Cyrano – Page 11 – GrogHeads

Cyrano ventures south (from him!) to Indianapolis, to file this report from GenCon

Somewhere, amidst all the other detritus I’ve gathered, I have this angry pin. It was made the year after Those Who Make Gen Con (TM) chose to take historical miniatures gaming and place it in a dark basement (I neither jest nor exaggerate) of the Milwaukee Auditorium. It reads simply: “I found the miniatures games at Gen Con”.

Gen Con left my hometown for the center of Indiana over a decade ago, and historical gaming of all kinds has fared little better since. Cards and clicks may have been replaced by cards, anime, and cosplay, but it still takes a dedicated grog to find something appropriate to his or her tastes.

Role-playing, of course, can be found in abundance

And Gen Con this year took real patience. It’s fairly well known that the hotel block reserved by convention organizers was significantly increased this year but still sold out in less than an hour. The on-line “wishlist” event registration system resulted in large queues and, at least anecdotally, gamers not getting into their first, second, or third choices. The exhibit hall was expanded yet again and yet, according to the folks to whom I spoke, sold out in near record time. I’ve long made it my habit to hit the convention hard Wednesday through Friday in the hope of avoiding the worst of the crush of humanity that arrives on Saturday. This year the crowds came on Wednesday night and never seemed to let up.

In all this, though, there were those flying the wargaming colors and I write this to honor them.

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There’s always something cool to see at Origins. Here’s what stuck out for our team…

click to enlarge images

Barthheart: Well, this was my first ever Origins and my first con of this size. WOW! 5 days whizzed by… but maybe because I had such a great time with the GrogHeads and GM’ing games of Sergeant’s Miniature Game. I managed 5 games in total and all the people who came to play were great sports and had fun… not hard when SMG is a fun game to play. Husband and wife teams, father and son teams, old, young just great people out to have a fun time. The people from Lost Battalion Games, makers of SMG, were very helpful in starting our games, gave us some fantastic prizes to hand out and also gave me some very nice swag for GM’ing their game.

I also helped some of the vendors setup. We were helping Decision Games setup and it was hard to not start shopping right then. I wandered by their booth later on and they remember who I was and asked if I was interested in play testing a new tactical space game they were working on. We played for about 2 hours. Fun game, nice people. They took my name and email and are going to set me up with a printed play test copy when they get them.

I managed to not break my wallet and only bought RAF and some extra soldier minis for SMG. Decision Games released their new monster Atlantic Wall for the con….. REALLY nice looking game with a huge map, 11+ sheets of counters… only $240 at the con…. so tempted but it would have never gotten played only taken out and fondled every few years.

Overall, great fun with great people. It was nice to be able to put faces to the screen names at GrogHeads.

Hope I get invited and can attend next year.