Garycon – MRAAKTAGON

Garycon 2026 – Musings!

It’s been three years since I’ve been at the best con there is: GARYCON. This con has three big things going for it (maybe more):

The Grand Geneva Resort. Intimate setting, cannot be a huge convention, drinks flowing constantly so you can get shitfaced from arrival to departure, every day of the Con. Food is plentiful and the restaurants and food service is really great. The staff will do stuff for you (like set up more tables in nooks and crannies). Tip them well and your random gaming table in the corner of some dark area will have a waiter the whole night. NO OTHER CON HAS ANYTHING LIKE THIS. It’s also very scenic.
RPG, OSR and bespoke game focus. I saw Star Frontiers, Top Secret, FASERIP, and the ORIGINAL version of BOOT HILL played as well as dozens of tables of AD&D. DCC is there in FORCE as well, Hackmaster, OSRIC, everything OSR. Why Lamentations of the Flame Princess doesn’t make a showing at this con I have no idea. Also tons of games from ye olden days that people made their own pimped out copies of: a huge Kingmaker board, massive wooden board for TSR’s Knights of Camelot, massive Dawn Patrol table. All of this is super awesome to see.
Cool little town nearby. Grand Geneva is across the expressway in a wilderness/farm region next to Lake Geneva, it’s technically within walking distance of the downtown BUT NOT IN MARCH. This has two positive effects, one, the town is far enough away that everyone stays at the Con for dinner and getting drunk AND if people want some night life outside of the Grand Geneva, there are tons of excellent bars and restaurants a short ride away. Being a town with the highest per-capita net worth in most, if not all, of the midwest helps as the quality of the places you can to is way higher than any town of this size. You can also stay in a hotel not far from the convention and get a bus/shuttle to the Grand Geneva to save money (even with record crowds at the con, there were still vacancies as March is between ski season and boating season so it’s a tourism dead zone).

Alright, here’s some shit I saw and played. I got to the con about 1PM Friday and just wandered around mostly as everyone else was in games or still working like chumps! The coolest thing I saw that day was the shrine to Dave Trampier with tons of his old stuff to look at, including original pages of Wormy, two hand drawn TITAN playtest boards, and lots of old artwork prints. I found a copy of Dragon #77 at the Noble Knight booth and added it to the collection there (has King of the Tabletop in it). I got a personal tour of the exhibit from Tramp’s sister and it was pretty eye opening. There were letters where he was trying to get people to fund a WORMY compendium, but it didn’t go through. That needs to happen someday, somehow. Friday night we went out to the steakhouse there and started heavily drinking and the night was over (most people had gotten there after work and were pretty beat down already before the booze).

Saturday I just had one game I had signed up for, the LEGO mech game, Mobile Frame Zero. There were a lot of kids there and the guy running it was a bit slow to start– by the time we got to the first turn’s activations, my buddy pinged me that there was a seat at the GIANT KINGMAKER TABLE and so I booked it over there to play that instead. That was great fun despite the fact that I had the weakest starting faction in the game and could only buddy up with people to do anything. The lady running it was the second generation ‘runner’ of this game and she did an amazing job of wrangling these cats.

I had to go to a funeral nearby that took a chunk of hours out of the con, but when I got back I got into a horror RPG called VAESEN. The scenario was investigating a string of crazy murders in Prague and we were nearly all killed, but pulled it off in the end (not going to put in any spoilers as I think this is a game module that others may play). It used a D6 attribute+skill system like Tenra Bansho Zero which was pretty good BUT for something like this I would still go for CoC with friends and INTO THE ODD at a convention. Last game of the day was going to be Warrior Knights (haha!) but it go to late so we played Shadow Moon Syndicate instead, which was fine but too much like Ethnos for my tastes.

All in all, a fantastic weekend that I really didn’t plan out enough, next year, if I can make it, I need to run an event or two.

Garycon 2019!

Garycon was this past weekend and I was able to go Friday and Saturday to game the fuck out of it. Always a great time, it’s one of those cons that I very much hope does not get any bigger because the venue, the attention you get from the staff, and the small but cool set of events are not something that should be forced to change due to overgrowth. While I really dig Game Hole Con, that thing is going to get bigger and bigger until it’s rival to Gencon itself. Garycon, hopefully, not so much.

Most years we get in some RPG games (mostly DCC) at garycon, but this time it was all board games. Matt went Thursday and mentioned that the game library was very small (they didn’t use Milcog which is at Gencon and Gamehole con) so we had to schlep a ton of our games to around the place. Luckily, unless we have an event, we go to the same spot every year, park our sweaty asses there and don’t move for the whole fucking weekend.

FRIDAY. I’m going to call Friday exactly what it was: eurotrashday. Now I like a good euro, and I generally like to try new games, but this was a bit too much worker placement for a single day.

We started out with the excellent but messy (and poorly graphic designed) Terraforming Mars. This took a long time, but the experience of playing was quite fun, and we were fresh and not drunk. While not super easy to learn, it was easy to relate the systems and mechanics to what was going on on the board quite a bit more than the next few games. I’d play again.

Between the Euros we did get a game of ROOT in. I pretty much told everyone that I would be satisfied to play ROOT all goddamn weekend, and that I needed to play it at LEAST once per day so people were aware. Root is not a euro (it’s only called that by eurofreaks who couldn’t possibly lower themselves to play an ameritrasher) so there was a bit of a reprieve. The game that day was a Vagabond, Lizard Cult, Cats and Birds game. It was surprising win for the Lizard Cult, even more surprising when after the game we realized that Matt had not been discarding his cards whenever he scored garden clearings. It’s a wee bit more difficult to score with the Lizards than that! People are starting to get better with them though and that’s excellent because they are nasty.

The next euro we got the wooden cubes out for was Gugong : a game where you play a faction trying to get the most influence in the Forbidden City for reasons I’m not totally sure of. This is a worker-placement-point-salad-solo game with very little interaction between players but a neat looking board and peices. Gugong was really difficult for me to learn after playing Terraforming Mars (and playing Root), but was basically placing stuff on the board to generate points, either inexpensive and late, or expensive and early and hope that whatever you were doing generated more points by the end of the game that the other players doing the same thing. This game seems to have about 30% more crap on the board to do than needed with an area where you could float your cubes around on boats and ride a little horse around as well as trying to complete a wall, moving up a track through a little village… it was incomprehensible thematically to me and just seemed like a mess of linked mechanics. Gugong wasn’t terrible, but just has nothing to recommend it over tighter euros.

The last game of the day was one I really did not like, but it had some great art and graphic design: Coimbra. I’m not sure what to say about this one except I wished, based on the theme, that I was playing Princes of the Renaissance instead. I did not know what was going on in this one, and just chose the tiles with pretty girls on them most of the time. One incredibly annoying thing was the variable turn order. I wanted to switch seats with people but of course you have this big tableau of tiles in front of you. I’d likely play the others again if pressed (especially terraforming mars), except for this one.

SATURDAY! This is the day we played the good shit, but it was loooong. We got to the con pretty late in the morning and immediately started a massive game of Eclipse with likely too many expansions and new races and shit. It’s a great game, but they pumped out the expansions there for awhile and unless you play A LOT of the base game, I just don’t see the need.

This was a slog, and a very low-tech game so battles took a long time. I hope the second edition consolidates some of these expansions and just keeps the good shit. While I appreciate a game where a bad hex pull can ruin you for a couple turns, with the ‘moving ancients’ your whole game can be fucked for good. With a game this long, that’s not good.

Next up was the amazing game of the CON: DUNE. I brought my old set that I’d had since high school, that has no more player aid sheets and has pubes in the box that are older than my kids (hey, we played on the floor some times…). We had a full 6 players and lest you forgot how good this game is, or never knew, let me remind you. You see where the storm goes, you see where the spice lands, you bid on cards (the only tedious part of the game) and then each player lands stuff on the planet and moves one army. That’s the whole game! Yet in those simple phases is one of the greatest war games that also fundamentally nails the feel of the conflict from the book perfectly.

I drew the Bene Gesserit and immediately wanted to get retribution on the game of Dune and all players after a loss years ago to them in a game when I destroyed everyone as the Harkonnen’s on turn 2 AS PREDICTED and lost.

For the prediction, looking at the board and players: newer Harkonnen player, totally new Emperor and Guild player, strong Atreides player and experienced Fremen player. I chose the Fremen on turn 4, which is a bit of risk since the game can be over (with a worm appearance) on turn 2/3 after alliances are made. The Harkonnen and Atreides were hammered off the board by the Fremen, Guild and Emperor in the first couple turns and based on the board positioning, I got lucky and a worm wasn’t drawn until turn 4. The Fremen made an alliance with the Guild, both of whom had strong board presence and it was all over but the yelling and crying as the Bene Geserit again snatched victory from the jaws of defeat (I think I had 2 pieces on the board at the end).

The last game of the day was another game of ROOT, this time with 6 players! This was an awesome game and took place during the Goodman Game’s free beer and chocolate bar party in the same area, so people kept coming round to see how things were progressing. We were intensely into the game and even with that, it went until 12:30 or so AM where I was able to squeeze out a win with the Riverfolk with the Vag and Lizard Cult nipping at my heels! I was able to put away the win because of a single, unprotected garden that had been ignored in a mouse clearing far away from the action (remember Lizards control any clearing where they have a garden no matter what) allowing me to place a trading post and hit 30 points. Great game, lots of shit talk and yelling of the word fuck.

There’s also a ton of radical pictures I took of the miniatures area I’ll throw into another post.

Garycon 2018

Always a fun, mellow con where you can get food and drink no problem, from where ever you are in the Hotel. We showed up on Saturday only and hit the board game library and then commenced to playing DCC until my kids nearly fell asleep at the table. This is one Convention where you can just basically show up and fairly easily get into games.

This con is getting … bigger. We’ll have to see how long it remains at the Grand Geneva which itself is huge– I think it would not be as unique or fun if it moved. Hopefully it stays a smallish/medium con in the next few years and doesn’t approach the monstrosity that Gencon has become. However, if you want to experience what GENCON was like in the early years– Gary Con is definitely it.

The GM’s view running People of the PIT!

Garycon 2017! twas good.

This is a unique little Con as it harks back to the era where Wisconsin was ground zero for all D&D stuff, with THE DUNGEON shop (basically the D&D store with the TSR office upstairs), the qtip factory, etc. all around Lake Geneva, where some of these TSR guys still live and still show up to Cons!

So if you do not know, Garycon is a small con at a very cool location, the Grand Geneva Hotel, at it’s worst point in the turn of seasons (end of March) when the snow is gone and the warm weather (even for hiking) isn’t around yet. 40’s and rain is what we got again this year, unlike Game Hole Con which was absolutely gorgeous out all weekend in November! I think that Game Hole and Garycon bookend each other quite nicely at their times of the year though, where, typically, you ain’t going outside for summer or winter sports at all up here.

This is an OSR con, which means Dungeon Crawl Classics, Swords and Wizardry, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Into the Odd, Trampier art, Castles and Crusades and a lot of old dudes. One of the guys I was with mentioned that the demographic was, for the most part, 20 year-olds and younger, and late 30’s and older with the entire millennial generation not even there.

That said, while all about OSR, DCC dominates this con as far as I can tell. They have a huge booth in the small exhibitor hall and while there were tons of people playing 5E, there were also many DCC tables everywhere. I think one of the reasons DCC does so well here is that a lot of the old Wisconsin/Northern Illinois TSR designers are involved with Goodman games (and now even WOTC with their partnership announcement this weekend on the old school modules). Goodman does judges guild reprints AND their own Californicated OD&D DCC stuff, they do a rebirth of Metamorphosis Alpha AND their own Mutant Crawl Classics. So they are pushing ahead with their own games while at the same time not only bringing back some of the oldies, but adding new content from the original authors. This makes the OS (without the R part because they likely never stopped themselves) happy.

We got to play DCC twice with Daniel Bishop as the Judge. For our first game our gang of freaks was nearly half the players there, which was totally awesome. I had run a funnel and read modules, but never played the ‘leveled’ version of the game before and I am quite impressed with the rules in play. I played a warrior, Sensless played a magic user with all BUFF spells and Maat played the only thief, bowers another Wizard. The game is dominated by the magic users for the most part (which is very anti-vancian/gygax), but they destroy themselves to pull off what they do and still have to rely on the dice–nothing is every certain no matter what you spellburn. What it comes down to is trying to maximize chances of a certain spell result using spellburn, corruption, the halfling luck power and personal luck. How it works out in play is basically full on gonzo, where the GM can lay heavy stuff on the players and they can come back from the brink with clever luck/burn/corruption usage — but it’s very costly. In a CON game Wizards are not going to hold back on the burning for results, so shit will get crazy.

Fighters are awesome however. They take a beating as expected, but instead of flat bonuses, they get a DEED die with which they can declare a heroic deed, like pushing someone to the ground or dry gultching them if the die comes up 3+. This allows a lot of creative play for what is normally, even in 13th Age, a bit of a boring class outside of Runequest/Mythras.

My second game I coached my kid through and it was great with a very strange premise in a deathtrap dungeon, which he had never experienced before. I talked to him after about how the horrifyingly deadly traps were telegraphed by the description of the area, and the non-telegraphed ones were fairly easy to get out of. Unlike the funnel games, leveled characters in DCC are difficult to kill off as long as the rest of the party is around– but his party had nearly all the spellcasters drop to zero at least once and I would have loved to see some of their character sheets to see how bad their stats were with all the spellburn and voluntary corruption!

Other stuff I saw and did:

Played A Study in Emerald three times and it was great each time, even though we got a few of the rules wrong. I also busted out Moongha Invaders, another Wallace classic.
Col. Zocchi was there with his dice and stories. Picked up a D100 and a full 12 die set. I need them for the funky DCC dice, but these will quickly replace all my other dice, which I will probably donate to the school library or work.
We played Alpha Blue with Venger Satanis. One thing out of playing this I noticed is that when PC’s are presented with the desire for sex from female/male/alien NPC’s, they are ALWAYS paranoid about it being some sort of duplicity. This happened in Alpha Blue and in Scenic Dunnsmouth a couple weeks back. Even when everything checks out the players are still totally thinking it’s a trap for sure… why are we conditioned this way?? Think about it, you come out of a dungeon with a ton of gold and hit the local inn, the brothel wenches will want you to buy them drinks and other stuff to maybe get them the hell out of there on a gold sedan chair, BUT likely want to actually fuck adventurers and of COURSE any male NPC in the same situation will want to put it to even the brawniest of females when she has gold jangling in all her pockets!
Marvel Heroic – there was a table next to us today that was playing, cool to see. That’s a fun superhero game.
Tom Wham – we bugged him about getting some of his games print on demand or kickstarted! I missed the Search for the Emperor’s treasure game though sadly.
Grand Geneva knows how to make a fucking good Brandy old fashion!
There’s a small space between the city sprawl from Milwaukee and Lake Geneva that used to be a BIG space. Driving through these areas that will soon be mc-mansion farms as far as the eye can see was sad.
I grew up near Saylesville, which isn’t even a village or township any more, being wholly swallowed by Waukesha, with only the name of the millpond to show it was ever there at this point. To the south of us was a big farm owned by a Gygax, which we heard was a cousin of Gary Gygax. Everyone in our area pronounced it GEE- GAX and not Gu-I-Gax. One of the Gygax grandchildren walked around and talked to con-goers and I asked how his name was pronounced and he said the Gu-I-Gax version, so there you have it. My mom will never be convinced to say it that way though.
CON food. I had terrible issues with something I ate or drank, same as a couple years back at Game Hole con. I don’t have a sensitive stomach normally at all, but fucksake, there was something going on there.
Man– Wisconsin– you have to get some exercise!

Garycon this weekend

It’s been a fucklong time since I posted stuff. Was in Colorado, played Lamentations for about a week (will post about that later), then we had 13th Age and got in as a player in an ACKs game as well.

But this weekend is OSR madness with Garycon. I’m looking forward to playing some DCC and lugging my huge book around, looking forward to my kid meeting the makers of DCC and having a go at the strongest judge contest (with the enormous judges guild book). Pic unrelated.

Garycon action!

We made it around 10 and it was already hopping at the Grand Geneva. Great con to wander around in, but like all small cons, if you don’t have a game going on, there’s not a ton to do (except eat and drink!). It was far from the mass insanity of Gencon. We pretty much played Numenera all day as the Into the Odd game I wanted to get into is going on NOW rather than when I though it was.

Stuff that was good:

Location – The Grand Geneva is just that, it’s a grand hotel on massive acreage. in summer you wouldn’t have caught me dead inside any buildings there.

Focused convention— Gary Con is an old school D&D convention with all that that means and all that that excludes. There were no LARPers, very little cosplay, few board games– people were there to game as well and not jag around.

General friendliness- it’s Wisconsin after all. WI people are a grim folk generally, but they are nice. The staff at the grand Geneva were very friendly and accommodating.

Lots of indy stuff. There were games played that have never and will never see wide publication or even publication outside of someone’s typed up notebook.

Food – was good

Beer – was cheap and good

Gaming – a bit more chaotic to try to get into games, and yet the con is so small you could just walk around and find the people that you want to play with. Next year I will probably run something (Lamentations most likely).

Large Beards. Some of the biggest I’ve seen.

So yes, for sure next year.

garycon