Gottacon

Gottacon!

Early this February was the fifth iteration of Gottacon, a gaming convention in Victoria, BC (actually Saanich). And it was my second time attending. I didn’t really talk about it here last year (because I fail at blogging), but I’ll try to cover the basics and give brief impressions of both events.

So, some basics: Gottacon covers pretty much all games that don’t involve running around. There was a small-ish corner devoted to the most hallowed nerd afflicition, pen and paper role playing games. There were endless tables for Magic: The Gathering, which is apparently still a thing. There were even more tables devoted to miniatures and their foam-based battlefields. And yet more tables in the back, covered in computers and monitors. And a few more tables with bigger monitors for console gaming, and a few trusty CRTs for retrogaming. And yet more tables for board games and card games.

Awesome.

It wasn’t all gaming, though. In the middle was a dealers section, selling stuff from electronics to dice to armor. At the front was registration, the silent auction, a refreshments stand; all the non-gaming things needed to survive the weekend.

And, with the exception of the dealers, everything was open 24 hours a day for the entire weekend. Which is just… awesome. Yeah. :D

Highlight of 2012: Sabacc, definitely. Or, as I called ‘til I found out the name again this year, “Star Wars Poker”. It’s the game Han Solo played when he won the Millennium Falcon. It’s … poker-ish, with a strong randomizing element — after each player’s turn, there’s a strong chance that the cards in hand that aren’t frozen have to be returned to the dealer and replaced with random cards. So yeah. I stumbled across it while it was starting at midnight, Friday night, and ended up playing ‘til I conceded defeat at 4 AM. I nearly won it all! .. and I was actually winning for most of the night, and knocked out a good three people while at it. But I played my final hand badly and the other remaining player won the special pot, giving her the lead.

Yeah, awesome.

Highlight of 2013: … Actually, this feels kinda wrong, but I think my favourite thing from this year’s con was just having more friends around. Last year I knew Gavin, Carson, and some of the IRL Events people, and that was about it. This year I had more friends going, knew more of the volunteers, and that just made it… groovy.

I look forward to next year’s con.

Comments

Marc: So what does “Gottacon” stand for, if anything?

Any Diplomacy games in operation? Someday I’ll play that again. I was expecting to get my set out of storage tonight, but alas I bought the wrong size bookcase on Sunday, and thus my project to unpack boxes from my move to Ahuntsic is delayed.

nfg: I asked. Apparently there’s a story behind it, but it’s “meant to capture the spirit of people who love conventions.” I read it as “gotta con!”, where con is some sort of verb for not sleeping and imbibing excessive amounts of caffeine.

And yo! No Diplomacy, but there were some excessively long games. I barely managed avoided playing an expansion of Talisman, which according to the group playing would keep the game down to six hours instead of however long the normal game goes on.

Marc: If a game of Diplomacy outlasts a convention, then the problem is not that the game is “excessively long”; the problem is that the convention is excessively short. _Mutatis mutandis for a party.

It’s all really a question of how much time you provide people to negotiate between turns anyway._

Marc: Sorry about the excessive italics. Got my closing tag wrong, I guess.

Test test. Test