It did come off of the pre-order cards at the booth, but I also asked volunteers at the booth and the guy who kindly ran a short Spirit Island demo for me and I was not told I was wrong. I didn't think it might only be for new pre-ordersand I do know the people at the booth at least went and asked someone before coming back and talking to me. I would absolutely love to be wrong about this one.
Wow, Chaos, that’s a ton of stuff!
I figured there had to be a way to replace heroes, given that your games were taking three or four hours. Sounds like an OblivAeon game is sort of a mini-RPG campaign run within the rule set of Sentinels.
I presume that, since you mentioned Chekov’s Hairdryer, in the third act of this thread someone will dry their hair?
How about Absolute Zero + Isothermic Transducer + Twist the Ether + Fixed Point, though =)
Thanks to everyone in this thread whose been reporting in from gencon. Those of us who can't attend do appreciate it.
That would work. Would require you to sacrifice both AZ and the Visionary though by my understanding of the rules. They would have to both be in the line of fire (visionary so that Twist the Ether would actually activate, but this is perhaps wrong) and I can't think of a way for AZ to recovery 5,000 hp before fixed point went away
Actually, just realized. Add in a bee bot and Unity and you could save Visionary and Unity by popping bee bot.
The Visionary could be in a Telekinetic Cocoon. Bee Bot is a great solution (assuming the 5k damage card is an ongoing card).
A team with AZ, Visionary, and NightMist could get away unscathed. NightMist can redirect her 5k damage over to AZ, The Visionary chooses cold, AZ heals back up to wherever he was before taking 5k fire damage =)
Awesome.
Alternatively, everyone other than AZ at the same health, and Smoke Bombs.
My first GenCon!
Boy, you guys sure are good people. I wish I had any idea who most of you forum users were; I made a point to ask everyone's forum handle names who I really talked to, so maybe I just didn't properly meet everyone? Who knows.
I probably ended up socializing most with Phantaskippy and then Rabit, forumite-wise, and I had a great time losing to the least-helpful-caboose-owner in Isle of Trains, aka Phantaskippy. but I know for a fact I met EvanDan55, Donner, Sejixs, arenson9, Paul, and obviously Craig, Christopher and Adam. No clue if I met grysqrl, dpt, jagarcio, MorningSprite, bobbertoriley, Animus, PlatinumWarlock, schadkehnfreude, ddchasek, cinnicat, jffdougan, bolnerap, Chaosmancer, or anyone else. I don't know how I could have not met at least some of them, but I don't remember trading those usernames even once...
I mostly just worked this con, and went to geek concerts. That said, basically every hour I had free I was in the demo room for GTG, including when I was cosplaying Scholar with my wife as Ex-Patriette. Great stuff, and look forward to photos from it! There were some amazing costumes. I confused Arenson9 considerably by asking him to pose me and my wife from the "Don't Dismiss Anything" card from Scholar's deck, which he probably took to be some kind of a weird sex thing. It wasn't, Andy. Unless maybe it was.
Honestly, though, it was a phenomenal time. Everyone was so welcoming, so friendly (especially Phantaskippy in Isle of Trains), and so enthusiastic-- the GtG family especially, but really, just about everyone on the floor. It was a huge show full of people so excited to tell you about their games. I have never felt so perfectly in my element. Bought way too many games, and got to demo (and run the demos for) most of GtG's products; still got a few to try, though. I am shocked at how much fun I had whaling and demoing whaling in Nantucket and New Bedford, in which both games I learned that only a small subset of people enjoy my "We love our Empty Sea" MTV pun. Also, despite owning Bottom of the 9th, it was only in demoing it that I found just how incredibly fun that game was. I demoed it my first work day there for my whole shift, running two boards of it simultaneously for most of it, and the game sold like hot-cakes.
Thank you all for being such a great group of folks; let me know if we did meet and we just forgot to exchange forum names; and I can't wait for next year. Where I hope to keep more time open to do things like go to the Sentinels Lore stuff!
Hopefully they'll need some GMs for the Sentinels RPG next year. :)
You don't even know. At GenCon, I saw him destroy Absolute Zero just by using his vest pocket.
I remember seeing an awesome Scholar with a glowing Philosophers stone when I sat down for Oblivaeon, and I think I remeber a sweet expat with a foam ammo belt, but I didn't talk to either of you. It was my first time signing up for events, so I was bouncing from table to table around the con.
I was sitting with Brian when we spoke at the Wed pre-show dinner.
I confused Arenson9 considerably by asking him to pose me and my wife from the "Don't Dismiss Anything" …
Part of the confusion was that I am hard of hearing. Most of it was that (A) I was trying to organize things, so looking for ways to stay focused on everything going on rather than a single task, and (B) I didn't understand why you needed me to pose you if you already knew what the card looked like. But I eventually figured out that you wanted to make sure that the pose was spot on. Sorry for being a little slow on the uptake.
… small subset of people enjoy my "We love our Empty Sea" MTV pun.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Also, despite owning Bottom of the 9th, it was only in demoing it that I found just how incredibly fun that game was.
It's amazing how much more fun I have with most games once I commit to really learning them well. There are just SO MANY GAMES.
Great meeting you both.
Well, you know… don't dismiss anything.
Don't worry about missing me, I haven't been super active on these forums before, and I was just the volunteer at the Handelabra section of the GTG booth (tall guy, short hair, glasses, Ravenclaw lanyard). I spent the later half of all four days there. Got to meet all the Handelabra folks except MigrantP (obviously). Great group of people. Jean-Marc and I hit it off especially well.
Saturday was probably my favorite day at the booth, because we had a lot of the costumers coming around. Prime Wardens Fanatic, Expatriette, Scholar, Visionary, Luminary, Matriarch, and Super Scientific Tachyon stopped by the booth, plus two of the Handelabra folks were also in costume (Crista was Super-Scientific Tachyon as well, and Jennifer was a flip-side La Capitan). Apparently there was another flip-side La Capitan and another Matriarch roaming around, but I never got to see those two. I did run into a Greatest Legacy and a Baron Blade outside the GTG room when I was off my shift and headed to the charity auction.
The booth had three major groups of people stop by.
1) superfans who already knew about and had everything
2) people who knew about Sentinels as a card game but had no idea the app existed
3) people who knew nothing about Sentinels at all
We made a good impression on most of the visitors. The phone version was especially popular, probably because it was the most eye-catching of the three we had available (Steam / tablet / phone). There was a TV going in the upper corner of the booth, rotated for portrait mode, playing a 10-ish minute demo video that included a full battle of four heroes against Baron Blade in Enclave of the Endlings.
Several people liked the game so much that they whipped out their phones and bought it on the spot. Mobile seemed to be selling better than the Steam keys we had available, though I did see several people buy DLC packs and base games that way. One customer in particular came up and asked to try the full version (she was familiar with the base game), so I set up a PC for her to do that. After getting wasted by Apostate and asking me "how do I beat that [unpleasant adjective]", we talked strategy and she decided to pick up the season pass on the spot.
Christopher stopped by the booth for a few minutes, which was pretty cool. I chatted with him briefly about how things were going and how Handelabra helped me get into Sentinels; wanted to make sure he knew they were helping draw people in. Great guy, I can see why so many people like him.
One thing that struck me was how much networking went on at the show. We had at least half a dozen people with press badges or exhibitor badges coming around and asking about corporate issues that I couldn't speak about, so I passed them off to whichever Handelabra employee was at the booth with me at the time. Made me kind of wonder how many networking types came around during the early shift (or even before the place opened)!
We also had one visitor each lobbying for Xbox 360 and Windows Phone versions of the game.
---
I also stopped by the GTG room a couple times off-shift. One of my friends was demoing Compounded in there, plus I went to the charity auction and had fun mostly just watching that. I did bid on and win Dark Watch Nightmist, though.
This.
The designers want to find a publisher. The publishers want to find the best new games. Printing companies and distribution companies want to make contacts. Paul was meeting with a couple of people from one of the printers they use. They played Sentinels of the Multiverse for the first time, despite having printed however many tens of thousands of copies. Reviewers want to get copies of games to review and audio and video for podcasts and vlogs. Publishers want to get their games to the reviewers that will have the most impact. Or possibly just to anyone who says they'll do a review. Seriously. If you want to get a bunch of games for free, set up a YouTube channel as a game reviewer and just start emailing every publisher you can find. I bet you'll be inundated, though you won't get many of the most popular games. Game store owners are there trying to find out what games to stock and trying to remind everyone else in the industry, including consumers, that if they keep getting their prices undercut by online retailers, game stores will die out and the next generation of gamers won't be able to as easily get into tabletop gaming.
The Tabletop gaming industry is both a very small industry with more people interested in making games than there's really a market for and relatively low barriers to entry. Margins on materials and labor are good, but the volume is relatively low, so no owners are going to get super rich, even if, like Asmodee, they buy up lots and lots of popular titles. There's way more people who want to work in the industry than jobs available, so salaries are modest. All of that leads to people generally being in the industry for the fun of it, which leads to a lot of friendliness. That, on top of the fractured nature of the industry, with so many small to medium companies means an almost frenzy of networking. There aren't just a few giants running the industry (though Asmodee seems to be trying to get there). That's why GenCon can end up with 500+ booths.
The industry also, as I understand it, simply doesn't have a lot of business people. For sure there are lots and lots of people doing_business, but they are rarely trained or experienced in business per se – Finance, Accounting, Marketing, etc. I'm not sure if that leads to more networking or less – my guess is about equal amounts, but perhaps more ad hoc and informal meetings than planned ones.
I posed the question to a couple of people of how many people are working full time in the tabletop gaming industry. Greater than Games has 7 or 8 and is considered medium-sized, I think. Are there 1,000 people worldwide employed full time? Does that sound like a lot? Consider that there are probably more than 1,000 people working in fast food joints in most cities, I'd guess. The university I work for has ~5,000 faculty and staff, if I remember correctly. And the industry has been growing, I'm told, by 15-20% a year for many years now. Think back 20 years – Settlers of Catan had just been released. Magic the Gathering was just a couple years old. AD&D 2nd edition was the most recent version. So this is both a small industry and in many ways a very young industry. Lots of people are still kinda figuring out what it means to be in the industry – both the flocks of new people entering the industry and even many of the veterans. It's rare, I think, for people to follow a "standard" career in the tabletop gaming industry of working their way up the ladder at a big company. Not many big companies, for one thing, plus so many people jumping in to start new companies all the time, or just trying to sell their design to a publisher.
The relative youth of the industry means that, from a historical perspective, we are living in amazing times. The people who have literally created this industry, by coming up with novel ways to play games, are still alive and active. I don't know if there's anyone out there doing any serious journalism on the tabletop gaming industry, but I hope so. I had a chance to hear stories from the early days of Wizards of the Coast and they were hilarious and amazing.
OK. Now I'm just rambling, time to get some sleep.
=] Thanks for the name drop! We had fun chatting with you too!
We mostly demoed Tactics all four days, and got a chance to meet a good handful of you, which was unequivocally a pleasure. As anyone who dropped by the demo room can likely attest, all of the new games(Lazer Ryders, looking at you) were a ton of fun! Everyone who came in for the costume contest looked super sweet, and it was cool seeing the broad demographics that >G appeals to. Thanks to everyone who came by and made Gen Con a great time!
Andy, that was an awesome post, and if another Awards were to happen, obvious nominee for Truth Seeker! Great investigative journalism. Feel free to wax nostalgic and ramble your heart out. Top marks.
Belatedly - I can verify at least one of these things happened, and if you've ever played online with some scrub who kept on disconnecting and re-appearing, it wasn't the first time we've played. We demoed Oblivaeon together and your wife stepped up like a champ to handle all the bookkeeping, which… yeeeesh. This hopefully won't be a spoiler to anyone who hasn't seen it, but we had a cool Legacy-Expatriette combo going in our game and I'm kinda flummoxed at how teams won't get overrun without it.
Oh my!
Belatedly, I got a few pictures and a vid from the costume contest, though not with me at the moment - I mostly remember Fanatic, Super Sci Tachyon, Unity and flipped LeCap, though they were all fantastic - especially the one GTG staffer who cosplayed as Christopher.
We had an awesome Legacy combo as well, getting him heroic interruption and immune to melee every turn.
Truly, Oblivaeon will be the best place to exploit the incapped abilities. I would be stunned if a team was able to beat him with zero incaps, but potentially having 5 incapped heroes on the board allowing crazy combo moves makes me giggle inside.
Actually, also as expceted, Oblivaeon is probably one of the worst fights to go with an all random set-up. Our first game went very smoothly because our first environment was the Freedom Tower and we were able to get all the beneficial cards out and they stayed out the entire match.