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This is another redesigned comic that has been exclusively posted on social media two years ago.

GenCon is over and a lot of interesting games have been announced and people their crazy ‘haul’ pictures* are showing up everywhere. (* pictures of the gigantic stash of games that people bought at GenCon)  This made us think about how much money we’ve saved by not going to GenCon and how many games you could buy from that! In our case a ton of games since we would have had to buy two plane tickets to the USA. 😉

I hope everybody had a great time at GenCon or GenCan’t this year! 😀 If you have some fun anecdotes, feel free to share them in the comments, we’d love to read them.

Although GenCon was a little out of our reach, we’ll be going to Spiel in Essen this year! It’s rather close to where we live and we think it’ll be fun to experience the board game madness for once. And we’re looking forward to meeting some of our readers and other content creators in the board gaming scene!

Board game convention veterans, any tips for us noobies for our visit to Spiel?

I’ve only been to one board game convention and it was this year back in February, called “Con of the North” in Minnesota in the United States.

The big lesson I learned was to allow yourself plenty of free time to explore and talk to people; prioritize them over the games.

The structure of my con was such that you sign up for events or gameplay tables ahead of time. My first instinct was “fill up the schedule!” … “sign up for all you can!” … “book your day solid with as many games as possible!” because that was how I thought I’d get my money’s worth, how I’d get the most out of the experience. But in my actual experience, I got more from falling into conversations with the people there, the designers, publishers, demo-ers and players that you’re only going to find together in such a place.

Games are great and it’s the reason we’ve all gathered, but you can always play them back home, too. It’s the people that you should avail yourself of – their insights, their stories, their experiences, their passions – to truly seize the experience.

Oh, and be sure to stay hydrated and bring snacks … 🙂

I went to my first convention at the UK Games Expo this year, and other than spending too much I spent less time playing (but made sure i played games new to me) and more chatting with lots of designers showing off kickstarter schemes, quizzing them on gameplay and such, was really enjoyable to do some effectively amateur interviews. City of Kings was the one that impressed me most, very confident speaker and well versed with his own game.

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