I started going to GenCon when it moved to Indy in 2003. At only 90 minutes drive from my house, it was an easy decision to spend a Saturday checking out the con. I took my older son (12 at the time) and a good friend of mine along. We had so much fun that the 14-hour Saturday the first year turned into a 3-day weekend the next year, and every year thereafter through 2012.
When we first went in 2003, attendance was around 25,000 people and the con took up all of the Convention Center and spilled over into the adjacent hotels. By my last year of attendance in 2012, the crowd had grown to over 40,000 people and Indianapolis was busy building a huge addition to the Convention Center specifically to host GenCon and a couple of other huge events. 2016’s attendance number hit 61,000 people, which boggles my mind.
Sadly, Gencon’s ability to handle logistics has not grown as rapidly as their attendance, and that is part of why I stopped going. To have any chance at a hotel room within a reasonable distance from the con, you need to sign up for the pre-registration (purchase your 4-day passes) as early as December. Then in January or February, they do the hotel lottery thing, which has varied from just opening the floodgates and watching the servers burn down to trying to stagger the reservations system room availability to ease the burden. Nothing has worked particularly well, and in the past few years people have been pretty disappointed (or just downright pissed) with the way hotels are handled for the con. Even hotels outside the city are part of the reservation block, so finding anything within a 20 minute drive now could be difficult.
GenCon is an amazing experience though! I highly recommend it for anyone who has EVER been into pen’n’paper RPGs, board games, card games (collectible or otherwise), miniatures, dice, comics, fantasy and/or sci-fi. The people watching alone is worth the price of admission. You can also sit down and demo pretty much every game being shown off at the con, and often buy said game, sometimes at a discount, right after you play. They have a giant auction that lasts Thursday-Saturday, a costume contest on Saturday, a dance Saturday night (which is some fantastic people-watching), and a really cool kids-oriented track that has activities, games and vendors geared towards children. LARP is in effect everywhere, and True Dungeon is an experience everyone should try at least once. Lots of celebrity guests every year as well. Wil Wheaton is there pretty much every year. I ran into him one year and chatted for a short while, he was impressed I remembered he once wrote a column for CGW, so if you meet him, use that as an icebreaker! ;-)
It’s been a few years since I last did GenCon. In 2010 or so they did away with nearly all the video game publishers in the vendor hall, and that had been a big draw for me in the past. As the con got larger, space was a ta premium, and the combination of too many sweaty gamers, no more video games, not enough other booths that interested me and a serious downturn in convention swag (you used to come away with tons of nice free stuff before the recession hit in 2008) all combined to sap my interest in going. I was also pretty burned out by then, and my son had stopped going a couple years earlier when he graduated from high school. $600 for three days of waiting in lines and dealing with con funk just didn’t appeal anymore.
I kept telling myself I would go back for just a Saturday each year, but never did. This year is the 50th though, so maybe it’s the year for me to return… Now that the convention center is twice as big as it used to be it won’t be as overcrowded as those last couple of years I went. Plus with the economy doing better, maybe the swag situation will have improved. It will never go back to pre-recession levels though. In the heyday of GenCon Indy swag, I could pay for nearly my whole trip just by selling some of the swag I’d return with. Digital pet codes for MMOs, promo cards for CCGs, special commemorative con dice, promo minis, t-shirts, etc., it was a good time to be a gamer!
Oh, one last thing : For anyone who lives within a 4 hour so drive and wants to check it out…GenCon offers a special family rate for Sunday. For $45 you can get Family Fun Day badges for up to four family members. So you, your spouse and two kids (or you and three kids) can ALL get in for just $45! Get there early in the morning though, cause you’ll have to wait in line to get the badges and the dealer hall is only open from 10AM-4PM on Sunday. They do have special stuff for the kids all day Sunday though, and it’s a great and inexpensive way to see if GenCon is right for you and your kids!
