GenCon Report: Day One

GenCon opened yesterday for its 40th year, with Zygote Games occupying a booth in the exhibit hall. We're sharing our space with three other small independent game publishers:  Grey Ghost Press, Heliograph Inc., and Rogue Games.  This makes for a very cozy booth, even without customers.

The convention is huge, and the exhibitor hall is approximately the size of a dirigible hangar. This year there's a big electronic games presence -- Sony Online Entertainment has staked out a vast space. But it was interesting to note that the computer goodies weren't drawing any more traffic than the good old paper and ink games.

Coolest Thing Inside the Booth:  (Other than Zygote stuff, of course.) This is a tough call, but I'd have to give the nod to Colonial Gothic, an elegant little roleplaying game from Rogue Games, set in early America. It's a near-perfect time and place for roleplaying adventures, and has been shockingly neglected.

Coolest Thing Outside the Booth:  On my initial walkaround the niftiest thing I've seen is the book 40 Years of Gen Con, by Robin Laws. People are buying copies and getting them signed by industry professionals. It's like a high-school yearbook for our business. (Of course, you usually get your yearbook signed right before you leave high school . . .)

Biggest Buzz:  The booth with the most traffic for a single product appeared to be Fantasy Flight Games, for their new Starcraft wargame. It's rather nice that the game people are lining up to buy is a good old-fashioned tabletop war game. That's where this whole hobby started.

Biggest News That Everybody Already Knew:  The official announcement of a Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It's certainly interesting news, but it's about as surprising as a "twist ending" in a Shayalaman film -- the surprise would be if it didn't happen.