...if Just For One Day

1. Oh my Knizia, was it busy.  I've been to GenCon before, in fact, I believe this was my fifth.  I have NEVER, and I truly mean never, seen the exhibit hall as busy as it was on Thursday this year.  Not just the exhibit hall either, but the parking lots as well.  I usually park over at the mall a block over, and even on Saturdays, I usually can find a spot on the third level.  This year, at 9:30 AM, we had to circle the garage for nearly 25 minutes before a single spot opened up.  Absolutely insane.  Several other lots had already filled up as well.

Luckily, the on-site registration hummed like the machine it is, and we were through in under 15 minutes.  This is something I've always appreciated about GenCon, they seem have their act together when it comes to registration (though I've heard stories that Will Call and Events Registration were pretty tough to get through at times).  

With all of these people, it meant that just traversing the exhibit hall was more of a mosh pit than a shopping experience.  It made me appreciate the open aisles at Origins MUCH more.  This giant crowd leads me into my second point.

2.  It was hard to get to the games!  Because of the extended time it took to get parked, we didn't make the hall until 10:45.  By that point, roughly the front quarter of the exhibit hall was the line for Fantasy Flight Games (I heard estimates that the line was nearly 3 hours long at one point).  Nearly every aisle, and even the front wall seemed to hold some portion of the folks lining up to purchase the new X-Wing Minis game (mostly), among the other releases they had.  They weren't the only ones though, Wizards had a massive line to get in to see the new D&D items, AEG had a massive line, Wizkids had a line that circled their booth...it was about impossible to get into any of those major booths.  

If you did make it into their booths, forget about getting a demo.  Those tables were full, and in some cases, 2-3 deep waiting for a demo.  Somehow, I managed to get within 5 feet of a Fantasy Flight table demoing a new Star Wars living card game...I consider myself lucky.  I do give most of the companies credit though, I didn't see too many sell-outs beyond Android: Netrunner (the #1 game I wanted to buy there, sadly) and Seasons.  Fortunately, by early afternoon, it was possible to make it into these booths to look around.  If they had early buyer deals though, those were long gone.

3. I didn't buy much.  Granted, I didn't have time to stop by all of the indie booths, and try out those games, and I'm rather sad about that fact.  Still, in two or three rounds of the hall, I didn't find a great deal of games that interested me enough to really stop.  I am absolutely sure there were great games I missed, and I hope to learn about them in the very near future.  However, it just did not seem like there was a big "wow" factor to many of the new games I saw at the show.

4. What I did buy was nice and cheap.  This is my favorite part of GenCon - you can get some insane deals.  I was shocked at some of the deals I found on new games.  I found Africana by Z-Man for $30 (retail $45), and Roll to the South Pole by Rio Grande for $23 ($35 retail), even got a 6-pack of Star Trek Heroclix ships for $20 (about $35 retail).  A friend I was traveling with found Puerto Rico for $15 new.  And some poor company was trying to give away some version of Carcassonne for $1, and could find no one to buy them.  Deals, GenCon has them.

5. Awesome people I'll end my comments by discussing the awesome people I did talk to.  Every booth jockey, every opponent I had in a game, every person I accidentally elbowed in the back was as nice and as pleasant as you could possibly imagine, given the insanity all around.  I think that's what makes it all worth it... this hobby is so much more than just the games, it's all about the people that make and play them.  I sincerely hope that next year I can spend more time talking to them.