boardgame room. Then it was off to man Z-Man Games’ Hong Kong Movie Theater for the afternoon. The first film up was Jet Li’s Fong Sai Yuk – which I’ve seen and own – followed by the horror/comedy/martial arts film Mr. Vampire, which was new to me. It was goofy, but fun. I left afterwards to check out the dealer’s room, where I discovered the booth for Morrigan Press, the company which makes the Talislanta RPG. Talislanta is my favorite fantasy rpg, and apparently the company has been on a brisk publishing schedule this year. There were four new books on display. I bought them all at once. I also tried out a new card game called Anachronism in which you pit famous historical warriors against each other. Every year at Gencon I make at least one impulsive purchase and then later say “why did I buy that?” That might be the case with this game. Not that it’s a bad game, but I don’t know that I really needed to buy it. What can I say? I got suckered in by all the freebies.

That evening I played in the Shadowfist dueling championships. I did pretty well, making it into the final four with the best record (4-1, whereas I think everyone else was 3-1-1 or something). However, the first guy I came up against was the only guy who had beat me in the regular rounds. My deck’s biggest strength was surprise, so without that, I knew I didn’t have much chance. I didn’t win, although the guy who did was a guy who I defeated in the earlier rounds.


Saturday was the day of the the Shadowfist Final Brawl World Championship (dueling is one-on-one, whereas Final Brawl is multiplayer). This is pretty much an all-day event, running from 10am and ending in the evening (I believe this one went until 9-ish). I started strong, winning in the first two rounds, but then I faltered in the third and my deck completely stalled in the fourth. I still almost made it into the finals, but just fell a bit short. Partway through the tournament we took a break to celebrate Shadowfist’s 10th Anniversary. Zev brought a cake which had been decorated to look like a Shadowfist card, and he handed out free boxes of cards and thanked us all. It was a fun, convivial atmosphere, with a good group of people.



The Shadowfist Cake



Zev Cuts the Cake

In between rounds, I wandered back over to the Morrigan Press booth, where I had a nice long conversation with a young woman there named Emily who is a big fan of Talislanta and who was dressed as a Sarista Gypsy, which is one of the character archetypes from the game. I also inquired about doing freelance work for the game, and it sounds like there are some good opportunities coming up. There were also a number of genre celebrities there, including Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica (I also caught a glimpse of Mary McDonnel from the same show the day before). Since I know several of my friends are fans of the show, I went up to get a picture with her (my entire conversation with her consisted of “My friends like the show,” “I like the show,” “Are you enjoying the convention,” and “Can I get a picture with you.”)



Seethe with jealousy, bitches.

That evening I played Princes of Florence again (doing even worse the second time) and also played in one of the worst games of Puerto Rico ever. Not only did I play terribly – partially because some of the other players were so bad that their bad moves were throwing off my strategy – but also because the guy sitting next to me was an irritating asshat. [Bad username: ”mamcdowell”] will know what I mean. After the game, I just kind of wandered around for a while until midnight, when I went back to the movie room to watch Shaun of the Dead (we always show one movie for our Grave Robbers From Outer Space Fans – in years past it’s been Army of Darkness). I’d never seen it before, and I liked it.



My dinner on Saturday. This is what they call a cheese steak in Indianapolis. Pathetic.


I had originally planned to play Mare Nostrum in the afternoon, but it occurred to me that it was stupid to pay to play a game I could play at home when I could just try new games in the dealer’s room for free. So I ended up wandering the dealer’s room once more and actually trying out a couple of games, which I’ll discuss in another post. Finally, when my feet couldn’t take it anymore I went over to the Z-Man booth and chilled out there until the end of the con.



The Z-Man Booth

On the way to the airport I shared a shuttle with Julian (one of the Shadowfist design team members) and another guy who turned out to be a professional card stacker. That is, the guy’s job was to build huge houses and sculptures out of playing cards. He showed us some pictures of his work, and it was some pretty amazing stuff. Who knew that you could make a living building card houses – and a pretty good living, no less. Just another interesting character from GenCon.


I'll have more pics to share once I find a good photo hosting service. I put the gallery up on Webshots, but it requires you to login in order to look at it. I'd use photobucket but I don't think I can add descriptions to the pictures.