Posted in Board Games, Geeking Out
Gen Con 2018 Day 1
Gen Con 2018 Day 1 is in the books. Today was Sheri’s first day and sadly she got bitten by the headache bug. She stuck with it though and eventually the headache let up. I will say my first impression was that it is much more crowded than when I went the first time several years ago. Nowhere was that more apparent than the will call line. It was out of control bad. People were telling me that it took them 2 to 3 hours to get through the line. As far as I am concerned that is unacceptable. That is a huge part of someone’s day. We have only one set of tickets that we need to pick up but I can flat out tell you that we are going to kiss that $12 goodbye if the line is that bad tomorrow. I have been to a lot of conventions, including Comic Con, and never waited 2 hours to pick up my badge to get in. They really need to separate ticket pick up from badge pickup or have a lot more people pushing people through.
That was my only negative though. I just love Gen Con. I love the energy. I love walking around and looking at games. I love demoing games (although we didn’t do as much of that today). Today was my “buy games” day. So we spent a lot of time going around and picking up games. We went to pick up Root first but the line was nutso. As much as it hurt me to move on, we did. I wanted to make sure we got Villainous because I knew it was the one game that would be a Sheri pick. I wanted her to not leave without it. It was a smart move because I also wanted to pick up The Rise of Queensdale. The lines were reasonable and we got both. The nice gentleman at the booth said both were moving fast and would be gone in a couple of hours.
From there we picked up Ticket to Ride New York. We got to play it and it was delightful and fast. Our game finished in 15 minutes and everyone was smiling. I see us playing this a lot while traveling. We walked around and made a game plan for what we wanted to play over the next couple of days. Had a delightful conversation at the Flying Frog Booth about Shadows of Brimstone. Had Dice Throne demoed to us which then tricked us into buying it. That was top level Jedi Mind tricks going on there because we were not planning to buy anything else. Our last stop was to pick up my preorder of The Reckoners. On the way over to the booth we passed by Leder Games and that crazy line for Root was gone. We waited 0 minutes and got Root and its expansion. I was super stoked because that was the one game that I was really intrigued by. I just don’t do lines well.
It was a great first day but we are just about done buying. Our suitcases are filled. We can maybe get one more game and just carry it onto the plane. I can’t wait to see what games jump out at us and scream “buy me” (I can’t imagine Dice Throne will be the only one). Now it’s time to start cracking a few of these open and seeing what joy they have in store for us.
