GenCon 2015

I attended GenCon again this year. Its 4 days of gaming which I figured out this year I’ve been doing for over 20 years and if you count Axis and Allies it might be beyond 25 years. I doubt when my father introduced me and a friend to Axis and Allies all those years ago, as a way to keep us occupied and out of the adults hair, he imagined it would be a lifelong hobby. One of the good things about being closer to Indy is that I am again able to connect with the 19&one gaming club in Indianapolis. A few of these guys I have known since college and I think we put on a pretty good set of games for GenCon attendees.

This year we offered 10 games of the 3D Game of Thrones game which is pretty impressive if you consider that those games ran 4 hours each and had 6 players. That’s a lot of hours gaming. We had a great placement in the gaming hall this year so we had a ton of traffic and it seemed like a picture was being taken of the game every 5 minutes or so. A fellow priest from Iowa came in and he ran the bulk of them. One bonus for him was that the guys who run Boardgame Geek stopped by and he got to talk with them about the game.

I also ran a couple of American Civil War games using my simple rules. The games were fun and the first game had a lot of new comers to the ACW gaming. Its always nice to introduce people to historical wargaming and GenCon is a great place to do it.

I also ran a games using a friend and mine setting we call “A Very Divided America.” It’s based on the “Very British Civil War” that is popular in England right now. Our setting basically imagines that the Civil War ended in a stale mate and so America subdivided into smaller countries influenced by the political systems popular in the 20s and 30s. The game I ran was between the fascist and communists in the plains with the Reds trying to take a small town from the occupying fascist. Both games, while different, were very even and fun.

Overall it was a great time and I hope to be able to do it again next year. It’s nice to reconnect with friends, old and new parishioners, and see folks that I see each year only at GenCon. While the news always has fun at the GenCon, sometimes at the attendees’ expense, the people who play the games are almost always pleasant and fun to run games for each year.