GenCon or GenCan't?

I was at GenCon in 1992 for the GenCon/Origins and the 25th anniversary. Back then, it was in Milwaukee, at MECCA. I was there the next year in 1993 when Magic was released. We were there when Wizards of the Coast bought TSR in 1997 and after Hasbro bought WOTC. We were there in 1998 when they left MECCA (we saved a brick from the demolition site) and when the new WOTC castle replaced the old TSR castle (we saved a piece of the old castle too). We were there when Cardhalla first debuted in 1999 as a sometime people did with the discarded Magic cards left lying around before it became a big thing.
I went almost every year in that period, except the year my sister scheduled her wedding on GenCon Saturday.

When GenCon made the move to Indianapolis in 2003, we did not go and we have not been since. A logistical combination of a second child, a poor exchange on the dollar, the extra distance, and not having the knowledge of the downtown in the new city all factored in against us.


This year is the 50th anniversary of GenCon. It has been sold out for a while. One of the friends that we had gone with is making the trip this year with his son. We are still not going.

Shan and I talked about it, but the logistics still work against us. While our kids are old enough to leave behind and our dollar is doing better, the travel, new city, and having to book time off for it in advance work against us. Plus, the uncertainty of hotels, and even how quickly the memberships sold out would have made this one tricky.

It might be sour grapes, but I’m not even sure how much I would enjoy it anymore. I would still try to get in a Diplomacy game, and check in with the Highlander CCG crowd. I would spend a lot of time in the Dealers Room, looking at the new products, trying to find a few old items (like Jean Grey), and looking for some familiar faces – like GW/AoG Dave Frank, and TSR Brian Mitchel. I believe I would find the crowds overwhelming. Plus, not knowing the area, not likely to get a hotel near the convention, and the travel would all be challenging.
Most of the designers can now be reached online. A lot of the new games I can wait and buy locally or online. A lot of the older items I ‘could’ buy online, if I was willing to pay those rates. Even the promos aren’t as big a draw anymore. I’ve done without so many of the Heroclix promos now that I have passed beyond filling them. A lot of the other promos, I would still have the ability to buy online albeit at an inflated price.

That said, I do have my friend looking for a Bat-Mite promo for me this year, if he gets a chance.
I’m sure I would enjoy it if I was there. I really can’t see us making it down though, unless finances change significantly, like lottery-scale.

The Goats of Thor

So after a few hopeful months we still haven’t heard of a buyer for Wizkids. There was some talk about a group but it fell through when they looked closer at the financing.
Then there was some talk about Tops releasing the next set – Hammer of Thor – at GenCon. With ComicCon last weekend, Neca was selling the Thor’s Mighty Chariot – which was supposed to be the Buy-the-Brick figure for the set. They are also taking pre-sales at Amazon for Aug 15. This had led to some speculation if Neca has picked up the license or if they just bought out the stock of boxed figures. Since I won’t be at GenCon again this year, I will have to wait and see.

I did win some more figs on ebay and now have the rest of the Arkham Asylum basic figures on their way to me. I even have a few of the Super-Rares coming as well. Still no luck yet on acquiring any of the other big figures I still need.

Battletech

I never got into Battletech back in the day. I had played it at Gencon once - with the heat sinks but it never really grabbed me. I did get into the Mechwarrior Dark Age when it came out from Wizkids and even was a Warlord (judge) for a few of the sets.

I just got the classic rules from ebay yesterday. I'm going to check them over to see if they are viable for Wincon. I'm still very interested in the system from an upsizing view. From the book, I found out that the nice people at Armorcast used to make 28mm scale Battletech mechs. They look keen and inspring.

Old 40K marines – beakies

I remember when we first got into 40K. Back then, Rhinos came in 3-packs and marine had a 10-man lead tactical squad and a 30-pack of plastic marines in Mark VI Corvus armor – more affectionately know as “beakies”. These were reasonably priced – about $30 US. This was the same time when they were selling a Warhammer Fantasy army pack of 60 plastics for about the same price – 10 each of wood elf, dark elf, dwarf, goblin, orc, and humans.

The problem with the figures was finding them. No-one seemed to carry them. When we went to Gencon that year, we lined up for the dealer’s room to open and rushed directly to the Games Workshop booth. They had a stack of 8 of them and I grabbed them all – 2 for Connor, 2 for Don, and the rest for me. It turns out that that had been all they had brought. I think I still have one of the sets unopened – I had also picked up lots of extra heavy weapon sprues to be able to make extra Devastator squads in the later years when they returned to GenCon so still have about 3 sets worth of figures unmade.

Back then, in the Rogue Trader days, I needed a lot of marines as I had thoughts of painting up marines armor in all the flags of the world. Plus I had been working on a mouseketeer squad of marines with ears that only got as far a making a few heads and a female torso.

Blackmoor no more

I’m a bit delayed with this – so most of you might already be aware that Dave Arneson passed away on April 7, 2009. While not getting the same reaction in the gaming community as the passing of Gary Gygax, Dave’s passing was still noted.

He didn’t get the same name recognition as Gygax, but his Blackmoor campaign was the basis for Dungeons & Dragons with Gary’s Chainmail rules.

When we met him at Gencon he was very personable and friendly. We had tried to bring him up to Wincon for a few years. He cancelled twice due to his health and once because he was going to Prague to help with the Dungeons & Dragons movie. We joked that we had to stop inviting him in an effort to help keep him healthy. When we met him at Gencon after this, he was at the D&D movie booth and showing off the props.

Gasthaus-gutenberger

Last month we were at the Holiday Inn Airport for Shan’s dad’s 70th birthday party. The kids really liked the pool and the huge ball pit/play structure.

For dinner on Saturday night, we went to a German restaurant, Gasthaus-Gutenberger. We has some reservations as the last authentic German restaurant we had been in was over a decade ago back in Milwaukee during GenCon when we were the Canadian National Director for the Highlander CCG and Thunder Castle was having a thank you dinner. The food then was heavy and fattening and Troy drank a boot of beer. So we were expecting expensive, heavy food.
This time we were quite pleasantly surprised. I had the Jaeger Schnitzel (a breaded pork cutlet with fresh mushrooms with gravy) and was very impressed. It came with a purple cabbage side dish that was fabulous.

The staff was very accommodating and handled the large table of 26 with aplomb. We were waiting on by a shorter, quiet efficient waiter and a Shannon-Elizabeth-looking waitress. They also had an accordionist softly playing to accompany diner.

We heartily recommend it to others. Check out the menu, so you have an idea of prices, but it was definitely worth it.
http://www.gasthaus-gutenberger.com/

GenCon Update

It sounds like GenCon LLC filed Chapter 11 due to the temp agency costs from Celebrations IV.
It looks like GenCon is being sued by Lucas for costs and auction proceeds. GenCon is saying they are keeping money that Lucas didn't pay for booth costs - to the tune of about 80,000.
http://theforce.net/celebration/story/Lucasfilm_Sues_Gen_Con_112361.asp

Geez. There's no good winner here. Can't we all get along?

Gencon LLC files Chapter 11

http://www.gencon.com/2008/corporate/news-pr/releases/2008/2008.02.15.Press.aspx
GenCon has filed chapter 11. Having run conventions, Shan and I are always boggled that GenCon would be a money losing venture. No matter how we crunched the numbers, we couldn’t figure out how it would be a loss unless they were paying for massive coke parties. Granted these were based on the Mecca GenCons but they should hold up.

The booth costs are huge. I believe booth costs back then were between $500 and $1000 each. With over 200 booths in the dealers’ room, even comping the ones for TSR and later Wizkids, this should generate over $200,000 and should easily cover the cost of the convention space for the week.

The memberships used to cost $50 each. They claimed 30,000 attendees. Even with convention math, this should generate $500,000 which should cover the costs of preregistration books, program books, and any extra convention space that the dealers didn’t cover. This should also cover costs involved with a salary for a dedicated person in charge of the convention all year as well as a staff for the week of the convention.
They used to trade volunteer hours for memberships to help spread out the manpower as well.

The ticket prices for the games should easily cover the costs of printing of tickets. The tickets cost $2 and the judge could cash them in for $1 back. Even if every one of those attendees only played 1 game, the tickets should generate at least $30,000 and probably closer to well over $100,000. This should cover any cost of bringing in a big name guests.

The hotels used to be filled. Based on standard convention deals, if you guarantee a certain number of rooms booked, the hotel usually comps you a certain amount of rooms. With over 10 hotels being filled, any hotel space you need should be covered.
Could it be the spread of GenCon to GenCon SoCal, GenConUK, GenConOZ causing trouble with GenCon itself? See the open letter from Peter himself about GenConSoCal’s demise: http://www.gencon.com/2007/socal/press/Open-Letter.aspx

All the best Peter, we want you to be around in 5 to 10 years when we can start taking the kids again.

be the guy

When we were last at the local Games Workshop, the clerk mentioned that someone had bought one of the ForgeWorld titans and brings it by from time to time for Apocalypse events. It turns out that we know the guy.

He had been selling games by mail order and had a booth at the weekend flea market for a while. Since I had experience in this, we had been pushing him to go to GAMA.
I had sold games by mail order for several years and had looked into opening a store front for a while but never got enough together to take that step. We had been doing booths at comic shows and conventions but they didn’t have the same permanent flea market set-ups at that time. We had kids and it became more difficult to set up and watch these temporary booths so we let it slide and looked into what we needed to open a storefront.
Those things never materialized so we ended up closing out that venture for now.

The GAMA trade show was a great resource though and we highly recommend it to anyone who is in the retail game business. We were pushing him to take his wife with him so she could see how much of an actual business this can be. With his impending wedding though he wasn’t able to get to it. I just found out he is out for now as well.

I had also been pushing him to go to GAMA and Gencon so he could be ‘the guy’. At both of these venues, you get to meet the game designers, see the new products, and learn about what’s new and coming up soon. You get to be ‘the guy’ that knows these things and has met these people and can talk to others about this. People who visit the store and run into you can seek your opinion and knowledge in these matters because you’re ‘the guy’.
I used to be the guy but, since I haven’t been to Gencon in several years, haven’t done an open Wincon in years, and haven’t been around Keycon as much these last few years, a lot of the new crowd doesn’t know me as the guy anymore.

When I found out that it was him who had bought the titan, I was able to congratulate him on being ‘the guy’ after all. Anyone else who wants to congratulate him or see his titan can pop by the Games Workshop on Dec 29 or Jan 6 (5th?).

at par

The Canadian dollar is at $0.986 US today. Hey, 98.6, it’s good to have you back again.
I remember, as a child, the dollar used to be close to the US dollar. We would often seen ‘at par’ signs in Fargo and Grand Forks when on holidays. Comics used to be 25 cents, 30 cents, even ‘still only 35 cents’ and it didn’t matter which side of the border you were on.

Later, the dollar slipped, and comics would have two prices, a US price and, in tiny print, a higher Canadian one. In my early trips to Gencon, the dollar was firmly fixed in the .60s and you had to really work out whether it really was a good deal, especially since the weekend limit was only $50. It was like having metric money – with $1 US being worth $1.6 Canadian.

Last year, with the dollar in the upper .80s, the wife was buying books in the US on holidays as it was cheaper paying the regular US price than paying the higher Canadian price at home. This year, at almost par, the math becomes very easy on looking at the deals and with the limit raised to $200, it becomes dangerous.

I remember the last trip back from Gencon, and we were close to the limit, depending on how the dollar had done over the week. We pulled up to the border and the Custom’s officer asked us, “Just the four of you?”
It took me a second to realize that the kids also counted towards our limit. “Yes, yes indeed.”


A happy TLAP day to all of you scurvy dogs out there.

a Gencon too far

This is Gencon weekend. It started yesterday and, in a perfect world, I would be there. Gencon is a huge game convention that used to take over MECCA in downtown Milwaukee. Yearly we would make our annual pilgrimage to MECCA to see what were the new games coming out, meet the game designers, be able to purchase the new games or even find some obscure copies of old games, and most of all to game.

A few years back, Gencon moved out to Indianapolis and we had a second child. These two factors combined to make it unfeasible for us to make it down anymore. Now that the kids are getting older, we have hopes to make it down again sometime – while there is still a hobby for it.

I highly recommend it to anyone who’s into gaming. Even for those who aren’t into gaming, it’s still a blast. The dealer’s room used to be a thing of beauty. There were celebrities to meet and from which to get autographs. And the gaming was something else.

http://www.gencon.com/

One day, we shall be together again. Until then, I’ll bury myself in getting everything ready for Wincon 2007.