2 Days as a Con Dork (or "My first time at Gen Con")

[Captain Nemo]

VERY LONG POST - consider yourself warned. I wrote this up about my experience at GenCon about 3 months ago.

About 25 years ago, a classmate told me about a gaming convention held at Lake Geneva called GenCon. At the time, it apparently consisted primarily of a large roomful of tables at which small groups played Dungeons and Dragons. I had wanted to go, but for a variety of reasons, I have never gone. Until this year. I took a Friday off from work and took a day to experience GenCon for the first time. My goal was to get as much fun as possible into my day.

Over time, GenCon has expanded greatly both in size and scope. It began, as I mentioned, at Lake Geneva. When it got too popular, it moved to Milwaukee, and in the past few years has been situated in Indianapolis after having grown too big for Milwaukee. While there is no comparison with Essen, the main German convention, there were about 10,000 attendees over the four days (as one judge mentioned, "Germany don't have 500 channels with nothing worth watching, so games are much bigger there") and a sister convention in southern California (appropriately called GenCon SoCal, I believe) - compared to Essen, which apparently manages 100,000 attendees annually! Also, the variety of games at GenCon was much broader than I realized. Instead of a few role-playing games, there were also collectible card games, non-collectible card games, puzzles, board games, autograph sessions with actors in science fiction, computer games, and even a physical model of a dungeon - complete with puzzles to solve and monsters to (sort of) fight. I managed to try a broad variety of things - liking some better than others, but glad that I'd tried as much as I did.

If I had it do over again, I would definitely pre-register for the convention and events. For one thing, it's cheaper. For another, some events sell out ahead of time. Finally, now that I have a better idea what's available, it would make it easier to plan my time out ahead of time. As it is, I wasn't able to plan that far ahead this year, but I managed to do pretty well. I arrived early Friday morning and registered, and asked if there had been any cancellations in "True Dungeon", an event I'd read about on the website, wanted to try, and then found out late the night before was sold out. Luckily, there had been a cancellation for one of the first runs that morning, so I was able to check out the "Battle beneath Castle Greyhawk". There was another option, the "Adventure above Castle Greyhawk" (I think that was the name) as well as a "City of Heroes" version called "Avengers Assemble" all run by the same company.

In "True Dungeon" adventures, a party of 7 players is assigned to 7 characters - a fighter, a paladin, a ranger, a cleric, a bard, a wizard, and a rogue. Each character has unique strengths and limitations. Rogues have the ability to disarm traps, performed by the player moving a steel rod through a narrow track set in the wall (which is triggered electrically if the Rogue is clumsy - like ours). Wizards can cast offensive and defensive spells - the success of which is determined by the player's ability to memorize a "map" of the various "planes of power". Clerics recite healing prayers; here, the player has a necklace of wooden charms, and has to know the name of each. Bards sing to encourage their party (which gives them bonuses) and have to know the names of various runes. Note that the four players playing these roles are given about 15 minutes to "study" the information they need to memorize before the game commences.

Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers are more combat-oriented, and have 15 minutes to practice combat before the game commences. Combat is resolved using a "hand-shuffleboard" diagram of the monster in question that looks similar to the pictures of human targets at a firing range. Each monster is divided into zones, and each zone is assigned a number between 1 and 20. Instead of rolling a 20-sided die to determine if a hit is made, a shuffleboard puck is slid into the target zone and compared with a "to-hit" statistic. Fighters have the additional ability to do extra damage a few times during the game. Paladins have the additional ability to heal party members. Rangers use two weapons (simultaneously sliding two pucks onto the target). I decided to be a ranger. I am not good at memorization, so being a fighter-type seemed to be a good idea, and I'm fairly ambidextrous, so the ranger seemed to be a good fit.

We randomly drew weapons (I got 2, of course) and armor from a box of face-down wooden tokens and went in. The casters started studying, the rogue started practicing on the trap, and I did a few rounds of shuffleboard against a spider. There was also the opportunity to buy additional wooden tokens (which might have a healing potion, a spell, a number of "gold piece" units, or any of several other possibilities) and to trade "gold pieces" for other items in a variety of shops. One member of our party bought a flask for water and a set of hammer and spikes for 5 gold pieces each, if my memory serves me, trading in a wooden token with "10 gold pieces" inked on one side for 2 tokens (reading, obviously, "Water Flask" and "Hammer and Spikes" respectively). Note that tokens could be purchased at $10 for a bag of 10 random tokens or $60 for 7 such sets. One could also buy sheets and notebooks to organize these. This is a nice business these folks are running. I got a bag of 10 as a souvenir after the game, myself, which included a rare "Wand of Lightning Bolt" (useful if I ever play again as a wizard, or for trading with someone else who wants to play as a wizard). I also got a T-shirt that includes the inside joke, "I stole the cheese". At least, I assume it's an inside joke. I feel like I'm the butt of it, since everyone who sees the shirt asks me what it means and I don't know the answer.

(Possible Spoilers below. This information, and more, is posted at the True Dungeon website, so I assume they're doing different puzzles at GenCon SoCal, but please be advised that if you are going to GenCon SoCal, and planning to participate in the True Dungeon adventures, this may be a spoiler. You can also find out if I missed any rooms; True Dungeon was recently written up in an article of GAMES magazine, also).

Finally our party was called to begin. Note: there was mildly loud atmospheric music (so no one would hear the shouts of another party, accidentally spoiling puzzles) and most of the rooms were dimly lit if at all. Luckily, I have good night vision and eyesight. We were given a single dim red light-stick and then entered a cardboard-lined corridor, painted to look like catacombs. We were told that we were on a narrow ledge, and to stay on the dark part of the carpeting. Along the side of the mountain were several tombs with runes above them, and a bit of doggerel at the end of the corridor under a carving of a dog said we should try to find what we needed in the graves of those who were "fortunate". Our bard translated the runes, and several of us reached into the graves she recommended. The rogue tried to disarm a trap on one of the others and got his hand chopped off (6 points of damage). Me, I got a potion of healing (1 point); in one of the more positive-sounding graves, a bone-shaped piece of wood was found. Putting that in the dog's mouth prevented us from being doused with poison gas (4 points of damage) and we were allowed to move on to the next room.

In this room, there were a door, a lock, and a key. After we were all comfortably inside, a wall began moving toward us. We never did figure out how we were supposed to avoid being crushed (6 points of damage) but the key didn't fit into the lock, so as the wall crushed us, the door was forced open by our bodies (or so the DM told us) and we moved on to the next room.

In this room was an altar with a bearskin on top of it. Removing the bearskin and reading the poem triggered a trap - we were attacked by a skeleton. We didn't kill it the first round (I missed twice) so it took a swing at me (missing). The second round it was finished off quickly.

The next room actually had two parts. In one part there was a statue of an Efreet (a type of demon) standing on a compass in one corner and a small treasure chest in the other corner. We entered in a third corner. Someone got too close to the treasure chest, and suddenly (the DM told us) the Efreet was no longer a statue, it was real and we had to fight it. We managed to kill it the first round of combat; I got a 20 (a head-shot, a critical hit worth double damage) and a 19 (straight to the heart), helping the cause. The other part of the room we had actually passed, not noticing on the way in, but it was a treasure room - there were a few wooden tokens scattered in with a large pile of plastic gold pieces on the floor. I didn't find any, but one of our party members found a nice haul of about 50 gold. Our rogue also tried to disarm the traps on two of the chests, damaging us twice in the process. I think that was the last trap he tried to disarm. Good thing, too.

I believe the next room was the one with the magnetic globes. Somehow we were supposed to guess which of the four globes we were to put into a goblet in the center of the table. Somehow in the confusion it took us five guesses to get it right, and we took quite a bit of damage in the process. The DM for that room healed us since "I hate when people die in my room, and I hate having to reset those globes, so if you guys reset the globes for me, I'll ignore all the damage you were supposed to take". In the process, however, I did use my healing potion on myself, so lost that token.

The next room resembled a giant chessboard. Again, there was some way to determine how one should move to avoid taking damage (lightning trap - 2 points) but we never figured it out. However, at the opposite end of the room there was an orb of protection, so once one of our party members made it across, it was an easy matter to get the rest of us across. I later came to suspect (wrongly, it turned out) that the symbols above the entryways were intended as clues to our movement. "*+LVVL+*" were the symbols, if I recall correctly, but they were not, apparently, relevant.

The next room had a message over the entryway, "There are 1002 ways to exit this room." When we entered, we were immediately faced with the prospect of combat with a gorgon (Medusa). Our party had a few spells left, but it was mostly left to the fighters to try to kill the creature before one of us was turned to stone. I needed a 14 to hit. One of my pucks landed safely in the "15" zone, and the other landed just outside of the "14" zone. The gorgon was still alive until our final combat player, the rogue, missed any strike zones himself but knocked my second puck into the "14" zone (or, as the DM explained, "The rogue missed wildly, bumped into the ranger's hand on the backswing, and knocked your weapon into her. She's dead.") There were 5 possible exits from the room, each with a message over the top, along the lines of "one courts death who exits here," "one should not enter here", etc. About 30 seconds after 5 of our party blindly plunged through one of the wrong exits (including myself) it occurred to me that we probably should have gone through the exit with the message, "One (1) ought (aught, or 0) not (naught, or 0) to (two, 2) exit here." Apparently our other two party members guessed correctly, and proceeded to the final room. We got to watch as they failed to solve the final puzzle, our party was declared officially dead, and we left with nothing but our memories (and pricey souvenirs).

Well, it would be hard for anything to top this, either in excitement or in price. The food court, admittedly, did prove a good rival in the latter department, as I stopped for lunch and to plan the rest of my first day. I decided my next couple activities would be "Gamer Olympics", "Guild Wars free play", and "Sherlock Holmes Role-Playing Game".

"Gamer Olympics" is a series of activities that is theoretically designed to determine what your "actual" stats (Strength, Dexterity, Agility, etc.) are. In practice, most of these events were either poorly designed or inappropriate for the skill involved. For example, while "jumping from stone to stone" may be an important skill to have, I have my doubts as to how much it involves Willpower. For the most part, I thought it was a waste of time and money (although I overheard the guy behind me in line asking, "Remember me, I was here yesterday – I came back to try to improve my scores?" so I know that it appealed to some) and seemed to serve primarily as an advertisement for the organization sponsoring it (I don't remember the name, but it reminded me of the Society for Creative Anachronism). However, the final station, "Gladiatorial Combat", was a lot of fun. Padded weapons, padded shield, experienced opponent. The goal was to get as many "touches" in 1 minute as possible. Given my size and speed, I figured close-quarter's combat was probably the best way to go, so I chose the short battle-axe (and my opponent chose a correspondingly short weapon) and large shield. My plan was to charge, raise his shield arm with my shield, and swing at his legs. It worked. Once. The rest of the 60 seconds is a bit of a blur but I managed 12 hits (he also got in several hits, each worth a 5-second penalty). I rather suspect he was going easy on me, though. After the match, I cracked, "not bad if I were a man twice my age, huh?" After a bit of chat, it turns out that he's also my age, also has a desk job, and just isn't nearly as lazy about working out as I am.

After this there was plenty of time to explore Guild Wars, the only Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) I know of that doesn't come with a hefty monthly fee. Does it sound like a waste of time to play a computer game at a gaming convention when there's so much available? Maybe, but I was able to determine after about an hour's play that it was one I'd want to buy when the price goes down a bit more, if I have more gaming time in the future, so I don't think it was a waste of time for me. And I didn't have anything else to do at the moment. Anyway, you pick a race, a character class, a secondary class, and then kill monsters, explore the countryside and dungeons, and complete quests. I know, it probably sounds to you like a lot of other computer games. To me, it sounds like a lot of other FUN computer games, with some additional points in its favor.

Next was the Sherlock Holmes "matrix" game. For me, this was a dud. In many role-playing games, the gamemaster has a plot and the players try to get from one end to the other. In this sort of "matrix" game (I don't know why it's called that) the players shout out ideas to drive the plot along and the game master decides if he likes them or not. I think it didn't help that the character and subplot I created weren't that interesting (I decided I was having an affair with the cook, selling rats to poor people for meat, and selling human corpses to rich people as a delicacy, but I wasn't really involved with the murder per se). It ended after about 1.5 hours of a scheduled 4, but it certainly felt like 4 hours had gone by. So I had plenty of time to plan the end of the day.

At this point I ate supper, planning to go into the dealer's room afterwards. So it was a nasty shock when I tried to go into the dealer's room just after 6pm to find out that it had just closed. I planned out the rest of my day. I decided to go to a panel talk on "Serenity", a movie coming out this fall featuring the cast of the short-lived Joss Whedon series "Firefly", at 8pm, and leave early to get to "Settlers of Catan" at 9pm - a relatively recent board game I had heard great things about but never played, and then at 11pm a card game called "Gloom" which I had never even heard of, but was available at that time.

The Serenity panel was a bust. Of the three guests, one was unable to attend because of the movie's shooting schedule, one had a family emergency, and the other one (who had showed up for the autograph session) decided he didn't want to be the only panelist so he hid in his hotel room. After about a half hour, GenCon staff let us know that the panel was cancelled, so I moved on to the room where Settlers of Catan was going to be played.

Only two people showed up for the "beginner's level" of Catan, but there was a decent-sized group for the advanced level, so they let me join them. They were a really nice group, tolerant of newbie mistakes, so I had a lot of fun. Three of them get together to play each Friday night in Ft. Wayne. Settlers of Catan is a lot like a lot of computer real-time strategy games - you gather resources, you expand an empire, eventually someone gets enough victory points to win. There's no combat. Resources include wood, brick, wool, wheat, and metal ore, and you build villages, expand them to cities, and connect roads. There are a few expansions and a few variations. In a Christian bookstore, I remember seeing Settlers of Canaan, for example.

At this point I should probably mention that we were actually playing a variation (or parody) called Vice Lords of Catizzle. The gameplay was identical, but villages were "hoods", cities were "Inner cities", roads were "networks", and the resources were replaced with drugs, money (gambling?), prostitution, guns, and thugs. I'm sure that many a wife, upon hearing her husband utter the phrase "I'd have done better if I had enough money to get a prostitute with the drugs" (a phrase I have to admit I never thought I would utter under any circumstances) would have reacted with more than a raised eyebrow. However, as you may know, my wife teaches in a prison. Her reaction was "I bet my students would like that game."

The game dragged a bit, and the group was very understanding, so I left to play Gloom (which is in the GAMES 100 this year) at 11. This is an unusual card game. You begin with 5 family members and the object is to inflict misfortunes onto them, make them depressed, and then kill them off. Only the top visible points on a card matter. The cards are transparent in some places and opaque in others, so putting additional cards on top of the same family member may not necessarily cancel out the others beneath them. The person who had the worst day is supposed to start, and when I mentioned that I had missed out on seeing the dealer's room, I won that lottery. I got rather luck in my draws, won the game, and got a free t-shirt ("I won a game sponsored by Rogue Judges and all I got was this gratuitous advertisement" or something like that), so it was a good day. On the way out, I saw a small group getting together to play "Are you a Werewolf" in the hallway - which, as you may know, is the basis for the "Exam Committee" game on the Actuarial Outpost.

This might be a good point to mention the puzzle competition as well. There were about 30 puzzles posted at various spots in the convention center. Supposedly, the solutions to these were supposed to lead one to think of 6 components of a doomsday device. I didn't spend much time on these, but I solved 1 and think I know the answer on a couple others. The one I actually solved had 11 pictures of food, each with a digraph (2-letter combination) in the corner of the picture. At the right were 11 poems/riddles designed to evoke a person whose last name was also a food item. Condoleeza Rice, Warren Berger (Burger), and Fiona Apple were three of the solutions. The 11 digraphs, in order of the riddles, spelled out "What you call to stop a game", presumably "TIME". This (and the other words in that group) is intended, I assume, to evoke the image of a large digital readout that shows the hero exactly how much time is remaining to stop the doomsday device in question. Another was a set of groups of geometric shapes in various colors and configurations, and 4 "rules". You had to figure out the rules by using a set of examples, and then apply them to the 3-by-5 grid. Those that satisfied a rule represented a single pixel in an LED-style display. I managed to figure out the 1st, 3rd, and 4th rule, and got F_AY. I assume that was "FRAY", evoking (again, along with the solutions to the other puzzles) the image a rope or fuse burning down so the hero knows exactly where to go to stop the doomsday device from completing its task. There were trivia quizzes, logic puzzles, and all in all a good variety of puzzles. First 50 successful puzzles win VIP passes to the next GenCon. I imagine that at least 50 dedicated solvers managed to finish it Thursday before I even arrived, so I was only looking at them to have fun, and when I had something else to do or stopped having fun I moved on.

I got home sometime between 1 and 2. The next morning I slept in. When I woke up, I began telling my wife about the day and she suggested I should go back. Now, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that while she was happy that I was having a good time, she also had an ulterior motive: to get me out of the way so she could go shopping. Somewhere else, in the front of my mind, I really, really, didn't care. I had commented that I wished I had brought a bottle of water and a backpack. I had to run a quick errand before setting off, but by the time I got home she had prepared a backpack with 2 bottles of water and enough food to feed an army. I knew that I would have to eat some of it just to be able to carry the backpack the whole day. And I was off.

My first stop was the dealer's room. Game companies of all varieties were showing off their wares, of course. There were also artists selling their work, t-shirts, medieval costumes and weapons, and a variety of other accessories. I did buy a game and a dice bag while I was here, but in retrospect I wish I'd also tried a few of the other games that were out as well.

I looked for the costume parade that was scheduled, but never did find it. Apparently it was in an adjacent hotel to the convention center. So it goes. I did go back to the computer area and tried "Dungeon Siege 2" during its scheduled "free play". I was not as impressed with it as I was with Guild Wars. Of course, I wasn't too impressed when I tried the demo for the original Dungeon Siege, either, so this wasn't too surprising. This was a good time to plan the rest of my day.

I managed to squeeze 4 more games into my schedule. "Live-action Role-playing Chess" at 4pm, a Swiss train game (whose name escapes me at the moment) at 7pm, another attempt at Settlers of Catan at 9pm, and "Guillotine", another card game, at 11pm.

Live-action Role-playing Chess was a disappointment. In theory, the game is interesting. Each person is assigned a chess piece. But chess pieces have special abilities. For example, Rooks are vicious fighters, Bishops can cast curses and healing spells, knights can hide, and so on. The moves of each piece are similar to, although slightly different from, standard chess. The "turn" system is rather clever - each player gets to move or perform an action each turn, but these are done in random order. Each player has a "chip" that is placed into a bag, and they are drawn out one at a time. So the white queen bishop might move early in one turn and late the next, and the black team might get 4 or 5 turns in a row. We were also supposed to choose clever names for our characters and act out the casting of spells. I clearly remember thinking it unusual for a woman (even one named Nicole) to choose Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevski for a character name. Maybe that's sexist. If you think it might be sexist but you don't know who Lobachevski is, please do feel free to keep your opinion to yourself. Combat was typically resolved via "Rock-Paper-Scissors" and spellcasting resistance via "1-finger/2-finger". If you took damage, you dropped red poker chips, representing hit points, onto the gameboard from your "health bag". When you ran out of chips, you were dead.

It all sounds interesting, and it might have been a lot of fun. In practice, however, the black archmage teleported herself to the white ranks and promptly exploded, killing most of our team including myself, so I only got one turn (during which I tried to cast a spell which fizzled) and spent the next hour sitting or lying down in the space in which I had been killed. It might work better as a table-top game. However, I couldn't help but think that the 1980s era game "Archon", a similarly-themed computer game, managed to make the same concept work a lot better.

Dinner, and I then went to play Swiss Rail at 7pm (or whatever it was called). There is actually a "train sport" league, and participating in these games earns a player "Puffing Billy" points. There are apparently 3 different common styles of train games. The "Swiss Rail" type I played is one in which you build various routes and collect money at the end of each turn for every contract you can fulfill better than your opponents. You don't actually have a train token on the board; you just color in various regions within Switzerland in crayon to claim tracks there. Regions usually have the capacity to allow multiple players to build track through them. If you try to build too much track at once, there's a hefty penalty. First player to a predetermined amount of money wins. I came in third out of five players, and with a little bit of luck would have won, so I didn't feel like I played badly. Another style which I enjoy is the "Empire Builder" series. I own Eurorails, which I mistakenly thought was the original (the original is Empire Builder, and is set in North America). Apparently the franchise has expanded to India Rails, Nippon Rails (Japan) and Lunar Rails, and probably others as well. In this one you connect points within the region (again, using crayon) and have a train token that moves across the board to deliver loads of cargo picked up elsewhere. The third version, about which I know nothing, is referred to as the "18xx" series, presumably because each game is titled with a different year in the 1800s.

The second time I played Settlers of Catan I had more fun. For one thing, it actually WAS the original Catan, so there weren't so many crude jokes about drugs and prostitution. We played to 10 victory points. I made it to 7 and definitely understood what I was doing a lot better. I might have to add it to my birthday list. I think my family would enjoy playing it also. If you like board games and you like computerized real-time strategy games, you might well enjoy Catan.

Finally, the second day was almost over. Guillotine reminded me of Family Business but is made by a different company. There are 3 rounds, and in each round, 12 "noble" cards are lined up in front of a Guillotine. Each player has a supply of "action" cards. In turn, each player plays an action card (such as "move any noble forward to spots in line) and then "collects" the head of the noble at the front of the line. Different nobles are worth different points, varying from -3 ("Hero of the People") to +5 ("The Queen"). After three rounds, the player with the most points wins. We played several hands, and then the game sponsor (Rogue Judges, again) asked, "One more for a tie-breaker to see who wins the t-shirt?" I was ahead after the 2nd round, but there were 3 nobles for negative points coming my way - two "Innocent Maidens" (-1) and the Hero of the People (-3) so I played the action card that said "the round ends after you collect this noble" and ended the game (running out the clock, in football parlance). So I have another "Rogue Judges" t-shirt. I got home about 2:30am, already thinking about things I liked and things I would do differently next year.

Things I did wrong: I didn't preregister. As a result, I didn't (couldn't) really plan my time ahead. I didn't play any of the classic paper-and-pencil Role-Playing games that I would have liked to try again. Currently, of course, it's the "D20" system. I remember back before we even had THAC0s, so that tells you how old (and to a certain extent, out of touch) I am. I also probably tried a few too many of the more esoteric games and events, when I probably should have spent more time trying games I would be able to possibly play with others outside of the convention. While I was pleased with the variety of games I did try, I should probably have shifted my emphasis to genres of games I already know that I enjoy, rather than the scattershot approach of trying everything that looked "different". I managed my time poorly (I would have missed out on the dealer's room completely had I not gone the second day). I probably should have spent time trying more of the games in the dealer's room - they had plenty of staff willing to play or demo - rather than walking around aimlessly.

Things I did right: I got in a lot of variety. I played several new games, including a couple (Catan, Guild Wars) I would consider buying at some point in the near future. I tried a lot of things that, while I wouldn't try again, at least had the experience of trying them. And I would definitely spend the time and money on the True Dungeon experience again - quite possibly both adventures. Or maybe even all three, including the super-hero themed adventure. While I didn't particular enjoy the Sherlock Holmes game, I am glad I tried the open-ended matrix game once just to have done it. I won't do it again. Originally, I'd wanted to play "Law and Order", a similarly-styled game (my wife is a fan of Law and Order: SVU) but it had been cancelled. Now I know not to try it next time. And I'll say it again, the time I spent playing computer games was not time I consider wasted - I got to try them for free, and I didn't really have anything else to do at that time anyway. If I were to try the computer game free-play again, it would need to be something I was already curious about, but in this case they both were.

(Edited to change "Puffer Billy" to "Puffing Billy" as per later post).

[squareone]

How long ago did you write this? Serenity/Firefly has been out for a few months, and Settlers of Catan has existed in some form for at least two years, possibly longer.

[Captain Nemo]

The convention was in August. Catan actually has been out for 10 years, apparently - it just made the GAMES 100 Hall of Fame.

I actually just got around to seeing Serenity last night. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[4sigma]

Originally Posted by Captain Nemo

I clearly remember thinking it unusual for a woman (even one named Nicole) to choose Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevski for a character name. Maybe that's sexist. If you think it might be sexist but you don't know who Lobachevski is, please do feel free to keep your opinion to yourself.

Sexist? That's nothing compared to suggesting Ingrid Bergman play the role of hypoteneuse in "The Eternal Triangle."

[E. Blackadder]

I'm fairly sure Catan was game of the year when it came out. Maybe it was a slow year.

If anyone else is going to Philcon, drop me a PM.

[Sandman]

Dude ... how can you go to GenCon and not play in the Star Fleet Battles tournament?

Just kidding. I'm probably the only one around here who was once an SFB geek. Of course, I've grown beyond that now. Hmmm ... where did I leave that energy allocation sheet? I gotta check if I've got enough juice in the batteries for a HET ...

[Captain Nemo]

Originally Posted by Sandman

Dude ... how can you go to GenCon and not play in the Star Fleet Battles tournament?

Actually, now that I remember, I did spend about an hour between games watching two guys duel it out on a hex grid. I haven't played SFB in longer than I've played D&D (well, I mean, other than last Saturday, "Free D&D day"; before that it was grad school, almost 15 years).

[TakeNine]

How can you just now have gotten to Gen Con?

Settlers of Catan was German Game of the Year in 1995. It was released in America the next year.

The correct name for the train gaming group is "Puffing Billy."

[Captain Nemo]

Collge, Graduate School, Exams, getting married,... you'd be surprised how trying to have a life can really eat into your gaming time.

[E. Blackadder]

Originally Posted by Sandman

Dude ... how can you go to GenCon and not play in the Star Fleet Battles tournament?

Just kidding. I'm probably the only one around here who was once an SFB geek. Of course, I've grown beyond that now. Hmmm ... where did I leave that energy allocation sheet? I gotta check if I've got enough juice in the batteries for a HET ...

the cool space battle game this year is based on David Weber's Honor Harrigton series. It's by Ad Astra games.