Home of the Soul Cookie

Just returned from GenCon, Wizards of the Coast’s annual game convention, in its penultimate year in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (GenCon moves to Indianapolis, Indiana, in 2003.) Here’s my attempt at a debriefing-type recap:

Wednesday

We (Jason, Kris, Amber, and I) get ready and leave, bound for Jay’s parents’ house in Mission Viejo. Joel and Hariann (Jay’s folks) were happy to watch their granddaughter for the weekend.

On our way up there, we stopped at a Starbuck’s in San Diego. Came back out, I slid into the driver’s seat for my turn behind the wheel, turned the key, and…

Nothing.

The van was dead.

After several minutes of engine tinkering (and not a small amount of swearing), we summoned Triple-A, who gave us an high-powered jumpstart, and we were off again. (It later was discovered that there was some kind of gunk on the contacts to the battery which had not been cleaned off by the Pep Boys mechanic that had installed a brand new battery not three days prior.)

Joel drove us to LAX, we flew to Milwaukee, and we took a cab to the hotel, where we met up with Jeff, a friend from Arizona.

Kris and I each got about 2 hours of sleep. Jason stayed awake.

Thursday

The rain that had been present since we landed the night before was still there.

My first event was something I was really looking forward to: a Star Trek LARP (live action role-playing) event. After like 20 minutes of searching (GenCon events spilled out of the convention center into both the nearby Hyatt and Hilton hotels, not to mention the sports arena, where my event was), I finally arrived at my event and was ushered into a briefing: The Borg were invading the Federation, and we had to figure out a way to deal with the invasion. Cool!

…or so I thought, until I received my character info.

Was I a starship captain who had to muster a crew to defend Earth from the Borg? No.

Was I a dedicated scientist whose skills were necessary to neutralize the cybernetic threat? No.

Was I a lowly ensign on an away mission? No.

I was a… (wait for it)….

Manager of a bar.

That’s right. I was in the “C” group (C being short for crappy), and our “mission” was to keep morale up by preparing a banquet on Saturday night for the Starfleet brass.

Riiiight. I didn’t stick around long. Pissed me off, though, ’cause that was the most expensive event I registered for.

I had significantly better luck later in the afternoon with a “Whose Line is it Anyway?”-style event. I tell you, it took a bit of internal coaxing, but by God I got up on stage several times, and ended up just having a blast!

Thursday night I spent wandering the huge (but smaller than the comic-con’s) dealer room and then playing in a ill-assembled Series Archer demo. (You’d think that actually knowing the rules might be kinda important for somebody demoing a game, not that you could tell by our GM.)

And then, at long last, back to the hotel room, and sleeeeeeeep……

Friday

Had a Magic sealed deck event in the morning. Apparently there’d been some cheating in a booster draft the day before, so they made us waste a bunch of time recording our deck contents. I didn’t do so hot once we started. Lost the first match 0-2, got a bye in the second round, won 2-0 in the third (against a guy who had to mulligan down to just 4 cards in hand in our first game), and then went 0-2 in the fourth round, at which point I dropped. My deck just wasn’t working well. (Or maybe it was that I was still sleep deprived, and I wasn’t working well.)

More dealer’s room browsing, looking for swag to bring back. There wasn’t much.

Friday night was the DORKATHLON! Here’s the deal:

We didn’t really know what the Dorkathlon was beforehand, other than that it was a teams-of-four contest to outgeek the other teams for fame, glory, and prizes. I went into it thinking it was going to be pretty much a trivia content, though it ended up having some other components to it.

First was a Mr. Mouth competition. Our team (myself, Jason, Kris, and Jeff) did really well, but there were some teams that did even better. No prize there.

Second was a trivia contest. Trivia? Geek trivia? We (read: I) so kicked ass. FIRST PLACE.

Third was a photo scavenger hunt. We got bad instuctions from one of the judges, and so weren’t able to score a lot of our pictures. (There were some… interesting things on the hunt list, though! Let’s put it this way: One of the “items” was a pic of two girls kissing, it was worth a lot of points, and the bad info was got was on whether or not we could have multiples of an “item.”) No prize.

Fourth was a stupid thing called “Know Your Judges,” essentially a trivia contest about the people running the event. No prize.

Fifth was “Shoot the Judges,” a Nerf-gun sharpshooting contest. We did okay. As with the Mr. Mouth competition, others did slightly better. It was a sloooooow event. At least we got to shoot some of the people responsible. No prize.

Finally, they tabulated the points from all the events. And though we hadn’t won prizes in anything but the Trivia section, we did well enough overall that we ended up winning THIRD PLACE overall! Woo hoo!

Saturday

I had a Star Wars LARP event on Saturday, but after my Trek experience, I blew it off and, after sleeping in a bit, spent the day doing demos for different games. Even got to playtest a new game for Andrew Looney of Looney Labs! Cool!

Sunday

Had a Game Deign Seminar with Monte Cook (good stuff), followed by a 7th Sea GM’s seminar (also good stuff).

Then we flew back to LA, and crashed (in the sleeping sense) at Jay’s parentals’ house.

Monday

Game con’s over, and there I was, moving furniture. Ugh.

At least I got a bed (a HUGE hommajamma of a bed) out of the deal.