Why don’t they come? Is it because so many vendors are already pushing their product and so many GMs already are running their games? I am very surprised to hear that they don’t attend.
Honestly I’m still kinda buzzing from it. My gf thinks the whole thing is kinda dumb (even if she’s glad I had fun), so I pretty much have to talk to you guys ;-)
Only the execs at WotC can say for sure, but general consensus is that Wizards of the Coast backed out of GenCon altogether a couple of years ago because they wanted to scale down their (expensive) presence at conventions and wanted to cover more ground with less money. So now they have a smaller team that does all the PAX shows, Origins and many other conventions year round. Another reason people speculate on is that Hascon (Hasbo, who owns WotC, has their own convention) is less than a month after GenCon, and therefore the two conventions are too close together for a large presence at both.
Personally, I get that as a company now owned by Hasbro, WotC has had to make some decisions with it’s head rather than it’s heart. Since they are required to be at Hascon, doing the huge show they put on for years at GenCon just isn’t feasible. For several years they sent smaller and smaller contingents, with a store/booth in the dealer hall that was a quarter of their old presence, but where you could still buy the newest releases and demo games. I thought that was just fine. Skipping it altogether sends the wrong kind of message, especially when one of your core products, D&D, is basically responsible for the existence of the con in the first place, and another, Magic, was responsible in large part for the rapid growth of the con in the 90’s and 2000’s.
Their games obviously still have a HUGE presence at the convention, with third-party vendors selling their product and running tournaments and sessions of their games. Still, I would have thought GenCon LLC would have picked up the slack a little and invested some of their own money in replacing that atmosphere that WotC and others used to lend to the con. It’s the third year without WotC, so it’s not like they pulled out at the last minute. GenCon LLC has had two years to plan for the 50th Anniversary without WotC presence, so obviously they just decided people are there to buy shit and play games, and they would just let the cosplay folks provide the atmosphere for free. Disappointing.
Great summaries. As someone who stopped attending when the event moved from Milwaukee, wow its bigger and nicer.
That was a great read – I’m going to have to go one of these decades.
I mean heck you’re like 1/4 closer up there in VA already, right? :P
On the flipside, everyone in my car was unreasonably excited about TAMARACK in Western Virginia.
Also: Western Virginia sucks exactly as much as I assumedi t would ;-)
West Virginia, however, has fantastic mountains for those of us inclined to things like rafting, and is therefore a beautiful state.
It also has toll roads and 1/2 of my partner’s in-laws. I stand by my decision ;-)
I had an awesome GenCon. It was my fiancee’s first time going, and I think about 15th for me. When we first got together a couple years ago, she was only a card player (cribbage, euchre, etc). I’ve now developed her into a full fledged board gamer who is absolutely loving her newfound hobby. It was a joy to see the con through her newbie eyes.
Since Armando did a nice recap day by day, I will do the same!
- Wednesday
- Flew in, checked into hotel, wandered the convention hall a little to see what was going on, watched GoT leaked episode to avoid being spoiled by some random conversation at the con.
- Thursday
- First event- an on premise Escape Room. We finished in the nick of time and they did a great job setting this up. Involved a cabin in the woods scenario.
- Hit the exhibit hall - hot items were already selling out (Photosynthesis, Sheriff of Nottingham Merry Men, etc.) Drooled over the prototype Pandemic Legacy Season 2. Picked up Potion Explosion expansion.
- Ate lunch at The Ram. Always a great time.
- Hung out at the auction. Didn’t win anything.
- Late night gaming: Nuns on the Run and then played several hilarious rounds of Coup.
- Friday
- Morning: Tactical Laser Tag in the Lucas Oil stadium. Very fun and we kicked butt.
- Visited the GenCon 50 year anniversary museum. Saw some awesome stuff including a prototype of the original Dungeon board game, early D&D boxes, lots of great photos, etc.
- Exhibit hall the rest of the day - Tried out demos of lots of stuff. Picked up Sonar (simplified Captain Sonar).
- Fancy dinner with fiancee and my brother and his wife
- Late night gaming: Champions of Midgard. Had never played this but I love Worker Placement games. A friend of mine had picked up the deluxe package. My finacee also loved it so we ended up buying the deluxe package the next day.
- Saturday
- Morning: GAMING WITH ARMANDO. Had an amazing time and a ton of laughs.
- Exhibit hall - Bought aforementioned Champions of Midgard. Also picked up a couple sets of Unlock which is an escape room thing. Tried more demos of things.
- Dinner: Giordano’s stuffed crust pizza. So good
- Late night gaming: Word Slam, Khan of Khans, Sonar
- Sunday
- Exhibit hall for half a day for last minute purchases: Stop Thief remake, Quarto, Katamino, gifts for kids
- Fly home
Overall had a fabulous con and already booked a hotel for next year (It’s plan B if the housing block fails spectacularly again).
Your gf sounds like my wife - she tolerates my geeky ways but only at arm’s length. Otherwise she gets dizzy from all the eye rolling.
The secret is to just never let her know any specifics or let her see any of my gaming gear. The eventual goal is to shove the gaming PC into another room entirely :(. It’s a little weird, since we bonded ~15 years ago over our shared geekiness for Nintendo games and Lord of the Rings, but her stance is that she “grew up.” AKA got wayyyyy more boring hobbies ;-)
So to that end, huge props to @Vesper for his games-loving partner; I am really glad that the two of you had such an awesome time at the show.
And it really sounds like I need to hit up The Ram. . .
Also I’m pretty sure my buddy James got that same Champions of Midgard game. . . sounds awesome!
Great write-ups! We gave it a miss this year, partly due to inertia, and partly because we were a bit apprehensive about the huge attendance, but it looks like they’re managing that part well.
Keeping up the same energy as y’all, though, would be a tall order :)
Considering I am still working through the plague I picked up at GenCon, it is possible I did not meet my own tall order :)
So, hypothetically, if I was going to take my adult son to a gaming convention next year, is GenCon the place to be? I’m in Tacoma so penny arcade is a hop skip and jump, but getting passes seems cray-cray and I’d prefer to go to something more focused on tabletop.
I think that GenCon and, more recently, PAX Unplugged are two of the bigger tabletop focused cons. I assume Origins fits the bill. All my friends say that Dragon Con is far more about cosplay.
Yeah, definitely don’t do DragonCon if gaming is your focus. It also has outgrown it’s venue so it can be a bit much.
That’s a really critical point. GenCon is HUGE, but it’s facilities and planners can handle it. The air systems, bathrooms, streets, hallways, hydration stations are busy but aren’t overloaded. Convention hall employees are always on the ball about spills, trash, etc. Will-Call line took me 5 minutes on Friday morning. That’s a recipe for a 2-3 hour line endurance challenge in many conventions.
I heartily recommend it.
PAX Prime is always going to be heavily focused on electronic gaming, which is awesome, but it kind of drowns out the ability to see and do a lot of tabletop, card and PnP gaming.
Origins and GenCon are the two best conventions in the U.S. for tabletop, PnP and card gaming. Coincidentally, both are held in the Midwest about 175 miles and 45 days apart from one another. Of the two, GenCon is the far larger convention, so since you’re travelling a good distance to start with, I’d recommend GenCon to maximize the size and scope of what you can do at the convention.
GenCon 2018 will be August 2nd through 5th. Badge sales will begin around the end of January, and you’ll need to be registered for a badge to take part in the hotel block reservation lottery which will kick off in mid-February. Despite a recent construction boom, hotel rooms are still at a premium for GenCon, so if you’re travelling from as far away as you are I would leave nothing to chance. Register for badges as soon as you are able, then jump into the housing block the moment it goes live. The entire block was sold out in hours this year, with all the downtown rooms disappearing with the first wave of reservations. Staying outside of downtown is certainly possible, but I can tell you from experience that it really sucks hard to have to drive into downtown, pay to park, then drive back to your hotel every day.
It’s worth all the hassle though, as if you and your son are into board/card/PnP gaming GenCon is the mecca for all such things. It’s not just the HUGE dealer hall filled with publishers, shops and game demos, it’s also the enormous areas dedicated to gaming, both organized and pickup, the mind-numbing amount of games/events you can register for, the cosplay everywhere including the costume contest, the anime festival within the con, the auction and auction store, the live music and other special events throughout the four days, and basically the amazingly awesome atmosphere where the entire city for blocks around the convention center is dedicated to everything gaming. GenCon spills out of the massive convention center and into every nearby hotel, into Lucas Oil Stadium, and even into the restaurants, streets and public spaces around it.
As a dad who has attended with his own son for years, first when he was a kid, then as a teen, and finally, this past year, returning with him as an adult, it’s really a unique and special experience to share with your son that I can’t recommend highly enough. You guys will love it.
That’s some fantastic info @SlainteMhath. Thank you!
Yeah. I kind of regret not going when he was a kid (we did go to a couple of local cons), but I wasn’t really in a financial position to go back then. Also, he’s got his own tabletop RPG company now so a trip to GenCon is nicely relevant.
Having done it this year, I won’t pretend it was optimal (especially the 20-minute walk from parking to JW Marriot where I was running a game first thing one morning), but it honestly wasn’t too bad. The con now sells parking passes through the same event ticketing system that you sign up for tournaments and tabletop games via, and my friends and I snagged a pass for each major day of the con at less than 1/3 of the going rate for full-day parking in downtown Indy. So, even if you don’t snag a downtown spot, @BiggerBoat, I’d say it’s still worth your time and money :)
I’ll also strongly recommend breaking away from the huge tournaments and big-banner publishers running their own games for $12/slot and explore some of the indie groups and one-off GMs/organizers running their own crazy stuff–at least once or twice during your time there.
Not just because I fall into that category, but because some of my very favorite gaming experiences of the whole con came from doing so, while my friends just had the thoroughly average experience of the official Starfinder, Pathfinder, and D&D sessions being run ;-)