GrandCon Gaming Convention! (the photo dump post)
Posted on: September 22, 2013
- In: board games | conventions | fun stuff | gaming
- 6 Comments
We have returned, victorious from GrandCon! A new gaming convention in Grand Rapids, MI, GrandCon featured pre-scheduled gaming events, a ginormous gaming library you could sign games out from, a Pathfinder competition, table top roleplaying, game demos, a really nice dealer room, seminars, and more. I’m happy we got there early in the morning on Saturday, as the registration lines only grew and grew into the afternoon. I heard at one point that over 1200 badges were printed and that they ran out of programs. I think they’re gonna need a bigger hotel/convention location next year!
There was also an adventure to a brand new comic/gaming shop in the city, and an unintentionally SFnal dinner involving LED lights in a sushi presentation.
While I write up a longer post about the super cool World building panel that was presented by Tracy Hickman, Ed Greenwood, Steven Schend and Jeff Grubb, you should enjoy these photos.
photodump commencing in three. . . . two. . . . and we have lift-off/photo dump!
These huge cardboard monsters were set up in the lobby, they were part of an oversized gaming demo for King of Tokyo
The game comes with regular sized dice, and regular sized cardboard characters that go on a regular sized board, but throwing big plushy dice is so much more fun!
More gaming demos in the lobby everywhere I looked:
A deck building game called Sentinels of the Multiverse
Not sure what this is, but it looked cool and there were never less than ten people at this table
Napoleon, a historic strategy game
Once I finally got past the “ooh, what’s that!” of the lobby, there was a game room that had prescheduled games at different times of the day and an open gaming library room with much more games, but much more crowded tables. My husband ran High Frontier, which I talked about here. Both gaming rooms were jam packed all afternoon and evening.
The gaming library was incredible. this is a privately owned gaming library of over 1,000 board games, everything from Monopoly to Ticket to Ride to Twilight Struggle to Nuns on the Run, to every kind of board game you could imagine. This gaming library, just look at it!
there’s more.
the room was packed, everyone was having a great time:
wait, what’s that I see, in the center of this table? Is it? could it be? YES, it’s the brand new Firefly game! I didn’t get a chance to play it, but I did get some close up photos:
the board for Firefly
uuggg, Niska’s. Don’t want to go there!
of course there’s a dinosaur token!
Elsewhere, there was plenty to do and see. I was wearing my Totoro t-shirt, and as I was complimenting this lovely TARDIS lady, she was complimenting my shirt. We had a mutual squee moment.
I’m not sure what Kittens in a Blender is, but I want it. could be my stepping stone towards Cards Against Humanity?
On the way to dinner, we went to Vault of Midnight, a new comic/gaming shop in downtown Grand Rapids. If you live over there, you know that this weekend was the opening of ArtPrize. I think I got the very last parallel parking spot in the entire city.
so new, they don’t even have a permanent sign yet.
and look who was working there!
Most of the staff were wearing super hero capes! it was a very cool shop! Came home with some graphic novels and a manga.
This is the big photo dump post, but stay tuned for a post about listening to two geniuses talk about world building for 90 minutes, Ed Greenwood and Tracy Hickman.
6 Responses to "GrandCon Gaming Convention! (the photo dump post)"
[…] judging from this post, the Little Red Reviewer was there and I missed my chance to try and arrange a meetup! […]
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September 25, 2013 at 11:48 am
Awesome. I ordered KING OF TOKYO (plus the POWER UP expansion) for myself for my birthday. Great game.
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October 8, 2013 at 4:20 pm
Kittens in a Blender is every bit as awesome as you imagine it would be. It’s a quick and fun little game where you try to save as many of your own kittens from having a blender ‘incident’ while simultaneously feigning remorse and sorrow when you ‘accidentally’ fire up the blender without noticing your opponents’ kittens inside! Oops.
I always love when this game makes an appearance at our local board game night.
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the Little Red Reviewer 
September 22, 2013 at 10:50 pm
Really kicking myself that I didn’t ask if you were going! Also, I actually got to talk to Tracy Hickman today and he signed a copy of his new Batman novel for me!
For $30, GrandCon was SUCH a good time. Although I didn’t get to play the new Firefly game either 😦
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September 23, 2013 at 9:18 am
He talked a little about that Batman book at the Worldbuiling talk. I’m not really into Batman, but now I totally want to read it! he sounds like just the nicest guy in the world.
any chance you’ll be at Marmalade Dog down in K’zoo in February or ConFusion in Dearborn in January? I think it’s in February (which is of course, the best time of year to be driving in west Michigan.
Was it just me, or was the method of how to sign up for games and events confusing? Many of the volunteers i talked to kept asking if I’d pre-registered for things, when and how was i supposed to do this?? 😦
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September 24, 2013 at 11:44 pm
I’m about halfway through and it’s pretty good so far. I want to track down his original Dragonlance trilogy just out of curiousity. Is there an omnibus version?
I’ve never actually HEARD of those cons but I’ll look into them. January, I have an interim semester which makes things a bit easier vis a vis doing stuff off of campus, so I’ll look into ConFusion.
As to pre-registering, when you registered on the website, you could actually pre-register for specific events. You had to use a dropdown menu to access them. The actual how to sign up for it was a little tricky, but basically, some stuff you just had to put your name down for and some you had to pay a little bit for. But yeah, it was a little confusing figuring that out.
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