Friday, July 20, 2012

Game Con Review: Dexcon 15

The GameWick Booth at DexCon
Well, another amazing Double Exposure run game convention has come and gone and boy was this one a doozie!  Five days of non-stop gaming and the biggest Dexcon crowd I’ve ever seen [and yes, I was at the first Dexcon in '92]. I attended this summer’s con as a part of the GameWick Games crew. I’ve been with GameWick for most Double Exposure's cons for the past three years. This year we were showing off GameWick’s hot new offering, the Zombie Apocolypse Game: Pittsburgh ’68. It was a blast! I ran 7 of the 13 demos for the weekend. Lots of players survived but plenty more joined the zombie hordes.

In between, I managed to get in a game of Castle Panic (we survived with two towers left), ran a game of WEGS Old Skool (Wingbit’s Dunge ‘o Doom where the players fled from a Minotaur and his undead band minutes before midnight [they claim it was so they could make the d20 burlesque]) and finished the weekend with a cool new horror RPG (link is to author’s blog). It isn’t published yet so I won’t go into too many details but it is a quick little system that doesn’t get in the way of a good story – and a good story we had – them nazi zombies and zombie minotaur didn’t stand a chance! [Anyone noticing a theme to the weekend?]

War Game Room at Dexcon
Overall there were an amazing number of events (over 1000 listed) including roughly 50 LARPs (some with out-of-this-world costuming), a board game room bursting at the seams, hundreds of RPGS and many more events. I do regret not poking my head into the war game room a bit more often but I did catch the setup of a hero clicks game with 3D scenery (including a couple of city blocks, a model of the Justice League and a third model of the bat cave)! Truly amazing stuff.

Double Exposure runs a fall game designers con in November called Metatopia and a winter con in February called Dreamation. I’m reasonably sure I’ll be heading to Metatopia (although there is the off chance I’ll head to Scranton for MepaCon (that same weekend instead) and am planning on hitting Dreamation come February. Can’t wait!

Anyone else hit a good con this month?

Sunday, July 1, 2012

July Update

Great news! We've now listed over 400 game conventions!

The breakdown is as follows:

Australia/New Zealand - 17
Canada - 34
Europe [non-UK]- 30
Online - 1
UK/Ireland - 32
USA - 287
World [all other] - 6

We're taking a break from searching out more cons at this point but will probably stumble across more as we move forward. We do have a list of game conventions in Europe yet to process so that number might tick up a bit.

We're now reaching out to the organizers of the listed conventions to see if they'd like to improve the descriptions we've added for their con. It's a work in process. Through out this process we've found a couple of really interesting game conventions and will be adding those to the blog as well.

Happy gaming!