GenCon reminds me that I’m old :D

While I haven’t been to GenCon since 2014, I’m still on the mailing lists and recently got an email about how hotels in the city are full up but there was still vacancies in the suburbs. Now, I know this is because GenCon’s housing department pretty much buys out the city and there’s some kind of lottery to get rooms but that’s still a far cry from my GenCon 2000 experience, where I drove up to Milwaukee for the day and had no problems getting in or getting into events.

Over the sixteen or so GenCons that I attended, things sure changed a lot. Some of that may have been my own perceptions but the convention definitely is different than it was almost twenty years ago. It’s much bigger, more family-oriented and more commercial.

This may be rose-tinted glasses speaking but I am convinced that, back in those olden days, when we had to chase triceratops out of the exhibit hall, events tended to be volunteer/amateur/works-of-love based. I ended up in my longest-running campaign because a group that turned out to be close to me ran an event that was a one-shot set in their campaign.

Frankly, in those ancient times, GenCon was really more of a local event. And the crust of the Earth was still cooling.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying things were better back then. The pterodactyl drumsticks were bigger, sure, but high speed internet is the bomb. I’m not the “you kids get off my lawn” guy. I’m more the “wait, I have a lawn?” guy.

Truth to tell, GenCon has to change and evolve. The world has changed. Gaming, the game market and the gaming community has changed. If it didn’t change, it’d be dinosaur bones in Milwaukee. I hope to take my son someday to the modern GenCon but I don’t know if I’d take him to the old one. And if you want that local feel, there are a lot more local cons these days.

But man have things changed. You’re not going to get a chance to game with the Piltdown Man in today’s GenCon.

A fundraiser lets me go to a tiny little convention

One of the really nice things about the Tucson gaming scene is Rincon, the little gaming convention in the middle of the desert. While it's hard for me to gaming conventions back in the Midwest, Rincon not only gives me a local convention but a couple of fundraisers every year, effectively giving me a couple more mini-conventions.

I have been to a lot of conventions over the years, from giant ones like Gencon to tiny local cons. Rincon's one day fundraisers, taking up about three meeting rooms at the hotel, isn't even the smallest one I've been to.

I feel like every time I go to a Rincon event, fundraiser or the actual full con, I keep on having a better and better time. If it isn't well organized, they hide it well. Everyone is friendly and even the fundraisers have good game libraries. 

I didn't have any problems finding games to spend the entire afternoon playing. When one group that I was playing with had to leave, I was able to find another to sit down with. Highlights included finally getting to play both Forbidden Desert and TAJ. The low light was Konexi.

While I honestly think that Forbidden Island has a definite place in my collection as a really easy cooperative to teach with plenty of eye candy, Forbidden Desert definitely takes the mechanics up a notch as well as the narrative. It definitely is not a simplified version of Pandemic, which I think is a reasonable description of Forbidden Island. Incidentally, we all died of thirst pretty quickly, which brought back memories of Outdoor Survival.

TAJ is one of the more complex and gamer-oriented games in the first series of Pack O Games. I haven't played GEM so I don't know if it is the most complex. It is a game of hitting goals and price manipulation as you try to get your favored rugs to be worth the most.

While I did enjoy it and I am glad to have gotten in the three player game, since I think two player game would not have done it justice, I was left wondering if actually had too many moving parts, mechanically speaking, for its short playing time. On the other hand, I would cheerfully play it again a few more times before deciding that.

Konexi is a dexterity game and a word game. It definitely has a nice toy factor with the large and stackable plastic letters that you to use. However, I felt like you were really limited in your choices. I also thought that including letters like Q and X made it harder to make words.

Rincon in its various forms continues to not disappoint.