Con hiker day 1: portcon

Games: 1
Junk foods: 3

I'm off the trail forever. My new summer project is going from game convention to game convention playing all the games I can and getting bloated on fingers and fries.

Today I did port con. A small mostly fandom related con in the great city of Portland Maine. It was cool to go to a small regional con as opposed to the craziness of gen con with its 50k attendees.

Portcon has about 2 thousand attendees from what I gather and there are no facilities for a con of that size in the area so the locations were a bit crazy. The vendor room was split among the three ballrooms in the doubletree, which obviously doesn't host this kind of thing often, no pipe and drape, banquet chairs instead of folding, nobody seemed to know how to turn on the lights.

With no big rooms the con decided to move many of the big audience events into a tent outside. (A 40x80 Olympic style tent for those in the know, with sidewall.) Even on a Sunday the tent was packed and people were having a good time. There were a ton of people in costume at this con, and most of the dealer room was cosplay and anime imports. This also skews the age down a good bit, cosplay isn't an old man's game, so I didn't get to bust out my zorak costume.

Separated from the rest of the con across a busy street in a vacant store front the cons game room was set up.  A decent sized room, spilt evenly between video games, board games and card games with a few tables set aside for rpgs. The board game library was pretty decent. I wasn't a big fan of size of the room and the low ceilings it created a lot of noise, I can only imagine what Friday and Saturday were like. I played one rpg and it was hard to hear the other players at points. The gaming aspects were pretty free form with little in the way registering. If you wanted to get into a game you just walked up to a table with a players wanted sign.

The game I played was pretty fun, a mash up of most dangerous game and island of dr moreu. It was in the 5x5 system which I hadn't played before. It ran pretty fast and was good for a light system. The gm was fun and kept things moving, the other players were a bit harder to motivate. But we got there.

On the way out of the game I noticed I lost my drivers license and bank card, as well as some cash. Hiking I don't carry a wallet just that stuff in a rubber band. I quickly went back to the game room. No luck, nobody turned it in there. So I went back to the hotel and checked at the main lost and found. Of course my optimism was validated, and my id and card were there, as was all my money. It pays to belong to awesome subcultures, those anime nerds are super great. Gamers and hikers, both super nice.

Jamie also had a good day, raising a couple hundred bucks for extra life, and signing up a half dozen new people for the cause.

Now I start walking for indy.