Gen Con – Day Four

Hey all, Dani (and Damian) here.

This post should have been written and published yesterday, but after driving home from the convention on Sunday, we did a lot of sleeping and a lot of staring at our very nicely sized convention haul. It was a lot to deal with and so this post didn’t get written up on time. Oh well, better a day late than not at all, right?

So the final day of the convention, I had no panels planned. The only events at the Writer’s Symposium were read & critiques and those actually filled up very very quickly. Plus, you know, I didn’t really have anything written to be critiqued. Oh well, perhaps in a future visit to Gen Con. We’ll see.

Instead we planned on getting a little bit of a late start to the convention center and then just wandering the show floor, demoing some games, and making some last minute purchases. I didn’t have a cosplay for this final day, but Damian brought out his most ambitious costume, and I think he looked great. The only bad part was that it was the hottest day, and he ended up only being able to wear the costume for a couple hours.

We demo’d a game called Dice & Dragons, which is sort of like a quick dragon fighting dice game. Each player picks their class (warrior, cleric, ranger, rogue, wizard) and there are different attacks, buffs, and heals that can be done based on dice roll combinations (sort of like Yahtzee, but with symbols). Damian and I enjoyed the game play, and the game was on sale for $20, so we bought a copy. I think it’s the only game we picked up this year, aside from the Warhammer card game that Damian got.

We also decided to finally finish our collection of the Looking for Group series, especially since they had a last day of con sale where each volume was only $10. Now we just need to read them all. Both of us, at one time or another, had been reading these online, so some story segments will be re-reads for us. But I can honestly say that it has been years since I’ve read LFG, so it will all seem pretty much new to me.

Finally, I should show off what we added to our respective dice hoards. Damian and I both really enjoy buying dice for playing Pathfinder and D&D, and we tend to choose a few sets for each character we play. So some dice get used more than others, but as much as possible we try to fit the personality or magic of the character. For example, when playing my clerics, I typically use what I call my holy dice, a set of gold glittery dice, or if I play a wizard obsessed with fireball, I have a red and yellow set that looks just like a raging fire. That same fire set will be used with a druid, though I pair those dice with my water dice, earth dice, and air dice. Overall in the course of the four days of Gen Con, I think I added 18 sets of dice to my collection, which is a lot. I have a dice collection problem, y’all. lol.

But my favorite purchase on this final day of Gen Con happened when I walked past the Worldbuilders booth. Worldbuilders is a geek-centered nonprofit supporting humanitarian efforts worldwide, and a lot of the products they have in their store are based on characters or games in books, etc. So you can buy signed copies of books and graphic novels, as well as shirts, mugs, dice trays, and more. And okay, these books may cost a few dollars more than if you bought them in a brick and mortar store, but the profit is going to support humanitarian efforts around the world, which I think is very worthwhile.

So my purchase from Worldbuilders was a plushie Oberon the Irish Wolfhound from Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles. Plushie Oberon even has a sausage in his mouth, which is utterly adorable. I fully admit it that I squealed a little bit when I saw him. So yeah, he was totally worth the cost. Expect him to pop up in an Iron Druid Chronicle photo shoot on my Bookstagram in the future.

That was pretty much the entirety of our day. After walking the show floor for a few hours, we headed back to our car and made the long three hour car ride back home. Damian pretty quickly fell asleep, and our buddy was watching Magic the Gathering videos on his phone in the backseat, so it made for a very long, kind of boring, drive for me.

That is all from the Gen Con experience. I hope you’ve enjoyed Damian and I’s daily wrap up. Now we’ll get back to our normal bookish content schedule.