December 21, 2003
Gencon SoCal
As you may have read elsewhere, Gencon SoCal was a disappointment to some that made the effort to attend. I've never been to the original Gencon in the midwest, but it's been the big kahuna of American game conventions forever. Still, the writing was on the wall that this first venture to the West Coast might struggle. Right off the bat, you look at the schedule--two weeks before Christmas. Next year I understand it'll be one week before the holiday. It probably plays even greater havok with Hannukah.
I don't know what the organizers were thinking. On the one hand, heading to sunny Southern California has got to sound good to lots of gamers living in snowy parts of the country. The venue for the convention, the Anaheim Convention Center, is literally across the street from Disneyland, making for a nice combo-vacation, or else a great place for the nongamers in your family to have fun. But still, it's such a busy and even stressful time of the year for most folks, it's no wonder the turnout was light.
It certainly was. I heard some accounts that it peaked around 4000 on Saturday, and was considerably less on the other days. I don't know what the other Gencon (or Origins, or WBC) draws, but from the acres of open tables I'd have to say the organizers were hoping for a bigger turnout. This photo shows the CCG play tables, mostly empty.
I wasn't originally planning to attend, but the opportunity arose to help out Überplay by putting together a team to represent them at the show. They were a bit late in organizing all of this, so we missed out on being in an actual Exhibitor's booth. Instead, we were there just on Saturday to "demonstrate" several games, something that missed the official program but made it into the program errata sheet.
(The Gencon folks were really strict about the terminology. In their mind, demos are something very specific--free events put on by the exhibitors or something. Ours were supposed to just be scheduled games, which meant the players needed to have a $1.50 event ticket to play. They could've pre-registered for us, too, but that system didn't work well for Überplay or anyone else, from what I've heard. In any case, we didn't turn anyone away.)