GaryCon Recap

Last weekend was GaryCon, in beautiful Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where it all began. If you’ve never been to this con, I cannot recommend it highly enough. There are thousands of gamers, artists, and vendors, all there to pay homage to Gary Gygax, the co-inventor of Dungeons & Dragons. Also in attendance are dozens of luminaries from the early days of the hobby and TSR, most of whom are happy to chat, sign autographs, and receive free drinks at the bar in the evening.

I arrived Wednesday evening after a 13 hour drive from New Jersey, all done in a single shot. Since I brought both the regular batch of BRW Games books and a large selection of non-BRW products, including wargame titles from Decision Games and board games from Steve Jackson Games, I opted for a different setup for the booth:

The wargames turned out to be a huge success. By 11:00 on Thursday, they were almost all gone, and by 2:00 the last two were sold. Bringing them was an experiment; I wasn’t sure if they would sell at all. Experiment successful! I’ll be bringing a lot more of them next year, and to other cons as well. Overall, things went exceedingly well. A lot of people heard the Good Word of Adventures Dark and Deep, and I actually ran out of Castle of the Mad Archmage, and had to take orders (all of which have been submitted, by the way). The emails with the links for PDF versions of the books that people bought went out this morning.

There are actually four dealers’ rooms; the main one (where I was), an annex (which was under-advertised at first, but more signage was added and things apparently turned up), a room exclusively for Hackmaster, and an artists’ alley. Whew!

On the whole, this was a spectacular con, and I’m happy to be coming back next year. And now, more photos of the dealers and a few bits of gaming:

Posted in Conventions.