NonCon 7

This year, I wasn't really listed as a confirmed guest on NonCon's page as a guest (although I did have listings for all the things I was doing). I think this means I've officially graduated from the rank of Guest to the rank of Furniture, woohoo!

Getting to the con was a fun experience this year. My initial travel plans were sidelined at the 11th hour, and I had to beg a ride off another RetroMUD GM who was coming from Rhode Island. I also dragged along my cousin this year for the first time (well, first time for this particular cousin, I've gotten 3 out of 4.5 so far). The trip went well enough until we hit Poughkeepsie, but then in came some truly amazing fog. We're talking horror story fog here. Silent Hill levels of visibility. We had to guess where roads were, and on more than one occassion wound up on dirt roads leading up to little farm houses and such in the middle of the woods ("Let's split up and look for a phone!") So yeah, that much was fun in its own way.

Eventually, we find Vassar, head in and after I greet some people (and get some surprisingly warm welcomes here and there), I end up settling in for a reading of the truly astounding but sadly obscure novel, The Eye of Argon.

After that there was some more catching up with people, I played a decent amount of Aquarius and Zendo with some of the other NonCon regulars (one of whom came up with a darn good guess at a rule for his first time playing, counting the total number of dots on every piece in the setup). Unfortunately, my game playing time was cut rather short overall as new campus policies forced the con to shut down for the night at 2 AM. Of course, the bright side of this is that being forced to stop playing games meant this was the first NonCon when I've brought myself to sleep (and in an actual bed at that) both Friday and Saturday night.

Saturday's schedule hit some snags as far as I was personally concerned. There was a major Magic tournament on the schedule overlapping two panels of mine (along with the Collision demo), and uh... even today, Magic is pretty darn hard to compete with. Both panels got scrapped accordingly, but I still managed to rope in quite a few people for Collision... and I have to say, it's a lot more fun than I thought it'd be once you get enough people into it. I think I'll be going with my gut and throw it into publication within the next month or so (have a rather satisfactory board layout here, just need to find a good source for the pieces and pretty things up some). Someone compared it to a game called Tsuro, having a chance to play it on Sunday, I'd have to agree there's some similar concepts involved.

The Red Shirt panel slated for Sunday faired less well. I didn't really have a chance to run it then, but I did get a start on things with an impromptu game Saturday night. The general concensus was that there's some nice potential here, but it needs a bit more time in the oven, which is what I was expecting.

Since Sunday's schedule of events was pretty clearly doomed, I did a lot of game playing then. Most notably, I finally had a chance to play Puerto Rico. Really had my head handed to me too, but eventually I picked up on the basics well enough that I expect to do decently next time I have a chance to play it.

Caylus is another game of the German sort that's now ranked rather high in my book now. The basic premise is that everyone gathers resources and sends them off to help build a castle and gain favors from the king, but the interesting catch is that the primary source for these materials is the ever expanding town, being built by the players, using the same resources, so you can garner a decent score from ignoring your official duties and just play land baron. There's some great mechanics for turn order and such too.

Citadels is fairly fun too. It's a card game based mainly around all the players constantly picking new roles each time, and having to psychoanalyze each other to figure out who has which so you know who it is, for instance, that you're stealing from. Twilight Imperium was this year's game I really wanted to play but didn't, but in all fairness, it's a long one, and my schedule was pretty tight.

Speaking of wishing to play games, someone I could have sworn had done so at least once in the last few years caught me at the last minute as he'd never played Massive Vs. Masses. He had his chance, and beat out his opponent just barely (it came down to 1 citizen and 2 HP in the last turn if I recall). That was nice to see.

Also at NonCon this year was Randy Milholland, who I didn't see much of. Shame that, he's one of the few webcomic people who doesn't just have a strip where two or three college students talk about videogames, which earns him points in my book, and more importantly, he ran a game of Toon on Sunday that I missed out on. Mmm... Toon.

Speaking of other guests, around when my cousin was experiencing the crazy high pressure sales of C.J. Henderson, I found out his daughter/illustrator Erica is evidently doing an internship animating Venture Bros.. So... that'd put me only 3 degrees away from Dr. Orpheus, and 4 degrees away from The Tick. And the source code for this paragraph is now officially ugly as heck.

So, yeah, another great NonCon to go with all the others. If I omitted anything important, as usual, bite my head off and I'll correct it. Otherwise, I'll see you next year.

Next year at NonCon, I'll actually be selling games... which, incidently, you can (maybe) pick up about now (or at least, within the next month or so).