HalCon weekend

I drove to Halifax yesterday, in the driving rain - pardon the pun.  Except for one spot just past Truro, where the rain was so thick as it swept across the highway that it looked like blowing snow, it was mostly just a rainy day.

I've had my first day at HalCon and so far, things are good.  I wish I had more photos to show for the day. I took quite a few but I think I fudged up a setting on the camera. That and shooting in low light conditions conspired to make it one of the worst photo session I've done on the past five years. It was massively disappointing but these are the bumps in the road we all have to deal with.

In many ways, this years HalCon is a winner. The venue at the World Trade and Convention Centre is a superior setting.  Here are the big rooms with lots of artists, vendors, game demos.

Tables and tables of Warhammer 40K players and their wicked looking models

Here is the variety of special function rooms where a sizable audience can pack it in with their genre heroes for demonstrations, Q&A sessions, and photos.

John Paladin painting up an audience member as a Klingon

Here are the wide corridors that can accommodate milling crowds with or without costumes. Yet, my joy has been small and fleeting.

I'm hoping Sunday will be a better experience, but it feels like something is missing and I can't put my finger on it and if I can't figure it out, I'm afraid it will bug me so much I'll be distracted from the business of having fun.

The highlight of the day for me was hearing Steve Jackson promote his latest game creations. Here is the man from Texas, whose namesake - Steve Jackson Games - is a 30 year old veteran of the indie game industry.

It's a Duck of Doom dice bag, inside a Cthulhu tentacle dice bag.  What else?

Apologies if the Duck or the Tentacle confuse you. Go check out the website.

My favourite Steve Jackson Game is OGRE (but I think I told you that once before).  I'd show you photos of the cool new Ogre 6th edition stuff coming this time next year, but I have this horrible photo shoot thing going on.

SJ Games' big property these days is a game called Munchkin.  The game is designed to make fun of all those rules lawyers you've ever been forced to play with.  Wonderfully, today Steve revealed for the first time, the latest add-on for the game called Munchkin: Apocalypse.

The apocalyptic future of Munchkin

I was really pleased that he choose this setting to announce his newest game.

All in all a good first day, although there are some things that could be improved.  First, I walked the Con for several hours but never found a handy source of food.  The convention centre is attached to a mall, and there is mall food available, but nothing directly related to, or within the physical bounds of the convention.

The vendor area is still too closely packed.  This may have been a space constraint, but I think a more creative arrangement of tables would help.  The artists area seemed to have people just crammed together too.

I was disappointed with the game vendors.  The selection seemed smaller than last year, and the prices looked like they were up. The variety of games represented was much narrower and past mainstays of the industry like Dungeons & Dragons seemed to have all but disappeared.

As they say, tomorrow is another day.  My convention buddy Andrew and I are raiding his game closet tonight, looking for something to bring with us to play on Sunday, something quick and easy to play, with some action to attract on-lookers, and maybe something that interested players might want to join for a couple of turns.


Day 2 Update - Sickness has descends

We were unable to attend Sunday, Day 2 due to illness. Next year... However, the day wasn't without it's perks.  I had the opportunity to introduce a friend to the game of Chess.  I can now confirm that my skill level is worse than that of a fifth grader.