NonCon 8 and TempleCon

I hit a pair of conventions last month, and only just now am I getting a chance to sit down and talk about them. In addition to my usual trip to NonCon, this year I was also invited to TempleCon in Rhode Island, which we'll discuss first since, well, it was 3 weeks earlier.

TempleCon went fairly well overall. Nice people running it, nice crowd attending it, and it was a chance for a hundred or so people to see The Massive Vs. The Masses for the first time. It went over great in terms of people playing and enjoying it, which is always nice to see. And as an added bonus, C.J. Henderson was across from me in the dealer room, giving him a chance to dump this year's wad of books on me, and get a friend of mine into his stuff too.

On the downside, the primary focus of the con was on tabletop wargames, specifically WarMachine. So first off, I really should have brought along Starship Kyuceus, but more importantly, the bulk of the attendants were there to spend 3 straight days playing a very specific game, rather than wander about trying new things. Also, my room was just plain awful. Broken phone, broken shower, broken doorknob, only a single big to be split between two people, no table, all for the price of fancy suite. In addition to the malfunctioning phone and half a bed depriving me of sleep, the cost of my stay was signficantly more than my profits selling games.

Shortly after this, it was off to NonCon, for my 7th consecutive guest stint. I hid a bit of a snag in getting there this year, as all three of the people I was planning to head up with had last minute complications. So in the end, I ended up heading up there this year with the son of a local gamestore owner I was meeting for the first time. Nice guy, but his work schedule meant heading back here late Saturday night, cutting a day out of the con for me. In order to make up for that, and in light of the fact that there was a snowstorm approaching that would have made Friday morning travel impossible, my mother was kind enough (at the last possible minute) to offer to call the local motel, work out whether they could shift my bookings back a day, and pay any extra expenses incurred by doing so.

Here we get into the big problem this year. "What reservation?" asked the motel. You see, many conventions when inviting their official guests, are nice enough to find them a place to stay and reimburse them for their travel expenses. NonCon, at least for the last several years, has been one such con. This year though, they apparently decided that while they were still inviting me to come run demos of a few games and all that, they were going to have me pay my own way. Now, on the one hand, I can understand that, since they apparently were having some serious budget problems this year, I love going to this here con, and if you ignore the fact that I'm now an actual professional game designer/publisher (which is an odd thing to do but hey), this is the same collection of games and stories I brought to the table last year. On the other hand, they kind of, you know, completely and utterly failed to mention this state of affairs to me at any point. I discovered it on my own the day I was leaving. One would think it would have come up at some point during this series of e-mails getting my events properly scheduled.

Now, if this were mentioned before hand, odds are I still would have gone, since, again, this was the year I actually had the final production version of MvM to unveil to all the people who have been playing my old cardboard and styrofoam demo sets, and it was a nice chance to meet briefly with R.K. Milholland face to face to talk about him illustrating Red Shirt. Still, there were however 2 other cons asking me to attend that weekend, and with some more time, I probably could have worked out a more "bum a couch" variety of travel plans. Anyway, here's hoping someone makes good on that front by next year, and let's just focus on the positive.

As previously hinted, I got to finally show off MvM to many people who had only seen early demo copies... in some cases VERY early versions as they missed a few years in the middle. I did in fact work out the whole Red Shirt art deal, which is quite exciting. I had a chance to catch up with a bunch of people I only get to see once a year and find out what they've been up to (babies were had, organizations were formed). There's a few people I expected to see but didn't too, but again, the weather was nasty that weekend. And then of course, I had a chance to play a few games for the first time.

Gloom is rather interesting, as all cards in the game are transparent overlays which partially change the text and stats of cards they're played on top of, but ultimately the mechanics are the same as dozens of other games (see my whole bit about comparing Munchkin to Kill Dr. Lucky).

St. Petersburg falls somewhere on the german game spectrum between Citadels and Puerto Rico, which is pretty interesting, but it's significantly less forgiving of early-game errors than either of them.

Unspeakable Words really won me over though. Basically, it's Lovecraftian Scrabble. You draw a hand of 7 cards, and try to make a word from them (which can be found in either a scrabble-legal dictionary or anything by Lovecraft), then score points based on the number of angles in the letters (in a Hounds of Tindalos reference). THEN you need to make a sanity check on a d20. If you can't meet or beat your score, you lose a point of sanity. Go too crazy, and you're out of the running, but 1 point before that happens, you gain the ability to count absolutely anything as a legal word. It adds a nice little risk-assessment element to things, and rationalizes the inclusion of the absolutely wonderful sanity counters. If I had the money, I would buy a copy of this game if only to raid these suckers for use as minis for other games.

So yes, fun was had, games were played, demos were ran. Any suggestions on what con I should hit next?