Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

On Day Three of Total Con I decided to shift my focus to the vendors and some of games being played. Started with a group about to play a miniatures game call Trilaterum.

I didn’t realize at the time that they were also a vendor selling miniatures and accessories to the game.

Next I talked to a fellow named Caleb who was about to start running a boardgame called Mosiac

There seemed to be an awful lot of grand march of Civilization games in the place, at least to me.

From there I spoke to Christopher White of Creatorpult whose 3D printer seemed to be constantly running every time I passed by his area.

The concept of being able to do this would be almost beyond the imagination of those who attended the first few Totalcons.

I then spoke to one of the playtesters of a RPG called Fae which had a rather interesting concept of being an RPG where you play the monsters.

It certainly had one of the coolest characters which is why I led with the image.

There were vendors who had gone completely old school like the folks at Arkensword Press who were doing their first Total Con as vendors.

Vendors who were selling and testing their own games were a common sight at Total like Jim Fitzpatrick whose game is Mission to Planet Hexx.

As I mentioned there is a different vibe from Pintastic and one of the difference was that by Saturday the director of the event Steven Parenteau had some time for me when he didn’t at the start.

I was actually surprised that the only sign of pintastic was Dave dropping off some cards promoting it, but there was one familiar face and taste that had been at Pintastic:

Quigley’s cakes have been at Total Con for a decade and they did in fact sell out of their entire inventory by the end of this night which means that on Sunday they’ll have chance to actually game. (Don’t worry if you want the cupcakes they’ll be back for Pintastic in April

Of course there are other side business like the Fabric Treasury that makes accessories for gamers:

You might have noticed that while I am, as always excited to interview people I was starting to seem a tad slower, the early mornings had been getting to me and despite a more reasonable 5 hours of sleep over a friend’s apartment that morning I was dragging having completely forgotten to eat. A trip to Linguini’s for lunch filled me up and I returned to my spot in the free play room where the continual Blackbeard game was set up by 3:30 or so.

I plugged in the laptop and the battery of the camera to recharge but apparently I needed recharging more because it was a little after 4:30 when I sat down and seemed to nod off and when I looked again it was nearly 6. I literally crashed right in the chair in front of the game and was out at least 60-90 minutes as the gaming went on around me.

When I came to I was a tad refreshed and even more importantly the Wars of Ozz table was being reset for a new group meaning that the gamemaster was free for an interview:

It turned out the fellow from my home town a year ahead of me in High School which was cool.

But the most intriguing interview of the day was my final one with Jeff Johnston whose games were very different than most of the elaborate setups in the place as all of his games were designed to be played in 15 minutes and made for the youngest of children.

That was it for interview. I spent the rest of the night running Avalon Hill’s Blackbeard for a group of players and finally teaching Groo to the group when Blackbeard ended. I didn’t end up back at the apartment till 1 AM.

I’m going to mention one thing in passing. There was a miniatures game that I thought was simply incredible and brought a huge smile to my face. The gamemaster had no time to talk early in the day but I swung by as he was packing up. He was very enthused about the game he had made but for reasons that people who attended Totalcon and played or saw his game will understand we decided that it was prudent to give the interview a miss and skip even the still photos of it.

Fortunately there were other games with cool images that were not a problem from the Star Wars universe.

To Cthulhu boardgames.

There is one more day of Total Con to see. Looking forward to seeing it.