Looney Labs Rabbits Mailing list Archive

[Rabbits] [Event] VorpalCon by Raven Black

  • FromSuperFRED <superfred@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateSun, 6 Nov 2005 21:14:53 -0500
This is an auto-generated report from SuperFRED regarding an event that Raven Black has submitted.
http://rabbits.looneylabs.com/?RabbitUserID=RavenBlack

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Title: VorpalCon
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Date: Nov 05 2005

The convention was one of boardgames and role-playing games, with, it turned out, a disappointingly strong focus on the role-playing (the greeting announcement ended "let the roleplaying begin!", at which all the boardgame people said "oh *fine*, we hate you too" and retreated to the boardgame room).

Even so, the boardgame room had 6 permanent residents, a few extras who came in after one RP and didn't leave, and a reasonable flow of visitors. I had signed up to run Icehouse a little late (having only discovered the con a week before), so there was unfortunately no promotion of Icehouse games in the paperwork, but since the room was shared and the table was low, most everyone who passed through the boardgame room had their eyes caught by Icehouse pieces, by far the most visually appealing game in the room. In all about 15-20 people played at least one game over the 9 hours we were there, and some played several; Icehouse, Zendo, RAMbots, Ice Towers and Volcano most prominent, amongst others. The fact that I had a pretty girl with me probably helped with attracting attention, as people were rather inclined to inquire "what's this?" as a prelude to amusingly inept attempts at seduction.

Everyone who played seemed reasonably impressed with the games; RAMbots went down particularly well as I demonstrated it to the person who was running Robo Rally on the other side of the room. (He seemed inclined to agree that RAMbots is more elegant with its removal of nearly all random factor.) It seemed likely that he, at least, will be buying pieces in the near future.

Overall, not a huge success, but still by far the winner of the boardgame room, and possibly the whole con, with about twice as many participants as Robo Rally, which in turn beat everything else in the room by a significant margin.