A podcast about board games, role playing games and gaming conventions! We bring on game designers, creators, players and game masters to talk about their passion.
Episodes
Thursday Feb 07, 2019
Thursday Feb 07, 2019
Rich and David are back to talk all about the history of their favorite gaming convention, Gen Con. How it got started, and what steps led to its enormous success. Everything from the humble beginnings as a place to play "Fight in the Skies!" and other war games to the ideal incubator for D&D and TSR. early on Gen Con becomes the place to launch games like Magic the Gathering, whos founding company goes on to purchase TSR and Gen Con... Really an interesting story.
::Correction! We claim Gen Con is the largest convention in the world... There is another. and it's an impressive 3x larger with 190,000 attendees! over in Germany: https://www.spiel-messe.com/en/
^ Turns out this convention does turn style accounting instead of estimating headcount. It's a fair bit smaller than GenCon. Unless it doesn't, then it is larger. We're getting conflicting reports and I can't read German.
Some additional resources:
Interactive site with maps, timelines, and every Gen Con program cover
40 Years of Gen Con, a hardcover book detailing waaaay more than we ever could
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Comments (5)
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OH NO, THE ERRATA GOT ME
Monday May 20, 2019
I will try to only minimally comment on this, though this topic is totally my jam. The international Federation of Wargamers is the group that started all of this, and the littlest known fact is that the prequel to Gen Con was a convention held in Malvern, Pennsylvania, in 1967, and it was a frustrating enough experience that the dude decided not to run it again, and Gary Gygax took up the call to run the next year's event, and the rest is history.
Monday May 20, 2019
Now that I am actually able to listen to the show... I love the explanation and your enthusiasm for the subject, but sadly you are wrong about Fight in the Skies, as it has been played it every Gen Con, eventually under its changed name of Dawn Patrol, and in fact the game's creator Mike Carr is the only person known to have attended every Gen Con as well.
Monday May 20, 2019
Also, wow, Podbean, what kind of random-ass handle did you automatically give me
Monday Apr 08, 2019
Essen Spiel reports turnstile attendance only; Gen-Con's turnstile attendance is significantly higher than Spiel's, so we can conclude actual attendance is quite likely higher also.
Monday Apr 08, 2019
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