This was my first Gencon and it was from a working point of view. I was working for Hinterwelt Enterprises the whole con, but had plenty of time to go out an wander the dealer hall.
Tuesday: Bill, Theo (Bills 2 year old son), and I load up the van and leave for Chicago(burbs). Surprisingly the van (the Hinterwagon) was a great and comfy ride and had more than enough room to hall all the stuff we needed for the booth. The ~7 trip to Chicago went much more smooth than I expected and Theo was an excellent traveler.
Wed:We stayed overnight in Chicago where we picked up Linda (Hinterwelt's editor and Bill's wife) and left @ about 9am and arrived @ the convention center @ ~noon. Then the scramble started because once you pull into the loading area you have 30 min to totally unload and get out. No problem for us because we had the good luck of having our booth on the back row of the dealer hall and not far from the loading docks. Once we had unloaded Linda, theo, and I went an checked in @ the Hilton and parked the van while Bill began setting up the booth. It took us a while to park (the carrier on the top of the van was giving us clearence problems), but evetually we made it back to the dealer hall and helped bill finish the setup. We finally finished setup @ about 6pm and headed back to the hotel to shower up. Just before we were going to leave for dinner we got the call from Rafi (my fellow demo/booth dude) who had just landed. Rafi met us @ the hotel and we left there and went to P.F. Chengs for dinner. The place was packed, but the service and food was great. Bill,Linda, and Theo made their way back to the Hotel for the evening, but Rafi and I decided to hit up the RAM for beer! Man they have the best beer ever, any selfrespecting dwarf would love this stuff. I had and O'reillys and a Buttfaced Amber, great stuff but much more strong than regular beer. Rafi had a couple of IPAs and he said that they were his favorite. We made our way back to the hotel around 1:30 am and crashed shortly after.
Thursday: Started off great, we had a lot of good traffic and talked to a bunch of cool people. We were a bit worried about having the "D&D Online" booth across from us, but the guys running in were really nice and kept the volume down to reasonable levels so we could talk with our customers. Thanks! (BTW D&D online looks great) As it was last year, Squirrel Attack! RPG was a hot seller and so was the boardgame based on it. Many people stopped and looked @ our "know your nuts" T-shirts and we sold some. lots of folks looked at and chatted with us about Roma Imperious. The free "squirrel die" give away was going well and we handed out many of them. We also had two demos that day: Rafi demoed Shades of Earth, while Bill ran Supers Inc. . Both demos had good turn outs and the players enjoyed the games. I worked the booth all day since my demos for Nebuleon were not scheduled until Friday and Sat. One thing I learned, was that standing the better part of 8 hours with my bad back is no good. So the hall closed @ six and we all limp down to the RAM for dinner. I had a burger the size of my head, and it was very good. Rafi had some more beer. We had planned on doing some after hours gaming, but we were all so beat we just ended up going to sleep early. I must be getting old or something.
Friday: Well, after a good sleep i was feeling good again. Made it up to the hall a bit early and took a quick look around. Saw some cool stuff. The Privateer booth was awesome, and so was the FFGs. I saw the booth for 7th Circle and looked @ Qin. very nice looking game. Made it back to the booth , and we had another great day. I noticed when I asked about system preference that many more people than expected were saying they were looking to try something other than d20 for a change. Not sure if that is an industry trend or it was just a fluke. The day was better on by back since I got to sit more with the demo scheduled. After the con we went to the place in the Hilton for dinner and I had prime rib, which was no doubt the best I have ever had. Rafi met with a friend and went out partying all night and from the sound of it had way to much vodka & redbull. He stumbled in @ around 3:30 am.
Sat: Rafi had a demo @ 10am and jsut barely made it on time, but had another good showing. Traffic @ the booth was good again. We had visits from many rpg news sites like Zachary from RPG blog, a reporter for the local news, Gaming report, a fiction writer (Cindy Prey IIRC), and some others. Bill ran a demo of Squirrel Attack the RPG and had a full table and much fun was had. I had a only two players show for my Neb adventure, but I ran it anyway. It went well and we played out the whole four hours, but with two players I had to water it down to the point where some of the feel that I was going for was lost. But both of the players said the game was fun and I also enjoyed the game. I'm a big believer of running ademo game no matter what the turnout is. So I wrapped up the game @ ~8pm and Rafi (who I nearly had to drag with me) & I went Enzo's pizza place for dinner and discussed some game ideas and such.
Sunday: I spent a good part of the day walking around the dealer hall talking to people and checking out some new games. Talked to Kevin S from Palladium, who is despite what people may say a really nice guy. Stopped by Neko's games and had a short talk with Pete (the owner). Stopped by the Green Ronin booth, wow they some really good deals! Hopefully they sold a lot of stuff. looked @ Qin again, but didn't end up buying it. Checked out the key 20 booth and picked up a copy of Burning Empires (sweet book so far). Talked Jeff Combos @ the Exile Games booth and geek out on
Hollow Earth Expedition and picked up a copy of it along with a set of free dice. There were many other people and place I saw, but these are the ones that come to mind the most. So, 4 o'clock comes around and the convention ends and we pack up quick and get the heck out of Indy.
Conclusion:
had great time. Met a lot of cool people and i feel that we represented Hinterwelt well. The lack of buzz around the hall about specific games leads me to believe that this years Gencon release as a whole were not as spectacular as normal. There were a lot more Video game booths there than I thought there would be. We had D&D online right across from us, Pox Nora, Stronghold ,and a Warhammer game all right next to us. I have to thank the Pox Nora people for watching out for Theo when he escaped our booth, you guys were really nice about it.
Not sure if I met any other ENworld folks or not, but if you stopped by our booth or played in any of our demos let me know!
