Gen Con 2006 Report: Wednesday/Thursday

Well, I've had a week to recover from Gen Con, so I guess it's time to start posting my "Gen Con Report".

Wednesday:
A sub-group of the Gen Con forums called the "Kentucky Fried Gamers" (KFG for short) hosted some open gaming at the RAM restaurant downtown. Since I am a proud member of said organization, I joined them for an afternoon of fun. I taught a few people how to play Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot, and KFG founder Bubba Ho-Tep taught me how to play Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures. There were lots of other games going on as well, and it was just a great time. After 5 months on the forums, it was great to meet so many of the forumites in person.

After the open gaming, I drove home to pick up Rachel, and we went back downtown for the forum's big pre-Con party known as "The Stink". Sponsored by Gen Con, but run by forum members, the Stink is an opportunity for all of the forumites to get together, laugh, win swag, and generally enjoy the anticipation of Gen Con. Kind of like a Christmas Eve party. It was quite fun, and Rachel and I got to meet lots of folks. Our recent affiliation with the Mavens really helped us to feel more like a part of things. We left at 10pm, so I could get home and get some sleep before my first game on Thursday morning.

Thursday:
On Thursday morning, my first game was at 8am, entitled "You Too Can Cthulhu". This was an introduction to the Call of Cthulhu RPG, a game based upon the horror writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Our group played a team of people who are investigating a mysterious family in a small town, and we end up encountering some sort of ancient supernatural lizard thing . The subject matter doesn't interest me that much, but the game was quite fun, and the GM was fantastic. He used a lot of audio-visual stuff to set the mood, including background music and projected images. I'd highly recommend this event to anyone who's interested in this game, and I may do it myself again next year. By far the best GM I saw all week.
After that, I went to the dealer hall to get a first look at all the stuff. The dealer hall is like Christmas morning for gamers, with games and books and dice and t-shirts and just about anything you could possibly ever want to buy and more. I checked out a demo for Wizard of the Coast's new collectible miniatures game, Dreamblade, which was premiering at Gen Con. Kind of a cross between Magic: The Gathering and chess - it was pretty fun, but I don't think I need to spend money on anything else that includes the word "collectible".
I atteded a minatures painting class and discovered that I'm not a big fan of that hobby. My little miniature knight didn't turn out too bad, but I just don't have the patience to sit and paint these little tiny things for hours. I guess I'll have to stick to games with pre-painted minis, like Heroscape and D&D Minis.
After the painting class, I spent a few more hours in the dealer hall, doing demos and picking up swag. Wizards of the Coast had this deal where you do demos for their games and then you get to roll a giant foam d20 for a prize. I got a pretty good roll (a 17), and ended up winning a D&D v3.5 Player's Hndbook. That's a $30 book for free (hooray!).
RD had to work on Thursday and Friday (ah, the life of a junior high school teacher!), but he came downtown after work and we played in a Heroscape tournament. We brought our own 400-point armies to play in a single-elimination tourney. Unfortunately, both of us were singly eliminated in the first round! But, it was fun to play with some new people, and it's a game that both RD and I really like. After that brief hour of Heroscape play, we went t the mall food court for dinner.
We didn't really have anything else planned after the Heroscape tourney, so we started looking in the program book for another event to enter. We decided on NASCRAG, a D&D team event that I had heard a lot of good things about on the forums. We got some tickets and quickly was able to get a group together, which included Cody and Raeliste from the forums. NASCRAG emphasizes role-playing in their tournaments, which is a good thing since RD and I are only somewhat familiar with the rules of D&D. So, it was 4 hours of craziness, with each of us using cheesy accents and trying to figure out how to escape angry nuns and steal a submarine.
So, the first day of Gen Con 2006 started at 8am and ended at 1:30am for me, but it was more fun than I could have imagined. More of my report to follow!