GenCon Thursday

Elizabeth and I have been very busy here at GenCon, doing lots of fun stuff. Thursday, we browsed the exhibit hall for a bit and found my friend Zev, working his booth for his company, Z-Man Games. Elizabeth was amazed at the warm reception I got when I found him. When I was running DemonBlade Games, she was really too young to appreciate the kinds of friendships I established with some other guys in the industry.

Just walking around is interesting in and of itself, not just because of exhibitors, but because of other people attending. These two guys posed for me in mock combat:


Elf Guy Battles a Ghost Buster

We signed up for several events, then we got to play in a True Dungeon adventure. This is really pretty cool, as you walk through these incredibly dark rooms that are tricked out to look like carved dungeon halls. In any given room, there are either traps to puzzle past or monsters to fight. I played the cleric of our group. To make it more interesting than just rolling dice, the power of the spells I cast was dependent on memory. They gave me a set of about 15 prayer beads, all different. Each corresponds to a word, such as piety or fortitude. When I want to cast a spell, I would tell the guy running the room which one and he would ask me to show him a particular one. "Show me your bead of grace," he'd say, and I'd pick out the one that looks like a little melon. The less tries to get the right bead, the better the effect of the spell. I got them on the first try every time, so I was very effective. In the end, out our group of seven characters, two were killed by a failed attempt past a puzzle room and the rest of us died in the last room by not figuring out the final puzzle fast enough. That wasn't all that uncommon, apparently, and it was still lots of fun. There's a second adventure, and Elizabeth and I will play that one later today.

We dropped by the miniatures hall after that to see how some of my old StormReaver demo guys were doing running games of Shock Force and variants, that being one of the games I wrote. There was a Shock Force game, a Stargate variant, a Civil War variant, and a WWII variant all going. It's so cool to see people still playing my games. The WWII game looked particularly well planned out, and I got a picture of one of the battles in progress that came out rather well:


WWII Action Using WarEngine Rules

We had dinner with Zev and Paul (Zev's friend that helps him with Z-Man.) Elizabeth and I then tried out a game of Memoir '44, a much simpler WWII battle game by Days of Wonder. Finally, we headed over to one of the hotels where Zev's company sponsors a Hong Kong Action Movie room that runs movies from 8am to midnight every day of the convention. We started watching Big Trouble in Little China, but by this time it was really getting late and we were both kind of nodding off, so we headed back to the hotel for the night.