Gen Con Day Four – Unsellable Games, Dynamic Retrofuturism, and Closing Time

Woke up vastly early at 6*, when I didn’t really want to be awake until 7, so I spent my time weighing things; I think I can get all of my Gen Con purchases into cabin baggage, which pleases me.

* OK, so not that early for me in normal circumstances, but I got to bed at 1:30am.
You Can’t Judge Me! I Am The Night!!

Plans for the morning involved having breakfast with Frank, probably at the JW, and that’s exactly what happened; This was in marked contrast to many other meals, mostly because large groups of people, or at least of the people I know, cannot make a decision quickly, nor can they easily stick to it.
So we breakfasted, and Frank paid, and we ambled back to the ICC, picking up a friend of his along the way; Said friend is on a podcast, or possibly a vidcast, called Counter Slam, so we did the trading of business cards thing, though he also gave me a promotional D6, so I guess that’s a win for him?

Ran into Tom & Stacy outside the VIG; They were on their way home, so it was kind of lucky to catch up with them, however accidentally, before they went.

I did a final run through the Hall Of Capitalism to pick up a few things, including a copy of School Days, which the author signed, & a D30, because I’ve never had one, despite having no use for it.
Along the way I wandered past a booth with a possibly-interesting game called Flatpack, which I think I need to do some more looking into before making a buy/no buy decision, but it wasn’t a particularly good environment due to a somewhat desperate “please buy things” vibe the noise of being on a corner & there being multiple semi-independent vendors in the same booth.
One guy asked me, seemingly out of curiosity, which games I’d heard of out of what was in the booth, but his reaction on discovering that none of his were in that list was a resigned “yep, none of mine”. Turns out he’d had a dreadful Gen Con, and about the only things leaving his table were business cards.
Sadly, of the two games he mentioned, one was a love-letter to horror movies, which might be interesting but was too big-ass a book to get a feel for right there, and the other … I cannot imagine wanting to play about Angels Of Death reducing the population by killing them in a manner related to how you died.
(The phrases “Gothic as fuck” & “White Wolf without the bullshit” were used)

My last game of Gen Con was Rocket Age, which only came out this week, which lead to a certain “How does this work” vibe, and kind of a linear play to the game. Granted, everyone was pretty tired, which didn’t help, and the GM had had less than a week to learn the system & the scenario.
(one of the other players was someone I’d chatted to at last years Gen Con after checking out how Games On Demand worked)

Ran into Norman after that; He’d been having a whale of a time, including LARPs & a live performance from the people behind The Gamers.
There was a vague thought about dinner, but as I was meeting people, Norman took my warning about the inherent delay in actually eating & went off to hunt his own unhealthy foodstuff.

Catching up with Frank was pretty easy, and eventually Monica & Steve showed up, along with a couple of friends.
Hunger seemed to win through over the usual indecision & multiply-changing-plans, and we ended up at the sports bar in the JW for a meal before Steve & Monica had to race off & catch a bus back to Chicago.
Given the lack of fun had on the trip down, they weren’t looking forward to the trip back.

Hung around with Frank for a bit before The Tireds started to take hold, so we went our separate ways, and I came back to the hotel to relax, read for a while, and watch a show about fixing bad tattoos.

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