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Tuesday, August 11, 2015

TRAVEL: Gen Con Indiannapolis



After 5 or 6 years off, I finally returned to the "best 4 days in gaming". Check out some of the sights and a nice gallery of minis from the painting competition.

My favorite thing from the trip was still that Angel Giraldez demo I posted over the weekend. Got me all pumped to paint again. I'll give his book a shameless plug just because I liked the guy. Just found out he actually taught classes that I totally missed. Boo.

I really did a piss poor job of taking pictures this year. Shame because there was a lot of fun stuff. The show floor is cool, with more games being demoed than you could ever imagine in one place. Of course I took no pictures of that. What's really impressive though is the amount of space just devoted to gaming. Here's one small corner of the gaming gall- the space devoted to Magic. You can't even see it all. Probably at least 100 tables just for one game.


I tried to take a quick video to show the size of the gaming area. It's an epic fail on many levels. I obviously hit record before I intended and I can't get the damn thing to rotate, plus it's just too damn fast. Crappy video but you can kind of get a sense of the scale.


Beyond that, there's tons of smaller rooms dedicated to every kind of gaming you can imagine. 6 tables for Werewolf. 40 tables for Pathfinder pickup games. 50 tables for Legend of the Five Rings. It just keeps going and going. Add to that seminars on everything from publishing your own games, to improv, to fantasy writing (Terry Brooks was in attendance). And every hotel and restaurant in a 5 block radius has dedicated space to play, or people are just playing at dinner. Just a staggering scale. Supposedly ~56k gamers in attendance this year.

GW hasn't made it to Gen Con in years. They really don't give much love to this side of the pond. This was pretty much the entirety of their booth, so it's hard to say they made it this year either. Forge World was at least selling models. More on that in a later post. Sigmar models looked fantastic though.


This kind of cracked me up


And this company, Geek Chic made some awesome gaming furniture, including this dining table with space for games under the table surface, a pull out drawer for the DM to set up his books, and a rail all the way around where you could mount cupholders. 


Spinning dice rings, because you know...


And the minis! Lots of nice stuff. Here's a sampling.










Nice stuff, and a fun trip. Glad to be home and eager to get my hands back on my airbrush to practice some new skills.

As a parting shot...you're welcome. 


~Deet

3 comments:

  1. Beautiful armies! Geek chic stuff is great, but be prepared to wait 12 months!

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  2. lol was that guy at the event or outside in an alley?

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    Replies
    1. that was up against the back wall, just by the food stand. Because that's what you want to see when you're eating barely-palatable convention center food.

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