Gen Con Debriefed!

What a weekend! Well after all these years, I'm delighted to say that my trip to Gen Con still managed to defy my expectations. After flying into Indianapolis on Thursday night it was pretty much all gaming, all the time (with a little bit of dedicating boozing with my best friend the bachelor). No sooner had I arrived at the airport than my cell phone was ringing:

"Tom! Where are you?"

"Uh, the terminal?"

"Want to play D&D in an hour?"

"Sure?"

Less than forty-five minutes later I was in the massive Sagamore Ballroom at the Indiana Convention Center with several hundred of my fellow convention-goers, funny dice in hand and hastily rigged character ready to adventure.

Four grueling hours later, I was whisked away to one of downtown Indy's microbreweries with the extended gaming group, which included myriad people whom I'd never met but was instantly befriended by. This would be a pattern at Gen Con - you make new friends at every table and leave at the end of your time together with the handshakes of battle-tested comrades. It's a fun easygoing ethos, and you wonder we we all can't be more like this all the time.

After beers we head back to our hotel, whose lobbies are overflowing with pickup games of all sorts - roleplaying games, board games, miniatures games, you name it. We stake out an empty table and drink a growler of beer from the bar while playing Last Night on Earth, a zombie board game which is easy to play and fun enough to keep us up until 3am or thereabouts, at which point we retire to our rooms, crash, and start the cycle anew the next morning. Repeat for 1d4 days.

Good times.

(And more later!)

Son of Mancation

So once again I'm on my way to a guys-only weekend - loyal readers will recall last year's "Mancation" to baseball Spring Training down in Florida with my brother and his closest friends. Well, this time it's my best friend, and the destination is none other than Gen Con, that most hallowed of gaming conventions held annually in Indianapolis. Nominally I've gotten the green light to go on this trip because my best friend is getting married in exactly one month to the day, so this outing will represent a kind of uber-nerdly bachelor party.

That being said, I've always wanted to go to Gen Con, as far back as when it was held on the shores of Lake Geneva and advertised in the back of old Dragon magazines. This year should be a fairly interesting time to go, as Wizards of the Coast have just released the 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which means that there will be plenty of opportunities to demo the game. To be honest from what I've already seen and played of this new version, I'm less than enamored with it, but I will try to suspend judgment for the weekend at least.

Another cool thing about this year's Gen Con is that one of my dear old friends from Jersey will be there as a game designer! So I'll have friends on both sides of the vendor floor for this trip.

Well, the plane is getting ready to board, but more from Indy! There will be plenty of pictures, to be sure...

Detox

It's taken me just about as long to recover from my mancation as it did to go on it in the first place, but finally I'm sufficiently detoxed and dug out from work to resume my regularly scheduled blogging activities. I guess I just can't party like I used to!

Mancation, all I ever wanted

Actually, that's not true at all. Given the fact that my wife and I haven't had a proper vacation since Baby Exile was born, the allure of that recent guy phenomenon called the "mancation" (whereby a bunch of adult males go off somewhere together on vacation sans their wives or significant others) has more or less eluded me. However this doesn't change the fact that by this time tomorrow I will in fact officially be on mancation, as my brother is getting married this June and in lieu of a proper bachelor party - i.e., an improper one - he's opted for a week down in Florida to catch MLB Spring Training with his old crew, an annual ritual for him and his friends until people started getting married and/or too responsible to take a week off every spring to drink heavily and heckle the scrubs out on the baseball field.

But I am looking forward to the trip nonetheless. Many moons ago on our first road trip my wife (then my fiancee) and I attempted to join this weeklong party, only to be thwarted from making the drive from Savannah to Florida by heavy rains and a tornado warning that had us looking for the nearest ditch to save our 1995 Ford Aspire from being whisked away into a neighboring state. Ever since then I've been meaning to tag along, but as the years went by the possibility of taking a Spring Break became ever more remote, and I'd all but given up on catching the Sox in training when my brother announced that they'd be getting the gang together for one last huzzah.

So I'm going, even though I'm still battling that damned sinus infection and a last-minute cold - courtesy of Baby Exile and her buddies at daycare, aka the Bioweapons Research Facility - that's piled on for good measure. We've scored tickets not only for the Red Sox-Dodgers game on Friday but also the Yankees versus the Phillies on Saturday, so even though I missed the big showdown between the Olde Towne Team and the Evil Empire (which was last night: Sox won, 7-5!), I'll get to see both franchises in preseason action nevertheless. I'll try to post some dispatches from our rental house, since it's supposed to have a computer with high-speed internet access. There's also a pool, a big-screen television with DVD and VHS, and a freaking Ms. Pac-Man machine as well!

It's a proper mancation, all right.