Going this year, as usual! Registration is finally open for events, and I’ve just finished crafting my schedule. I’m thinking I might even put a few things up for auction - I’ve got a Black Lotus that could pay for the vacation.
Anyone else going?
I’m going; this’ll be my fifth year there.
As with most conventions, I’m strictly playing RPGs. Living Forgotten Realms on Thursday, and Chronicles of the Shattered Empires (the sequel to Living Arcanis) on Friday and Saturday.
I’ve got a group of fellow RPGA players from across the country with whom I’m friends; we meet up at Origins and / or GenCon every year to play together. We’re very much looking forward to it, even though several of our group can’t make it this year, due to scheduling or monetary issues.
My girlfriend and I will be there (our third year there). Mostly doing LARP’s with an RPG or two.
I did the RPGA thing back in the day with living Greyhawk, though I never did RPGA at cons.
I seem to divide my time equally between RPGs and Board Games most recent years, and I always leave time for the Smithee Awards!
I’m going. Haven’t been in a few years due to physical problems, but a test run at Marcon this past weekend shows I’m up for it.
I’m excited about Origins cuz they’re releasing the Dresden Files RPG there. The company is running a bunch of games, and I planned to play all weekend. They filled up in a few hours after pre-reg opened, I was only able to get into a few. Oh well. I signed up for some mini painting seminars, and some Call of Cthulhu.
Not only did they fill up, but registration went down Friday, so the two slots of RPG’s my girlfriend and I were planning on doing (we tend to go about 80/20 LARP/RPG at Origins and 60/40 LARP/RPG at GenCon) were filled with games that wouldn’t have been our first choices (though, they still sounded interesting).
This seems to be a big year for new licensed RPGs - Smallville and Leverage both have new games being demonstrated as well, and it seems like there was a fourth one that caught my eye.
I’ll be making my first appearance at it. I won a national qualifying tournament of Settlers of Catan and am taking part in the Nationals for a trip to the World Championship in Germany. Beyond that I’ll likely spend most of my time in the board game room as rpgs/larps aren’t really my thing.
Quick question. How far is the airport from the convention center? I might end up cutting it pretty close.
Not far. 670 is a relatively new road that basically runs by both of them - I mean, airports have their usual slowness, of course, but door to door? 15 to 20 minutes, I should think, and that mainly from traffic.
I’m curious about this. My buddies and I love to play SoC; I fancy myself as being quite good at it, I play online quite a bit as well.
How do the tournaments work? SoC seems like a game that, because of its cooperative aspects, could have a lot of collusion and/or cheating problems.
For a very thorough answer you can read my rather verbose tournament report
here
The shorter answer is that tournament games are a bit different from regular games. The basic format is to have a round robin of 3 or 4 games with the top 4 players based on wins reach the finals. If wins are tied you go by total points and if that is still tied you go by percentage of points from your games (ie if you got 9 and your opponents had 10, 6, and 5 you would be at 30%) You rotate to play different players each game so colluding isn’t a major problem here. In fact some of the traditional colluding of Catan is absent here since the motivation is different. Normally you do everything you can to stop the person winning, but here you may trade with a guy who might win if it can get you an extra point or two and help win a tiebreaker.
The finals of the qualifier were a bit more problematic. We played 4 games rotating who goes first. Things went well for the first three games but got awkward for game four. I had won games 1 and 3. In order to win all I needed was the guy who had won game 2 not to win game 4. Thus, it was in my best interest to throw the game to one of the other players. I didn’t quite do that, but I certainly focused on thwarted him at every opportunity.
Sorting out Magic the Gathering cards - going to sell my collection en masse to Troll and Toad. I would probably get more on eBay, but I really don’t have the time. And they’ll also buy my Star Wars and Spellfire cards!