GenCon 2005 Reports
From GTF
Contents |
Thursday, Aug 18
Friday, Aug 19
JimG
I picked up badges for me and the boys. We're going to spend most of our time at the convention on Saturday. I also bought a badge for today and mostly wandered the exhibit hall. During lunch, I talk with Chris Boelinger, designer of Dungeon Twister. He was demoing the game to another person at the time. I also met the actor, Ron Glass, over in the autograph area. Most of you may remember him as Det. Ron Harris from Barney Miller. Strange that he would be signing autographs at GenCon, eh? More recently, he portrayed Shepherd Book on the SF series Firefly. He was signing autographs for the upcoming Firefly movie, Serenity. Picked up my exclusive Heroscape figure and headed back to work.
Went back after work and hit the exhibit hall again. When I went by the Asmodee booth this time, Chris was free and we played a game of Dungeon Twister. It was my first play and I tanked horribly. It was crazy around the booth at the time and I went through 3 opponents before the game was finished. The Klingon patrol came by and captured Chris for a little bit so he handed off to an Asmodee (publisher of Dungeon Twister) employee. When Chris got back, he had the whole Asmodee crew put in the Klingon jail and we continued. He was called away for something else and I finished with another guy in the booth named Eric. Had a good time with the game and may pick up a copy but I want to play it a few more times first. Picked up the Sir Bedivere figure for Shadows over Camelot from the folks at Days of Wonder and headed out.
Lots of folks in costume for the True Dungeons area. And there were probably a lot that I thought were in costume but were seeing them decked out in their everyday wear. :-D
Saturday, Aug 20
JimG
The boys and I arrived about 9am and our first stop was Gamebase7. We were meeting several other BGGrs to say, 'hey,' and maybe play a game before striking out for the convention. We were joined by denise, statonv, rthornqu, futurescaper, rschmucker, qzhdad and CaptainCaveman. I played a prototype of a game coming out this fall called Havoc: The Hundred Years War with rschmucker, qzhdad and CaptainCaveman. It was an interesting medium length filler where you collected cards that you later used to bid on battles from the Hundred Years War for victory points. My kids played For Sale and Pick Picknic with CaptainCaveman's kids.
Following the games, the boys and I walked the exhibit hall. We picked up several of the Heroscape figure that was being given away. We walked around the Hasbro/Wizards area. The large Heroscape map was very cool. Next to this was a guy building huge houses of cards from Magic cards. There were multiple structures and some were over 6' tall. For the A&A: Miniatures, they had several authentic military vehicles. Walked over the Days of Wonder booth and the boys took a look at the large Shadows over Camelot board. That is one sweet board.
We had lunch at Smokey Bones and then found the Asmodee demo area. I wanted to play Dungeon Twister again but a guy was just finishing up and he wanted to try out Mall of Horror. It needed 3 or more so the boys and I joined him to play. It was light and ok. It did make you feel like you were constantly running away from the Zombies which was neat. After that, the boys wanted to look around some more. We went back over to the exhibit hall and did a couple of the activities in the Hasbro area so we could roll the big d20 for a chance at something big. Tristan was the only one that rolled high enough on the first roll to qualify. He got a Magic theme deck. By then it was nearly 5pm and everyone was tired so we headed for home.
I never did get another play of Dungeon Twister but I know Kieron picked up a copy. :-)
From Kieron: Note that it is VERY helpful (swag-wise) to bring three little boys along!
