Mebbie-bumkins posted about her brand spanking new skill at poker, which made me recall the gift Jenn (sorry, Santa) gave me in my stocking.
Three Dragon Ante at first elicited my thought of “oh, just a D&D version of 3-card ante,” but it’s nothing at all like that. When I started reading the rules, I realized that there is a large element of strategy involved. I look forward to playing it. Now we (Jenn and I) just need to find some nearby people we can con into playing our weird games with us.
I heard about the book Play Money
I was fascinated by the interview and picked up the book on Friday. I just finished it this morning and I’m still as fascinated by the man’s journey as I was when I listened to him on Fresh Air.
Like any other business, the one he embarked on required dedication, savvy, and contacts; it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme.
Fascinating. I won’t be sitting at my computer and quitting the day job any time soon, but like reading how other people succeed, this is a worth read.
Part V of an n part series. See here, here, here, and here for others.
Lots of stuff, I’m telling you TONS of stuff, goes on at Dragon*Con. You can party almost 24 hours a day on the planned activities alone! If you happen to be bringing friends (or meet new ones) you can fill that bit of time between 6:00 AM and 10:00 AM with anything your heart desires. We danced ’til 3:30 on Saturday night, and I gamed until the same time on Sunday, after which I went down to the concerts! (Friday I collapsed early, but I needed to rest up for the remainder of the Con)
Saturday night we saw the Crüxshadows, an energetic goth/darkwave band that we like. I, personally, don’t find them to be that inspiring from a musical perspective, but their shows are great, and if they ever get a U.S. tour date around here, we’ll go. So far I’ve only seen them at Dragon*Con. Jenn is psyched because she hugged Rogue, the lead singer, a man with wayyy too much energy on stage. I don’t have to guess how he stays so thin.
Other things I did this weekend: I went to a session with John Ringo, Sci-fi Military author extraordinaire. He was a very engaging person to listen to for an hour. He was wearing a kilt, along with half of the rest of the guys at the convention.
One drawback of going to listen to authors is I always want to run out and buy their whole published works. John was no exception.
In the exhibit hall, one of the groups that showed up was the company Chessex, who sells dice, amongst other things. I should have taken a picture of their dice table, it was freaking huge! A friend bought a dIV, which if you understand dice lingo (6 sided die = d6, 8 sided die = d8) means the die has a I, II, III, and IV on it. They were also selling a d5 which had five non-equal sides (typically, you’d roll a d10 and divide by 2 to get a d5) and they swore it was accurate due to the way the corners were mitered. I’ll stick with my d10’s.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster was spotted at Dragon*Con this year! I was touched by her noodly appendage.
Hotel elevators are evil creations of a sadistic being. During the con, elevators were generally hard to come by, and if you tried to get up or down during the periods between sessions, good luck. All this pales compared to trying to check out of the Hilton on Monday with six people’s bags, from the 18th floor. It was so bad that people I was on the elevator with had gotten on going up at the 8th floor, traveled all the way to the top, and were on their way back down. 
We made two trips down the stairs before I decided this was useless and went looking for the service elevators. Next year, it’s service elevators all the way, baby!
I did not understand the people who resided on floors 5 and below who would use the elevators. Just couldn’t be worth their time.
Lastly for this post, Dragon*Con TV! The programming and “commercials” and bumpers alone are worth the cost of entry to the Con. My personal favorite is the spoof, “The Simple Life: Ensigns” set on the Starship Enterprise. “I hope they teach me how to use the Force.” Hee hee.
I felt that having a humongous post about everything that went on at Dragon*Con would be a bit absurd. Here is installment II of the series.
Gaming has been a part of my hobby set since I was 10 or so (Jenn’s been playing since age 4!). I still remember the worried look on my mother’s face when I told her I wanted to start playing D&D. She had heard all the media-hyped stories about kids who’d committed suicide when their character died, or practiced “satanism”, or tortured the neighor’s turtle, or something. Thankfully, she got over it.
Since then, I’ve played D&D, AD&D, D&D 3.0 (not yet 3.5), Shadowrun, Call of Cthulu (Congrats, you’re insane!), GURPS, and several other role playing games. However, I’ve always liked playing board and miniature games more, especially battle simulators. Battletech is one of my favorites. Axis and Allies is good, but long, Risk, Warhammer 40K, the list goes on.
When I was in high school and college, I would attend at least 2 game conventions a year at various locations. Thusly, whenever I go to a con I always try to squeeze in some gaming and come home with something new. Dragon*Con is no exception.
This year, I’ve been introduced to Pirates which tickled my fancy. It is an age-of-sail “miniatures” war game. 
The goal is to gather the booty and terrorize the neighborhood. To that end, you purchase (yes, I know, they sucked me in) booster packs which contain ships and other sundries on credit-card type platic cards. You snap the ship pieces out of the card, assemble them together and poof! you’ve got yourself a navy. Different ships can do different things, and you sail around exploring islands for treasure and trying to knock your opponents masts down. I had great fun playing it, even though I got romped by the group I was with. In my defence I hadn’t even read the rules, so I was making stupid mistakes*.
We managed to squeeze in a round of Battletech. I made the mistake of giving into an insanity and had one of my ‘mechs destroyed during a charge. Alas… The interesting thing we noted was the age of the people who would stop by and say, “Wow, Battletech! I haven’t played that for years!” Unfortunately, Btech seems to be on the wane, to my grave despair.
We played Frag, a Steve Jackson game based on computer games such as Doom and Quake. Yes, it’s a board game based off a computer game. Odd.
We also squeezed in a game of Ticket to Ride: Europe with the maximum number of players (5). I’d never played it with 5 people before. It was frustrating not being able to complete your routes because 4 other people are all trying to get though Zurich!
The gaming was all great fun. As the title mentioned, I got to blow shit up, and that’s what it’s all about.
*I was playing in a “tournament” wherein the player with the most gold got a prize, the player who sank the most ships got a prize, and the player who did the worst (lost the most ships) also got a prize. I played so badly, I didn’t even come in last. No prize for Captain William…