GenCon 2013 – Thursday
Gencon is big. Really really big. The convention center is connected via skybridge to a Hyatt/PNC bank center. If you’re familiar with the concept of an arcology, this is the closest I’ve ever seen. The hotel is 20 stories tall, but the bottom floor is a large plaza with shops, and the rooms ring the hollow center of the tower. I can’t describe how weird it is to enter a building, look up over 200 feet and see a ceiling.
Everything is big. When I was waiting for an event, a man dressed as a goblin walked by. He was carrying a hamburger that, with no exaggeration, was larger than my head. I’m still trying to find out where he got it so that I can feed my family for the winter. The con itself is running more than 9,500 events and had to cancel some because they simply ran out of space.
After a delayed flight, I arrived on Wednesday with only enough time to crash at my hotel. Thursday started out on a great food, however, with a demo of the new Firefly boardgame.
Firefly
The Firefly game left me with a pretty positive view of it. In the game, up to 4 players each pilot their own Firefly class ship. I was lucky as hell and happened to get the Serenity AND Mal as my captain, which will rarely occur since ships and captains are separate choices. While there is no real difference between any of the starting ships in the game and the captains are all power balanced, we all know that Mal on the Serenity just made me better than the other players.
After you have your ship and captain, you draw one goal mission that is stupidly hard to complete. The first person to finish the goal mission wins the game. In order to get the money and skills necessary to finish the goal, you need to fly around from planet to planet completing smaller missions and buying crew and equipment. The gameplay is simple and easy to pick up, plus they use one of Wash’s dinosaurs to mark whose turn it is.
The game does a great job of preserving the flavor of the show without just forcing you to repeat the plot that every single person that buys the game already knows by heart. On the downside, the difficulty curve for actually accomplishing things in the first few turns is high, and an entire game is looooooong. Probably longer than Arkham Horror long.
The true test of the quality of the game, however, was this: after a two hour demo I wanted to keep playing.
True Dungeon
If you’ve ever wished you could go on a real quest in a dark dungeon, you’ve got to get out to a con that runs the True Dungeon event. It’s NOT a Larp – you don’t swing fake swords and throw seed packets at anyone, but the staff for True Dungeon does an excellent job of really wrapping you into this hokey fun dungeon crawl.
The event takes place in what is essentially a big warehouse with all of the lights turned off. The only light you have is what is shed by the fake torches, fires, and magical doohickeys in the dungeon. The dungeon itself is painstakingly created like a fully 3d set from a movie, complete with functional pieces for traps, puzzles, and full of actors in costume making their best crazy eyes at you.
You travel the dungeon as a party, each person with a different character class, moving from room to room solving puzzles and fighting monsters. For example, one of the puzzles was a table with a bunch of pegs on it. We had a huge pile of different sized gears that we needed to assemble in the correct pattern so that by rotating the gear at the beginning of the puzzle, we’d spin ALL of the gears and unlock the door to the next room. With only 12 minutes allowed per room (the event is ALWAYS popular and sells out, limiting the time allowed) the event is a frantic episode of Double Dare. The combat takes the form of playing shuffleboard on long tables, trying to slide your weapon token into a space on a printed monster design that will let you hit the monster.
The whole thing is tremendous fun, and the work that goes into creating the experience is incredible. There is one big downside, however: it’s crazy expensive. Tickets generally cost more than $40, and you really want to bring a bunch of friends. There are some extremely competitive players that have been doing True Dungeon for years, and if you go alone you might wind up being the person they yell at when you touch the wrong thing and electrocute the group.
The rest of my Thursday events ended up getting cancelled, so I spent the rest of the night doing what cons are really great for: hanging out with your long distance friends, drinking, and playing Cards Against Humanity.
