Enroute

Brief layover in Chicago. The rain here reminds me of home.

I can't wait for next year, though. There are some excellent games in the pipeline.

Day Four Has Arrived

Day Four is a mixed blessing every year. On the one hand, GenCon did not kill you. On the other, you will need to say good-bye to all the neat people you met this week. Or old friends you had the opportunity to meet.

It also means that, at four, they turn the air conditioning off. And then the general public leaves, and then the hard work of palletizing everything begins.

Today is the day of price cuts and haggling guests.

It's people's last chance for that demo they've been waiting all convention for.

This, by the way, was the first convention where I have had to make appointments for demos.

Most of the team - as I said previously - knows most of the games.  Apparently I'm the only Claustrophobia de Profundis person in the booth, though. And I'm the primary go-to when there is a question on another game (Other than Quebec, but that's because the designer is in the booth).  The boss has had me speak with several distributor representatives to give them a game overview or two, and I also had a chance to chat with Dale Yu yesterday, which was neat.  It's always cool to meet people you see online.

Tonight, the Asmodee team will gather for dinner before we head home. And then we split up and I don't see any of them until next year.

Two weeks from now, Stephanie and I will be at PAX.  Stephanie will be working for Asmodee and I'll be working for Mindspan Labs (I'll be demoing ZoxSo all weekend). If it goes well, Asmodee may have a booth at PAX Prime next year. At the very least, I hope they continue to send Stephanie and I to help demo games in the open gaming area.

Need to get going - Day Four awaits, and I still have to put my shoes on.

Games Played/Day Three

This year, I have played very few games. As some of you know, I log all games played over on BoardGameGeek.  In theory, there is a widget in the sidebar of this blog that lists games played.
I only list games played against humans, and I only record full games - if I bow out early or am tagged out to run another demo, or if I teach people to play without actually playing myself, I don't record that play.

By this measurement, I have played fewer games this year than in any previous year.

But this year, I also have not taken a full break at any time. I have taken five minutes here and there to visit nearby "Red-Zone" booths to drop a bit of money and receive goods (Purchases today include the new Mouse Guard box set), but I haven't even taken a meal break.

Stephanie will go to get food for me. "I'm going to be rude," I tell whomever is receiving a demo from me, "and eat in front of you." So far, no-one has had a problem with it.

There are booths I need to visit tomorrow.

Tonight, we had dinner with Jim & Dawn, two very good friends who used to be local to us in Seattle, but are now California natives. We only get to see them regularly at GenCon. We bought them dinner. Caught them off-guard in doing so, too. They have vowed revenge.

Dawn thinks I should take one of the many thousands of game and story ideas I have floating in my head and actually publish it. I ... I have some ideas I'm kicking around. So we'll see. My many blogs keep me pretty busy. But I do bounce ideas off of my wife and other friends nearly continuously, so we'll see.

Today's purchases included the new Mouse Guard box and Cthulhu Brittanica: Shadows Over Scotland. And several others.

And now, I'm off to crash. Before midnight. At GenCon.

Our Team + Games In The Booth + Old Friends

Our team this year is probably the best team we've ever had in the booth. Most of the team knows most of the games, with two exceptions:

Stephanie and I demo Dungeon Twister.  I demo Gosu.

I also think that, game-wise, we have the strongest booth we've ever had.  Sobek is going over extremely well (as it should - it's a very fun game). Double Agent is getting mixed reviews, which is a shame. Trust me on this: Play it at least twice. The more you know the cards, the better this game is.

We have most of the games I'd expected (and a few more). And some pre-production prototypes for Ghost Stories: Black Secret, Claustrophobia: De Profundis, Dixit Odyssey, Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk (English title to follow), and Takenoko.  I'm excited about all of these games.

Ghost Stories: Black Secret lets one player take the role of Wu Feng (the villain). It reminds me of the Sauron expansion from the Lord of the Rings co-operative game that came out ... a decade ago?

Claustrophobia: De Profundis is just good. It's more of the same, and adds a few new twists and wrinkles to the mis.

Naheulbeuk was a hair-pulling frustrating exercise in translation. It was three months of beating my head into a wall. But the finished product looks to be a lot of fun. It's more a party game than a gamer's game, but it looks like a fun party game. It's based on a French audio drama that is somewhere between The Order of the Stick and Knights of the Dinner Table. A completely inept party of adventurers is bumbling through a dungeon trying to recover an ancient artifact in order to fulfill a prophecy.  Players will have to overcome a variety of challenge types - minigames which test your dexterity, memory, endurance, and ability to spell. And it's had almost zero press. No-one knew it was coming except us.

Takenoko is a game where you are tyring to meet specific goals by building, irrigating, and cultivating a garden. And trying to keep the Giant Panda from completely destroying it.

Dixit Odyssey is ... well ... 84 more cards, and better components than before - the rabbits don't fall as easily, and the scoring track has been improved, as has the voting mechanism.

I"ve met a couple of people I have been e-mailing with. I always feel bad when someone says, "We've been e-mailing back and forth about Dungeon Twister," because I e-mail back and forth with a LOT of people about Dungeon Twister. I can remember Mike Dougan (even though I had to e-mail Geoff to remember what his name was), but most of the rest of you are blurs - sorry.

I have also gotten to see some old friends - David Miller from Purple Pawn seems to always stop by when I'm mid demo. He's one of the nicest guys to deal with, and I always feel bad that I don't have more time to talk to him. I did manage to play a couple of games with him last year on Wednesday.

My old friend Mark Kinney from All Games Considered also dropped by. Again: I wish I'd had more time to talk. Partly so he had info for his podcast and partly because I've known Mark since before I was heavily into board games (I used to be more roleplayer than boardgamer).

Todd and Kris are two of our Werewolves of Miller's Hollow regulars. I think we've been playing Werewolves together for ... five years, now. Todd and I also found a bit of time to talk professional wrestling on Wednesday before we made it into the dealer's room for setup.

We're at the half-way mark. Actually a bit past it, as Thursday is long and Sunday is short. This is the point where - every year - I start doubting my sanity in being here. Because my feet are blistered, my back is sore, and I haven't had a good night's sleep since Monday night.

Then I remember that it's GenCon.

... and I need to get going. I have work to do. :)

Contentment

Bits and Pieces from GenCon

Fiasco has won the Diana Jones Award this year. Well-deserved. Many congrats to the winner.

Margaret Weis Productions announced that they have the Marvel RPG license. Marvel, of course, being the home of the X-Men, the Avengers, the Hulk, and a number of other comic books.  It will use the Cortex+ system, which is the system used in Leverage and Smallville.

Today's purchases included Airship Pirates (the Abney Park RPG) and Smallville High School Yearbook.

Next year, the danger value of Cubicle 7 will be upgraded, as we also have Cthulhu Brittanica and several other books from their booth.  Upgraded for Stephanie as well as myself, that is. The booth is just too much of an econohazard.  It's on par with IPR this year.

Hotels

This year, we're staying in the new JW Marriott, which is connected to the convention center by skybridge. It's nice. Very nice, in fact.


I only have two very small issues:

1) We have a gorgeous shower. It's really amazing. But, after a full day of demoing games, I like to soak in a tub. This room has no tub.

2) It's too far away for Exhibitors. It's all the way at the other end of the center from the exhibit hall. Because of how the skybridges connect, I honestly think we're walking close to a mile each way.

If I were here as an attendee, I would stay here again with no hesitation. As an exhbitor, however ...

This is the third hotel Stephanie and I have stayed in for GenCon. Our arrangement with Asmodee is simple: They will pay for a cheap hotel room all the way across town, if we want. Or we can pay for our own hotel room and they will give us the money they would have spent on that cheap hotel room (at the end of the show).

The first year, we stayed in the Crowne Plaza. It was a decent hotel, but it wasn't connected to the convention center (it was just close). I didn't want to do that again, because I hate the outdoors when it is six hundred degrees in the shade and you have to drink the air because the humidity is so high.

Last year, we stayed at the Westin. We had a series of minor issues that added up and frustrated us (our AC didn't work reliably, the non-stick things in the tub were worn to the point of being slippery, and so on). I'd like to note that the staff was phenomenal, and bent over backwards to make things as right as they could - but there is only so much they can do.

Next year, I think I'd like to go back to the Crowne Plaza. It's close to where the Exhibit Hall has moved to, and I can handle a block or so outside if I have to.