I’m pretty
certain that everyone in any aspect of gaming has heard of the juggernaut that
is GenCon. Likely many have also heard
of the Origins Game Fair or the German Spiel de’Jahres festival. These are giant celebrations of the gaming
hobby. Being as massive as they are
though, they can also be extremely expensive events to attend and it is because
of that, that I recommend putting in some sleuthing work on your end. You see, conventions happen all the time, all
over the place and you probably just don’t know about them. I’m blessed to be in Illinois, where there
are a lot of conventions, thanks to probably Chicago and the fact that the
Midwest is a vast plain of nothing which just kind of makes people seek the escape
which gaming provides. I’m going to
spend a couple of posts in the near future talking about different conventions
that I attend.
Let me start
by saying why I attended and then I’ll write plenty about what they have on
offer. My wife. Well, there you go. No, not really, but without a doubt my wife
was a massive part of why I attended the first time. I discovered the con through a friend and
since my wife actually enjoys playing board games with our friends and family I
suggested it as a possible fun weekend away from the kids. We enjoyed ourselves so much that it then
became our own secret little vacation every year. We’ve never left the con disappointed in our
experience and always feel like the money is well spent to go. We love the Fancy Dress night event and we’ve
always enjoyed the charity events hosted by The Spiel Foundation. There is just so much to do there that you
never run out of things to keep yourself occupied and in that type of
environment even when you don’t know people everyone has such a generally
friendly open mind that you can almost always strike up conversations and find
things in common with complete strangers.
To get us
started I’ll talk about Geekway to the West.
Geekway is a board game convention held in St. Louis every year and I
believe it is at this point in its fifteenth year or some such, but I’m
probably off a bit. The point is that
they’ve been around for a while and I’ve had the joy of being an attendee of
the convention for the last five years and have enjoyed it thoroughly. While many conventions embrace large
groupings of different gaming genres Geekway is almost exclusively board
games. There are people who run Werewolf
there and you could technically classify that as a LARP if you wanted although
it would be the lightest kind of LARP imaginable. I’m also sure there are some people who do
get together and play things like D&D cloistered away in their own rooms
but for the majority of attendee’s the con exists simply to cater to our love
of sitting around a table and playing a fun board game.
Geekway has
evolved over time and is currently held in the St. Charles Convention Center in
St. Charles, Missouri. It has expanded
over the years and I believe this year is boasting a sold out attendance of
nearly 3,000 gamers. Geekway is a family
friendly event and open to anyone who wants to purchase tickets. The Geekway group has a number of special
things they do especially for the convention.
When you register every year that I’ve attended although (although
they’ve discussed this may be coming to an end in the future) you get a free
board game which means that to buy your way into the 4 days of gaming your
basically just buying a game. The
convention hosts a rather nice library of board games that you can rent out
during the convention to play which means you don’t have to bring anything with
you if you don’t want to, as even old favorites will probably be available to
check out and play from here. There are
tournaments aplenty and mostly fan organized at that so while there may not be
anything in the way of prizes other than bragging rights there are definitely
competitive groups you can join up with to really get your game on.
If you
interested in obtaining new things the vendor hall has grown pretty much every
year too. They boast not only established
and independent game publishers but also booths of artistic and craftspeople
making everything from geek related pint glasses and keychains to high end
board game tables. Sunday has a time set
aside for a massive flea market that you can buy, sell and barter games around
with other attendee’s and the convention itself hosts a massive math trade
style table every year where you can enter lots of games and then hope that
your grouping of games is popular enough to get you an early draft in to choose
the ones that you want out. One of my wife’s
favorite events has been the Fancy Dress evening which started I think our 2nd
year in attendance. It was really just
an excuse to dress up for an evening and play games and that first year many
people came in all the finery. Ball
gowns, bridesmaids dresses, tuxedos and suits.
The 2nd year is when the cosplay began showing up which is
great.
In an effort
not to drone on too long with this already long winded post, there are a ton of
reasons to go to Geekway. It’s held
every year on the 3rd weekend of March so if you reading this when I
post it or near you’ll realize that it is only about a week away. This will be the first year that we’ve taken
our oldest son as well and we expect he will also get a great deal of enjoyment
from the convention. That’s certainly
not to say it’s a cheap ordeal to attend, but it could be significantly
worse. Single registration is $65 for
the weekend and then of course there is the hotel cost as well as food costs to
consider. On average we spend about
$400-500 on the weekend but as I said, we’ve never felt like it wasn’t money
well spent for us as a weekend trip. If
you’d like to learn more head over to their website: http://www.geekwaytothewest.com.
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