Lots of People Playing Lots of Games
No one in this photograph is watching TV.
Here we are at Origins, Day Three. Wait, Day Four? I have no idea how long I’ve been here. I do know that I played about a half dozen different games today, plus an entire Magic tournament. If we each get our own personal Heaven, mine includes a perpetual game con.
As you can see, I solved the camera uploading problem. There appears to be an Internet connection in the convention press room (at least, there was an Ethernet cable hanging out of a wall socket when I went in to look, but there’s never been anyone around to ask about it), but frankly, lugging around a laptop all day isn’t worth you lot getting your gaming news a few hours earlier (I keed, I keed!). So you’ll have to make do with night-time updates and a backlog of coverage for the next week or two.
By the way, if you’ve never been to a big game con, the photo above depicts only one-fourth of the open tabletop gaming room. Behind me is the entire Magic tournament area. And that entire room? One of three. The other two house miniatures games and the dealer’s hall. Then there are literally dozens of auxiliary ballrooms and conference rooms, each with an RPG, LARP, war game, seminar or something else amazing going on.
The dealer’s hall itself is the seventh wonder of the gaming world. Everyone is there showing off new games, new supplements, new leather clothing and padded weaponry, and so forth. You can find ridiculous deals on pretty much anything (today I scored two adventures and a guide book for the old Marvel Superheroes SAGA RPG for about $16). There are two giant booths seling nothing but dice.
A lot of dealers are selling singles. The secondary market remains strong for Magic cards, Monsterpocalypse figures and certain D&D minis. HeroClix singles are falling in price along with other out of print games. You can find as much as a 50 percent difference in prices between dealers who are literally 20 feet away from each other, so it pays to shop around. This happened to me today, when I picked a pair of Boartusk Lieges to use in the Warrior deck for $2 each. They were $4 each at another table. I bought a HorrorCix booster for $4, then found it for $3 around the corner.
By the way, I wanted to mention that the folks at the Reaper minis booth were incredibly helpful. One employee asked what I was looking for, and didn’t balk at my weird request (“A drow barbarian holding a two-handed sword”). She helped me track down some likely elves, who will stand in nicely with some purplish-black skin. Then another employee found a perfect greatsword wielding elf, but he was part of a three-pack, and I didn’t really need all three. So he offered to open the pack and sell me just the one I wanted. Virtually everyone I’ve met this week has been truly friendly and helpful, but this was outstanding customer service. Totally above and beyond. Thanks Reaper!
Stay tuned – tomorrow morning I’ll post the full BattleTech simulator report.
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June 27th, 2009 3:13 AM
NO! The Ghost Bear agent musn’t be allowed to know of this priceless technology!