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I tend to go tona good number of conventions and am willing to meet goons at any of them as long as I can fit it in. Conventions I have attended and would attend again are: Dexcon Historicon Fall In Unpub Gamehole Con Too Many Games Gen Con Origins Double exposure Metatopia Pax unplugged Spiel (though no idea when ill go back) Philcon Decided not to attend origins this year after going for the last 7 or so years. Kind of bummed about that, but hopefully I'll make it back next year.
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May 24, 2022 01:38
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I moved to PA in 2009 and have attended off and on since then. I don't go every year but attend when I can. Usually when they are at the valley forge convention center since then I can attend while driving to and from the con from my home.
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May 25, 2022 03:52
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Speaking of HMGS cons, Little Wars is another good one I wish I could do. Its too far away for me though as its near Chicago. I think it takes place in the spring? Duke Siefried used to attend which was probably neat to see. https://www.amazon.com/Development-Miniature-Wargaming-Including-Napoleonique/dp/0244373183/
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May 25, 2022 16:59
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WerrWaaa posted:I live in TX now and could go to BGG Con if I had any idea what happened there. I'm pretty sure its mostly just people playing board games. I haven't been, but from what I have heard it reminds me of the experience I had attending Dice Tower Con in Florida in the before times. Essentially there was a 24 hour play room and game library and people just played games there the whole time. There was a dealer hall but it was tiny, spent maybe 30 minutes max there all weekend. The rest of the time was just playing board games in that giant room. If people got bored of playing games they were told to just go to Disney World for the day. I don't know if BGG con is exactly like that or not, and obviously there is no Disney World near by, but it has seemed like that from what I have heard.
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May 25, 2022 19:23
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If anyone wants to see what some of these cons are like I suggest you check out TheOneTar on youtube. They do video series on some of these, including: Kublacon Spiel Gen Con Origins PAX Prime BGG Con PAX South https://www.youtube.com/c/TheOneTAR/playlists
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May 25, 2022 19:25
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I would love to attend adepticon again. First and only time I went was either 2008 or 2009 when I placed 2nd in the lotr sbg tournament. Stolen glory!!! Sadly it being always either same weekend as gary con or weekend after kills it for me. I only have so much PTO and Gary Con is always going to trump adepticon for me. That said, I am in the middle of 3d printing a bunch of 10mm lotr terrain...
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Jun 23, 2022 18:21
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Dr. Quarex posted:
Does anyone know if there is an east coast at least somewhat equivalent to Adepticon? I've been slowly printing terrain and building miniatures for a 10mm LotR game of the siege of gondor and would love to take it to a con. It's got be in driving distance of Philly though, no way I am flying with this much stuff.
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Jul 4, 2022 00:11
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Some cons do that.
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Jul 7, 2022 23:25
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I've always heard about people lobby conning Gen Con but I've never actually seen it happen. Maybe I've interacted with them in the past and just didn't realize they were badgeless and just hanging out in a hotel lobby or whatever. I don't get the concept personally, even if you are a local. Just go to the convention already. I don't know what they get out of it, but then again I am a big old introvert and don't get joy out of just talking to random people.
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Jul 29, 2022 20:21
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I'll be there at least Friday and Saturday. Probably not on sunday.
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Dec 2, 2022 03:40
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I have all kinds of opinions on Gamehole Con vs Gary Con and such (they're both great cons but are also rather different from each other IMO) if thats a discussion people want to have. But. I am mostly in here to say I am on the planning committee for a new regional con just outside of Philadelphia. January 5-7. 2024 we're going to hose the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo. Its being run by a guy named Ron who did a lot of local cons in the 90s, and I am helping out with it in general but also a lot with the D&D Adventurers League part of the con. It is time to not just be part of the con but to BE the con! Quarex should be excited because the convention is also going to feature an auction that should be pretty good. I don't know if it will rival Gamehole con's as far as collectible stuff it gets but it should be good. Ron, myself, and several others are pretty big into the game collecting world so hopefully we get good stuff. Here is the event page for the con if anyone is interested: https://www.facebook.com/events/854102116024015
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Jan 27, 2023 21:56
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Dr. Quarex posted:You mean... the PAGE page I see I didn’t pick the dates, and I am not surprised the organizer of the con double booked it with another con that is quasi local. I do think the two cons are after different audiences though. I’ve never been to MAGfest but hear about it all the time. Dr. Quarex posted:
I like both Game Hole and Gary Con, but I like Gary Con more. I think part of this is because of my work on the D&D Documentary. We did a big trip to Gary Con and I got to know a lot of the old timers there as we interviewed them and I tried to pry documents from them for my camera. It’s great going back every year and still seeing them there and even getting to play games with some of them. It was also surreal getting to go to what essentially turned out to be a drinking party with the Gygax children. With all of that, my vision is probably a bit colored. Still, Gary Con feels like a family con to me. It’s the whole Gygax family, plus the old TSR family. The games all take place in one hotel complex which makes it feel nice and tight and a lot more welcoming than a more traditional convention center like where Gamehole is. The con also goes pretty late, and you can have no problem still staying up and chatting or even gaming with people in the hotel bar after your last game gets out at midnight. It’s care to gaming history is also special to me. The wargaming room they keep there complete with sand table is great, and you get to play Wargames you probably would never play anywhere else. There are also a lot of, albeit mostly TSR, games from the 80s and earlier run regularly which I like a lot as well. I don’t know how much of this will persist as the old timers start to die off but for now its a great con, and how old everyone is getting is part why I am super bummed to not be able to make it this year. Gamehole I love for how they handle D&D Adventurers League. Every year I’ve gone I’ve attended as an AL dm and ran tables for like 24-30 hours of my Gamehole time. There are other games going on there but they just don’t, to me, seem all that plentiful or all that special. Gamehole of course also has True Dungeon which is amazing for a con of this size but considering how expensive that has gotten I haven’t done a run since like 2016 or 2017 and don’t see myself going pack. Some of the things I like about Gary Con get replicated at Gamehole Con because of the hotel they put the DMs in. I forget the name of it but its the hotel attached to the convention center. They have a free happy hour every day from like 6 to 8, something Gary Con kind of does as well, and I enjoy. It’s also where a lot of people gather after games to hang out and talk and whatever else. What I don’t like about Gamehole Con is the night life. There is no bar (the pullout cart that is like $12 a beer doesn’t count) at the convention center or the attached hotel. Once the afternoon games wrap up the place becomes totally dead in the convention center. Post 10pm its truly dead, and you see few people playing games and almost no one hanging out. There just isn’t much to do at Gamehole Con except attend games and sleep in your hotel unless you have a car and can drive into Madison. It’s different at Gary Con, especially since its held at a resort and you can use the stuff they have there if you want to. One caveat to the above is I’ve always stayed at the hotel for Gary Con. I might feel a little different about it if I couldn’t eat a room in the old Playboy Club. They’re getting harder and harder to get every year so I am sure my luck will run out at some point. Edit: 1 thing negative about Gary Con is the Hollywood influence. I’ve definitely noticed it creeping in over the past decade. I am convinced Luke living in California has had him hanging out with influencers more and people like manganiello and its leaked into some of the con. Prices for some things have gone, there has been more streaming, there has been some ridiculous things like the Satine Phoenix wedding, and some of the more high profile games have been kind of ridiculous. Some people may like that stuff but I don’t. nesbit37 fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Jan 28, 2023 |
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Jan 28, 2023 03:29
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Yeah, I'm really curious how not staying at the convention hotel changes things for Gary Con. I guess if you stay at one of the places they shuttle to it wouldn't be too bad, but I would hate to have to drive back to my hotel. I'll probably find out next year since its next to impossible to get a hotel room in the convention these days.
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Jan 30, 2023 16:49
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I just posted my Origins report to Facebook, figured I would copy it here so this thread gets bumped and has some content: Back from Origins 2023! First time I attended since the “mini” Origins they held in the fall of 2021 which I attended to promote the Red Burnoose. Overall Origins felt mostly back to what it was like pre-pandemic levels, and was much less crowded than Gen Con as usual. I don’t know what their actual attendance was, but I got my badge something like 2 weeks prior to the convention and was in #10,000 something (on the low end) so I am guessing they didn’t have too many people more than that. Wednesday I got in to the convention center by about 11:30 after checking into the hotel. Got in line to get my badge and that took about an hour, which was a lot longer than I was expecting it to take. Went to lunch with a friend after that and picked up some Gen Con ICC carpet from him to take home and then headed to my first game of the con, a learning game of Avalon Hill’s Advanced Civilization. Despite owning both the Eastern and Western Empires board games I had not previously had a chance to play Advanced Civ before so I was excited for this one. The game was a lot easier to learn than I was expecting. It was also a lot more brutal than I expected. Me and another new player got into a war on like turn 3 and it pretty much sealed our fate at being in the bottom of the scoring chart the rest of the game. He came in last place and I was somewhere in the bottom 4 of 8 players. The game was not very forgiving, i got 4 different calamity cards where the top scorers didn’t get any, so it was impossible for me to ever catch up. The only card that seemed to work as kind of a catch up mechanic was “Civil War” that can let a bottom ranked player shoot back up, but its complete luck if you get that card and if its going to be effective. I liked the game overall and see how innovative it was when it first came out but its definitely an old school game that doesn’t coddle players like some of the more modern board games do. Thursday I started the day early with an 8am character creation event for Shadowrun. I usually like to try and play at least one new-to-me RPG at cons, and I chose Shadowrun to be that for me this con. I am quite familiar with the Shadowrun world, but knew nothing about how it worked mechanically so it was interesting getting some help to pull a character together to play in a con game later in the weekend. After that I went to the dealer hall for a couple of hours. Origins had a lot of new to the show vendors this year. They marked them out in the program and it looked like about 50% of the vendors this year had never vended at Origins before, so that was encouraging. Wander the floor was nice but I didn’t buy too much this time around. I had the evening free so went to the open play area and found someone who was looking for players for Dune Imperium. Played and enjoyed that, the game came together quite well and was relatively easy to pick up. I ended up taking 2nd place which I was happy with since 2 of the other people playing took to playing the game regularly. Friday I headed to Games on Demand to try and play CBR PNK. I did get into the game but it turned out the GM was a no show we ended up laying Scum and Villainy instead. The game was ok, I played a colonist in the Muscle role and we had to take over a ship and coerce, capture, or kill the crew to bring them back to a religious element in the galaxy. Game was a typical Indy RPG, I enjoyed it but felt no desire to pick up the rules. Afterwards I went to lunch and got news that my Friday night plans were cancelled due to a covid exposure, so I messaged a few people to try and fill up the rest of my day. One of my friends was an Origins VIG (loooots of drama around that program this year) and they offered to take me to the Origins VIG Mixer as their plus one since it started around 4. We went and the food and 2 drink tickets were nice, but we left pretty soon after. It looked like only about 50 people attended the event and we were not at all interested in the celebrity D&D game that they started playing at the front of the venue. We got shushed for talking but someone that was apparently paying attention so we just left. A couple hours later I ended up John Company with a group of people I sort of knew from the internet. I liked the game, but it was much more complicated than we were all expecting. One of the people there had played before and they helped the other 5 of us along, but still in 5 hours we only got through 2 turns of the game and we were all very experienced gamers. Would play it again but would definitely try and look for a way to speed things up. Saturday was Highlander day for me. I don’t quite understand their timing, but World of Game Design has decided to try and start up a 4th edition of the Highlander CCG that originally came out in 1995. Fun fact, the game has pretty much been in production continuously since 1995, but the 2nd edition, which is still having product produced in small batches, is pretty much impossible to get into, and I think the 3rd edition pretty much imploded. They want to bring back a version of the game that is more accessible and can be sold in game stores again, and since I liked the old game I figured I’d try and help. There was some confusion with the Origins events for the game as well as my schedule, but I ended up helping them with it for a good chunk of Saturday, running a sealed event in the late morning, helping demo the game to a few people, and then I was supposed to run a Cube event for them in the evening but it turned into another sealed event. We didn’t have a lot of players but those that joined us enjoyed it a lot and I had a fun time. They also gave me 1 of 30 copies of the playtest sets they had printed, signed by the creators of the game, for helping out and I certainly appreciated that a lot. Sunday I had to head to the airport around 2 to catch my flight home, so I had time for one morning game starting at 10, a Shadowrun session. I enjoyed the game, but the mechanics definitely felt very 90s. I don’t know how much the rules have been updated since first edition since this was a 6th edition game, but it definitely didn’t feel like an RPG that was designed in the last 5 years. Anyway, I played a troll Arcanist and had fun casting a bunch of spells to do things and the one combat session we had in the game was fun. I don’t know if I’d want to play Shadowrun all the time but I would play it again. After the game I went to the airport and that turned out to be an ordeal. I am not entirely sure why, but I ended up getting a free business class upgrade to my economy ticket and I think that was a good thing. For one, it meant the carpet I had in a bag could fly for free as my second bag. This was great since though it wasn’t over 50lbs it was technically an oversized bag. No complaints here. Then, due to the weather in Philly, my flight ended up getting cancelled. They ended up bumping me to 1st on the standby list for a 6am flight and a first class ticket for the 4:20pm flight on Monday. I stayed in the airport all night and didn’t sleep, and then at 330am went to check my bags to get into the standby flight. Because I had a first class ticket the woman at the baggage counter was able to get me on the 6am flight in economy, which I happily took, and then just was able to beat out the weather to fly home. While it wasn’t great having to be up for about 36 hours straight I overall had a fun time. We’ll see if I make Origins in 2024, and I am definitely looking forward to Gen Con in about 4 weeks. Origins is a fun show for playing games, but it seems to always have problems and there also isn’t as strong of an online community for the show, so I feel a lot less connected to it the rest of the year.
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Jun 27, 2023 20:13
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A complete list? I would be amazed if that existed. I think if you go to tabletop.events you can at least see all of the conventions using that platform, which would cover a lot of them. But there are going to be a lot that get missed. I haven’t even seen a comprehensive list of in person conventions since the Chainmail Girl Calendars from the turn of the century.
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Jun 28, 2023 01:02
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Similarly, PAGE is having its inaugural convention just outside of Philadelphia in Oaks, PA this weekend.
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Jan 3, 2024 14:33
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The first Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo is in the books! I think it went well overall for a first year con. It had some problems, some of them not the con's fault like Saturday's weather, but overall I had a fun time and think it was a success. They were hoping to sell 500 badges and sold around 1000 of them, so that is great. The con is already scheduled for next year. I think its the first weekend in January again but I have to confirm that. The auction was phenomenal, and I got to play in 2 games with a special guest which was great. I hope its a little less old school next year to help draw in bigger crowds. The guests were almost all either old industry people from pre-2000 or people who produced content related to materials from the older era. I love having those people, but I think it could benefit from bringing in some newer blood as well. Sadly if it is the first weekend in January next year I probably won't be able to attend, but I'll still help out with getting the con organized and such leading up to it. Here are some photos of the con. I didn't capture any of the gaming space at the con's hotel, so this is pretty much all the space the con had at the convention center. I took these at about 6pm on Saturday, so what should have been a relatively busy time everywhere but the vendor hall which was about to close. I know they sold 1000 badges but it never felt like there were 1000 people there.            
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Jan 8, 2024 15:08
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Jealous of your con schedule. Why oh why did I have to have babiez.
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Feb 6, 2024 02:08
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