Gen Con 2007 Report, Part 1: Wednesday

This year was my sixth year attending Gen Con. It is a large annual gaming convention attracting over 25,000 attendees. What follows is my recap of the first of the five days at the convention.

:: WEDNESDAY

I met my buddy Captain Squash at his place. We loaded into his vehicle and headed out. On the way we listened to several podcasts. The first was Fear the Boot. We listened to their recap of this year's Archon including coverage of the R-rated Furry panel. They ask an interesting question: who invited the anthropomorphic fetishists into the gaming subculture?

Next we listened to an episode of Diggnation, a show where two guys that used to be on TechTV talk about the top stories posted on the digg.com social bookmarking news site. Basically these guys sit around drinking beer and riff on new articles. It is pointless really but they did use the words "poon palace" which made Squash and I laugh.

Lastly we listened to an episode of This Week in Tech hosted by Leo Laporte, another TechTV refugee. I quickly got bored with the endless prattle about Apple's iPhone. I wonder what Laporte thinks of Apple announcing that they will cut the price of the iPhone by $200 just two months after introducing it to the market. Suckers!

Thanks to Jay of BYOV we stayed at The Hilton this year. The room was nice. Even though the hotel is not one of the ones attached to the convention center by the skywalks, or hamster tubes as we like to call them, it is decent place to stay during Gen Con.

Cpt Squash ran off to watch a minor league baseball game. I wandered down to the RAM to see if I could get into a session of Wednesday Gaming there. The meeting room was packed wall-to-wall. While I was bummed that I couldn't find a game, I was pleased to see that Wednesday gaming was popular. I bought a mug from the RAM while I was there and left for the convention center to pick up a swag bag.

Later Cpt Squash and I made our way to the Fourth Annual Gen Con Forum Stink, a gathering of regulars who frequent the Gen Con online community forum. When we arrived they gave us a bag of swag -- free promotional items and other stuff.

They had a passport game as an icebreaker. They had several categories such as "Veteran Stinker", "Attended 10+ Gen Cons" and "Played True Dungeon". When you found a player that matched a category you could ask them to place a sticker in your book. I ran into a bunch of old friends and met some new ones.

After the Stink several of us wandered over to the RAM. Since it was packed, we decided to trek to Rock Bottom instead. I have to say it was just as fun as the RAM. They had specials on drinks. Squash and I tried a sampler of their beers. They were good. The consensus was that Rock Bottom may become the new Wednesday Post-Stink place in the future.

We left there to go to a place that had karaoke. After listening to somebody massacre Creed's "Arms Wide Open" I had a massive headache. I took some Tylenol and hung out until our buddy Otter took her turn at the mike. She blew everyone away and ended up taking home a cash prize for placing in their karaoke contest.

Posted at 4:00 PM