I'd love to attend (I met a couple of you folks last year when I volunteered at the Handelabra booth), but I've decided to stay home and watch my daughter so my wife can head over and play SOTM, among other things. She didn't get to do Gen Con last year due to being 8+ months pregnant, so watching the kiddo while she heads to WYC is the least I can do.
Hope you all have a great time.
Minor timing update: I'm now committed to staying in Urbana until roughly 10:30 AM Central Time in order to pick up the Chromebook my son has been saving money for since before Christmas on his behalf & drop it at my ex's before leaving. (Store opens at 10:00 Central; need to purchase item & get it to her house before I can leave.)
Accounting for the time change, I'll be at the con between 1 and 2 PM Eastern time.
bolnerap, you could always come over after she comes home.
I'll likely be there ~3:30pm Friday, myself.
Jeff, we can’t find you!
Don't worry, folks -- we found him.  (Or, more accurately, he found us.)
Indeed. There were more free play areas than I realized, and even when I looked in the room he was in, I didn't look very well. Jeff played a bunch of Sentinels in the afternoon. Russ ran New Bedford to a group of four who seemed to really like it. Jeff and I then ran concurrent games – Compounded for him and Fate of the Elder Gods. Not sure how Jeff's game went. Mine was interestingly different than other games I've seen: The first time the game ended by someone having ten elder signs. Players seemed to like it.
There's an official podcaster for the con and my friend Jaclyn, who organizes volunteers for Who's Yer Gamers, was invited to be interviewed and teach a game. She chose to teach Sentinels of the Multiverse! We suggested she stack Baron Blade's and Insula Primalis' decks to make the game as fast and exciting as possible and apparently the podcasters, one of whom had played Sentinels many times, loved it. I didn't hear what happened specifically, but the person who'd played before was gushing that it was his favorite play of SotM ever.
We found a vendor in the dealer hall who was carrying New Bedford and SotM, so gave him a bunch of SotM promo cards and promised to give him any New Bedford promos we had left over after Saturday. The lanyards GtG sent us have been a hit. WYC is using crappy string lanyards, so everyone's stoked to get an awesome SotM lanyard. We'll see if we can interest anyone in any of the art prints tomorrow.
After just a couple hours teaching a game in a noisy hall my throat is nearly shot. Need to remember cough drops for tomorrow.
Wow! Sounds like a really successful day! Thanks for all the hard work, Andy and co.
Made it over after all! We decided this would be Baby's First Con, so I went with my wife and daughter this afternoon and I wore babygirl around for much of the time we were there. Played Tsuro of the Seas in the library room, ran into coworker and fellow Gen Con GTG volunteer Alex in the dealer room, then dropped by the big demo room to visit Russ and Jeff. Thanks for the chat, VG Mainstay preview, and promo stuff, folks! It was good seeing you again, hope to catch you at Gen Con this year.
Hey, bolnerap! Great to see you today – glad you stopped by! 
Today kind of sucked for me. I ended up with a massive headache. Overall, though, I think it was a positive day. I think Russ and Jeff both had a good time.
Jeff ran a SotM game with a bunch of experienced players in the morning. They got torched by The Dreamer. In reflecting on that, later, we realized that although it's fun to teach the game, it's not as much fun just watching experienced players, so if we're organizing an event where we're not going to be one of the players, we need to set the description to clearly state that it is a teaching game.
Russ and Jeff ran a bunch of ad hoc SotM in the afternoon, including an OblivAeon game. I taught Spirit Island twice. I think all eight players enjoyed it, but neither group were able to finish in the two hour timeslot or even get particularly close. I did my best to encourage them to spend a little time strategizing, but pick something before too very long, and I tried particularly in the second game to help them find and do useful things when they were struggling, but it wasn't enough.
Russ ran New Bedford at 6 and that group seemed to really enjoy it. The scores were 28, 25, 24, and 21. I finished off the night with another round of Fate of the Elder Gods, with three players. They were unable to finish the game in the two hour timeslot, though it came close. One of the players was at seven on the summon track _AND_ had eight Elder Seals. Again, they seemed to enjoy it. As far as I can tell, every person who played every one of our events enjoyed the game.
While I was wandering about in between events I happened upon a group that had checked out Time Management from the library w/out any prompting. One of them disliked it, but the other three were really enjoying it, with one of them remarking that they liked how different it was from other games.
One of my players seemed really into social deduction games, so I asked if he'd heard of Dracula's Feast. He not only had, but had heard really good things about it.
I'm not sure I'm going to go back to the con tomorrow. I could use a day off. Russ will be running Sentinel Tactics for the teens program at the con and I think doing some more SotM in the afternoon. I think Jeff may run a game, too, before he heads out.
I'lll have to think about whether I want to do something like this again next year. I enjoy organizing and being a part of exiting events, but we didn't quite make an event out of this. I had a good time learning Spirit Island and Fate of the Elder Gods well enough to teach them, but didn't actually have a great time teaching them -- a combination of them being much more complex to teach than SotM, having to deal with the time pressure/length of time of the game/not liking them to the same depth that I enjoy SotM, and then also some of the annoying noise and headache, particularly for the last game. The whole splitting of locations between the scheduled events and the free play area was annoying -- having to deal with lugging things around and trying to make sure there was someone watching stuff. I dunno. Maybe when my head doesn't hurt I'll have a more positive perspective.
Podcast session from Who's Yer Con featuring SotM: http://gamingwithscott.libsyn.com/hotp-whosyercon-2017-sotm
You can do a full Fate of the Elder Gods game demo in about an hour if you start each cult with 4 elder signs and 4 summoning track tokens. Sometimes a bit over an hour.
Sorry about the rough day.
I suspect the biggest factor there is the fourth player. There are more players to interact with and more lands and invaders to deal with, making the search space much larger when planning your turn. Even with experienced players, four-player games tend to take longer.
Getting AP-prone players to focus can be tricky, as well. There's a tendency to want to stop the invaders on every front right away, but that really isn't possible (if it were, the game would be too easy). I try to encourage players to each identify the biggest fire on their board and try to deal with that - anything extra is just gravy. It doesn't totally solve the problem, but I find it can help a bit when there are too many options.
I wondered if that had been you two - before I found Russ & Andy, I'd almost ended up in a game of Hogwarts Battle with her.
My sympathies. Thanks for the report!
Final day! I lazed into the con around 11ish and by the time I'd finished chatting with a few people Russ had finished running Sentinel Tactics for tweens. I gather there was some minor tweenish drama, but all four of his participants had fun. The person organizing the kids track is one of the winners from our first Sentinel Tactics tournament two years ago and he ended up running a second game of Tactics for a kid that came late and that kids parent. Russ, Matt sends his thanks along to you for helping out!
Jeff, Russ, Isaac, and I played a fun game of SotM against Voss with three of the playtest heroes (Harpy, Akash'Thriya, and Mainstay) in the environment (oh, what's the name ... something like spirit of the void), plus me playing Prime Wardens Argent Adept. We almost completely routed Voss -- saw neither ship and no Forced Deployments. We ended up with a cluster of 10-12 people milling around a few tables alternately playing games of SotM or just checking out the playtest decks that Russ had brought.
I took the remaining New Bedford promos over to the booth that had been carrying it. As mentioned (I think?) he'd sold out on the New Bedford games previously. By Sun afternoon he'd sold most of his SotM merch, too.
I wandered the halls a bit before leaving, including kibitzing with the folks running the Game Library. SotM is on heavy rotation from the Library, with two copies regularly getting used, in part because the people organizing the library like it and so often recommend it. Sounds like New Bedford get a lot of play as well and enthusiastic responses. In wandering the halls I also came across three different tables playing SotM. One of them was sort of the usual suspects, the other two were families that had picked up the game at the con.
So all in all a success, I think, despite my feeling crappy the night before. I'd mused about maybe not organizing something for next year, but I think I'll want to, just with some tweaks. I'd tried to create a 'slate' of GtG games to sort of showcase the range of products available, but I'm not sure anyone noticed. Better, I think, to simply let each person who wants to run games to run the games they want, and then create a joint schedule where we can help each other out / possibly holding down a regular spot in the free-play area.
I think that if we try to run a "slate," we'll need official GtG presence there - there's too much for the three of us to do, and maybe too much even with Dylan present. It would also help to do make sure that was clear by making it a series in the con booklet, much like Jaclyn's "Modern Boardgaming 101" series was.
Other things I think would be good:
The potentially complicating factor for me next year would be that my daughter might just be old enough for me to consider bringing my kids, which means I go into "dad mode" and not "con volunteer mode."
Those are my initial thoughts in the hours immediately following the con being over.
Note: I now have the art prints from Vengeance, Wrath of the Cosmos, and Villains (after this weekend). In each set of three, there's only been one that has really grabbed my attention, but there's art from other cards that would be neat to be able to add to them. I'd almost like to be able to order art prints for individual card art.
Thanks for the Dracula's Feast shoutout! :D