The Journal Of E. A. Kolb

I just returned from GenCon in Indianapolis this past weekend. If you're uninitiated, GenCon is the premiere convention for tabletop gaming (pencil & paper role playing, board games, tradable card games, live-action role playing, miniatures) in the United States. (Take a moment to reflect upon and appreciate how many acronyms I didn't bomb you with in the previous sentence.)

The last time I went was in 2005 and then only for two days. This year, I bought my 4-day badge in advance and bought tickets to events I wanted to be at. I went with Nate (

statichd3) and we met up with other members from our WoW guild: Bloc. Most of these folks are more direct friends and acquaintences (i.e. uofirob and deusinnomen), but the greater circle was about 8 people.

Most of the time there, I was hanging out with Nate and Sean. We had a hell of a time. Here's a rundown of what all we did:

• Played in a late-night preliminary round of a Munchkin tournament. None of us won.
• Participated in Mayfair Games' event. Their flagship game, Settlers of Catan, features five resources: ore, grain, sheep, brick, and lumber. By demoing their products, you would acquire badge ribbons. Get all five and you become a Knight of Catan. This enters you in a drawing for their new $500 wooden Settlers of Catan set (among other prizes) and gets you 50% off one of their products. Mayfair Games makes a lot of great games, so we had a tremenduous amount of fun doing this. I picked up Pillars of the Earth (apparently inspired by a Ken Follett novel).
• Purchased the US edition of Ticket To Ride. Demoed the Nordic Countries edition. Like it, but not nearly well enough to pay full price for it too. (All the Ticket To Ride variants except Switzerland are full kits.)
• Played in a Call of Cthulhu draft tournament. Finally learned the game literally minutes beforehand. (No offence to Nate, but he wasn't the best teacher on that.) Was surprised at how the people in that tournament were generally likeable people. Usually, the TCG crowd is filled with callous jerks (of all ages) with attitude. Played three rounds (Swiss), lost three. Still played pretty well for only having just mastered not completely butchering the rules.
• Played in the World of Warcraft TCG Bounty Tournament. Played one round against another surprisingly cordial fellow. Lost two matches to one. Could have continued, but opted to go to the Mayfair Games drawing instead.
• Turned the terrible demo deck of Magic: The Gathering that came in the swag bags into a servicable deck. Had fun playing M:TG for the first time in a decade. Subsequently built two theme decks (vermin and Fallen Empires' thrulls) from my single long box of black cards.
• Played a bit of the new Maple Story TCG with Sean. Maple Story is a free-to-play online MMO that actually is a competitor to the product I'm working to build now. The TCG comes from a partnership with Wizards of the Coast and, despite its cutsey younger audience draw, is actually very impressive as a game in its own right. Sean bought into those cards, so I won't exactly be playing this any time soon.
• Sat on a demo of Tomb from AEG. At first glance, it looks like a fairly standard dungeon crawling board game. It's not overly complex (unlike World of Warcraft: The Board Game from Fantasy Flight) so learning to play was pretty simple, yet one can see the depth of play can go a long ways. Where this was really interesting was in its variety. The demo was done with 8-10 characters available to put into your party. There were another 80 or so characters in the box that weren't in the demo. The stack of event cards (monsters, traps, treasure) was about 8 inches tall. You're not likely to exhaust the game in a hurry. Nate invested in a copy of that and I think we're both looking forward to the first excuse we can find to play it.

We had a fantastic time. I made some notes on what not to do next time. I think we may have been a little over agressive in what we signed up for. Our couple of TCG drafts were fun, despite both Nate's and my amazement that we weren't deluged by agressive TCG-scene assholes. The Munchkin tournament was mostly superfluous. Had we actually won, that would have been a lot less time we'd have had to just play games. We signed up for a session of Innsmouth Escape from Twilight Creations. We saw that ahead of time and the production value wasn't impressive. Plus we didn't want to interrupt what we were doing at the time for that.

We were smart to bring carry-on sized suitcases on wheels. More room than backpacks and not much more trouble navigating the hallways.

Photos I took with my camera phone can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eakolb/sets/72157606805434810/