September 8, 2023: Dragon Con Report From Jean

Dragon Con was as Dragon Con always is: loud and chaotic and exhausting and mad fun. At one point, the line for the vendors' hall was about 15 city blocks long (they wrapped it around a lot!) – I know because I stood in it. And even though I was working a lot of the time, I had a ton of fun. But you're not here to read about me admiring some amazing costumes (movie costume departments should have a discussion with some of the cosplayers), or buying entirely too many T-shirts, or even how good the chicken Alfredo at the Metro Cafe is. You want to read about our games.

I was in charge of running Wiz-War demos, using the lighted boards we built and the miniatures with Ben's amazing paint work from the recent Kickstarter.

Wiz-War is a great game for anybody – I had players ranging from people with recent experience to folks who had never heard of Wiz-War until they came to the demo. Players over 60 and under 16. A family that must have some interesting dinner-table conversations. All kinds of people.

And it was wild and wacky as usual, with spells and counter-spells going off, people enjoying the sheer chaos of Rotate Sector (my favorite card), and . . . well, me spending most of an entire game trapped behind a Granite Cube because I never drew a card to get me out of there; I spent most of that game punching a wall.

Also, I got a backpack with programmable graphics/text in the vendor hall. Naturally, I set it up like this:

Then, on Sunday, converging chaos led to me having to handle the Groo: The Game demo. I would have been less worried about that if I'd played Groo more recently than 20 years ago! But it came back quickly, and it was great fun.

One thing that's really cool about Groo is how quickly fortunes can change. At one point in one of our games, I was a single victory point away from winning. The next turn (with some help from Groo, of course), I had one rather small building left. Ow! It would have been much cooler if I'd been the one to play the Groo card on an opponent, of course! But Groo is even fun when you lose.

Late pledges are still available for Groo until the 10th. The shipment is currently in transit from the printer; grab one before Groo sinks the boat! Then you won't be asking yourself "Did I err?"

-- Jean McGuire

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