Riding to GenCon 45

Ok, I’m at GenCon 45. Unfortunately I didn’t get any game tickets. See, you schedule and purchase game tickets in advance to make sure you can attend the games you want to play. You can also get a Generic ticket, worth $2 which lets you attend any game with an open slot. Either because someone who actually paid failed to show up for whatever reason, or because they didn’t sell every open slot. Board and Card games are generally a single Generic ticket with longer running games, mostly Role playing, requiring up to 8 tickets. So upon waking, I checked with the guys who came and headed off.

We met at the Starbucks where I was holding a place for them, Brian and Jason. Both are members of my gaming group along with Jon, Wendy, Mike, and a few others who didn’t make the Convention.

First thing was to check out the board gaming (and card gaming) area. This was a fairly large area in the main convention hall.

And that’s just one corner. I was standing in the center of the room (or as center as I could) and got a pic facing each corner. It’s a huge room. This is pretty much all card gaming with board gaming behind me.

Of course, much of the fun is the costumes. Folks do tend to go way out with their selections. In this one, all three actually came separately and stumbled upon the others and decided to hang together for a much better effect.

There was live music as well. These guys were actually pretty good as were the other bands that were around the convention area.

The biggest “unofficial” event is “The Running of The Lemmings”. This is at 10am on Thursday and is when the vendor doors open. See the various game companies have special convention only gear such as t-shirts, buttons, patches, and even special or limited edition books. So much of the attendees of the convention gather at the gates (there are three) and wait for 10am. At 9:45am is the opening ceremonies and we even had the mayor of Indianapolis speaking at this one. I guess with 35,000 to 40,000 gamers come to town, there is some reason for the bigwigs to come out and schmooze πŸ˜€



I did pick up convention specific gear from the Catalyst booth (they create Shadowrun, my go to game) including a Doc Wagon t-shirt, Attitude t-shirt, … well, here’s a picture. Maybe that’ll help πŸ™‚

The two rows on the left are the Shadowrun books. The two black ones are the limited edition ones which I had autographed as well. On the right side are Judge Dredd books which use the Traveller game system. At the back is the Level 7 horror semi-cooperative board game. Into The Cosmos is a settings book for Cosmic Patrol, a ee doc smith or Jack Vance space opera type of game. Next to it is Tunnels and Trolls version 7.5 also autographed. On either side are boxes of dice. The left ones are specific to Shadowrun. The right ones I needed for a D&D game I played in. Under that are expansions to Red Dragon Inn (Pooky and Erin). Between is a CD from Choke The Word. Then various stickers and buttons along with a couple of books I got at the con.

Add in another 4 or 5 t-shirts and it’s a nice haul (and tough to pack back on the bike; but I did it).

I headed back over to the room at lunch. We had concierge service which gave us access to the 31st floor for free food and drinks all day. I’d had breakfast earlier then lunch now. I also dropped off my first run of gear (the Shadowrun stuff). Since it was light out, I got a couple of pics.


I did a little wandering around but was mainly looking for open games. I browsed the convention book looking for games I wanted to play and then headed over to see if there were open spaces. I was able to snag a space in the Cosmic Encounters game. I have the original game from back in the late 70’s, early 80’s so I was curious as to what had changed in 30 years. Mostly the characters and powers were the same. Some of the rules were slightly different, not enough to badly affect the game but enough that I couldn’t just jump in knowing all the rules.

I did wander around a bit after to see if I could connect up with a different available game but none were open. I did find a 10′ tall Wookie though.

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