Thursday, August 9, 2001

by the Wunderland Toast Society

---

• GinohnNews - Party Crash, Bicycle Crash, Palm Crash
• Dave has built a WTS page, starting with a Fact Sheet, articles on Designing the Ultimate Game and Going Underground, and rules for an Icehouse game he's developing called Strategery
• Ginohn gives us rules for Happy Fun Die, plus two new Tombstoners
• Jake posted Dan Efran's Icehouse FAQ, plus thoughts about Programming and Game Design

We're back from Gen-Con, and it was fabulous. Since this event takes place just a few weeks after our Big Experiment at Origins, we decided long ago not to plan anything too ambitious for this convention, and just got a booth in the Exhibit Hall. We also kept our staff to a minimum this time, bringing as official booth staff only myself, Kristin, and Alison. But even with a small booth, a limited team, and an impromptu demo schedule, we still managed to attract huge crowds and sell lots of our games. Yay!

We're very pleased with the new fixtures we added to the booth this time, which included a new backdrop, a giant rotating Chrononauts box, and our first real cash register (this last item having been a real joy during those times when the booth was really really crowded). With each new show like this we do, we further refine our equipment, our procedures, and our shtick, making it that much easier to do yet more shows like this each year... and aren't there sci-fi conventions and gaming events of some scale just about every weekend, somewhere? The more events we do, the more we want to add more events to our schedule. But of course, there's never enough time. Always we are needing to return home, to tend to the daily workings of the business.

Suddenly, however, everything is changing. We are in the midst of turning over our warehousing and fulfillment operations to a partner company, ACMS. Once this handoff is complete, we will no longer be involved in the day to day issues of taking orders and mailing our products out to our customers. Oh sure, there'll still be an endless amount of work for us to do as we seek to market our games... but in these days of tele-commuting and with our fulfillment work outsourced, we will suddenly be theoretically freed to run our business from anywhere. And with that realization comes the idea of getting an RV, setting up a mobile office/residence inside it, and HITTING THE ROAD! We could go on tour for weeks, even months at a time, just driving around the country from event to event, making game store appearances in between conventions, meeting fans and recruiting rabbits along the way, and updating this website and running the business from wherever we happened to be at the time. Wouldn't that be cool??? Well, it's an idea.

Other things I remember from Gen-Con:

• Fluxx promo card collectors will want to know about the Gen-Con 2001 promo card: it's a Goal promoting Chrononauts called Time Travel: Time + The Rocket. We have plenty of leftovers and we'll be making them available (along with the Chrononauts promo from Origins) through our website in a few weeks, after the fulfillment handoff is complete. (Can't wait? Send us a SASE.)
• Fluxx Blanxx made its debut at Gen-Con as well, but again, if you weren't at Gen-Con, you'll have to keep being patient while we rebuild our shopping cart. (Anyway, we'd rather you bought your copy in a game store, many of which should be receiving Fluxx Blanxx during the next few weeks...)
• The best concessions at the con were the bags of delicious cooked-before-your-eyes tiny donuts, sold by the Milwaukee Miniature Donut Company. They had a scaled down version of Homer Price's donut machine right there on the third floor of the convention center, right between the exhibit hall and the open gaming area, and the whole area smelled of donuts all weekend.
• The most intriguing new release I saw was "Morton's List", a thick book filled with hundreds of real-life activities, accompanied by dice and lookup tables, with the idea being that you get your gaming group (aka "the Inner Circle") together, roll the dice, and then go out and do whatever the book tells you to do. The game's subtitle is "The End to Boredom" and some of the suggested game activities are sufficiently risky (the book is filled with warnings and disclaimers) that Gen-Con management decided not to let them have a booth in the exhibit hall after all. (To find them, you had to follow the trail of "Banned from Gen-Con" flyers to the table they were camped out at in the Open Gaming area.) Anyway, they're clearly Dreamers so we picked up a copy... we'll see if anyone in our group wants to review it.
• Speaking of new games, James Ernest just released a time travel board game called "US Patent Number 1", but frankly, it looks like no match for my time travel game. It's probably fun, but it's just a racing game, the time travel factor is pure window dressing. What fun is time travel if you don't get to change history?
• We haven't been to Gen-Con in several years, and the last time we were here they were actively tearing down sections of the convention center to make way for a whole new version of same. Now, most of that work is done and the new facilities look great... for example, check out this funky bus shelter! It's just too bad the convention is moving to Indianapolis the year after next. I shall miss getting to eat at Giordano's and the Safe House.
• As always it was good seeing friends and fans both new and old... I especially enjoyed playtesting the Lost Identities with Brad (who was thrilled to see his character Mojo in my nearly-final prototype deck) and Nanofictionary with Zach, Jessica, and William (I've never seen anymore more excited about this newest game than Zach). Oh, and thanks Carol for making sure we stopped to eat now and again!