This GenCon was my first, so I don't have a good reference for comparison. That said, I had a great time.
A bit impressive and overwhelming at first because of the shear scale. 30,000 or so gamers in a relatively small area will do that. The dealers' room/exhibit hall alone easily took a good couple of hours to wander through assuming that one didn't stop very often. Rather crowded most of the time with wall to wall nerds.
A few dealers in the exhibit hall had the T20 main book and one had copies of the main book,
Gateway to Destiny, and TA1. Unfortunately, the later dealer's copies were all a little mangled, but I didn't mind too much since that dealer was selling everything in the store at 50% off, so I picked up the lightest mangled copy of
Gateway to Destiny even though I already have the PDF. The next day, the copies of GtD and the main book were gone.
Other Traveller related cool things in the dealers' room were the demos of Cosmographer (Campaign Cartographer add on), AstroSynthesis (Fractal Mapper related 3D starmap software),
GURPS Traveller: Nobles, and Dwarven Forge's sci-fi starter sets.
My favorite non Traveller related cool thing were the
Hirst Arts "Fantasy Architecture" molds. Basically, silicon rubber molds for casting plaster building blocks. Pour plaster in, pop the dried plaster out, glue together, paint, and then, after some work, you've got pieces to make dungeons, temples, buildings, and castles. Could be a new hobby for me. If you go to the website, look under the Projects link to see some examples.
I sat through a short demo of the
Battlestations game that someone mentioned. It's sort of a combo spaceship combat and inside a spaceship combat game. Not something that is at all useful for Traveller, and I didn't particularly enjoy the demo.
I played in both of Flynn's scheduled games of T20 as well as Psion's pickup T20 game and enjoyed myself. I particularly liked meeting (in person) Shadowdancer, Torander, and Psion from CoTI. Flynn's scheduled games mostly had people new to T20, and he gave them a good introduction. I did seem to continue in my quest to get the Doc Zhang character killed in Flynn's game, but I wasn't successful in spite of being intentionally shot by one of his crewmates at the captain's orders for destroying the evil corporations samples (so the captain couldn't resell them) in the first game and a truly bad set of Hide rolls in the second game.
There were a few Traveller things in the auction. I picked up a $7.50 copy of
Azhanti High Lightning that only had the deckplans and counters (for selling on eBay) at the Auction Store. On Sunday, a complete copy of AHL went for about $20; a copy of
Fifth Frontier War went for about $25, and Tom Wham's copy of
Striker went for about $18. Quite a few Traveller items went up Sunday morning for some reason while I happened to be there.
Most amusing thing that I saw was the clash of cultures as thousands of Indiana Colts and NY Jetts fans arrived for a preseason football game Saturday afternoon/evening and ran into the heaviest day of GenCon which also had the heaviest concentration of GenCon people in costume. Talk about a clash of cultures.
Unlike what some reported last year, finding a place to eat without a really long wait wasn't a problem for me except for Saturday evening when our chosen restaurant was full inside because of the football game. We got to people watch while eating on the patio though, so things worked out just fine.
Ah, I'll have to really try and get there again next year.
Ron
