With Gen Con over and my Recaps done, I finally had time to put everything away and get life back to normal. While putting everything back is never the most exciting thing to do, it does give me time to see what all I came home with.
This year was pretty light on acquisitions as I focused on picking up promo items for the games I like and getting some standard things that are annoying to pick up online.
Case in point, some new dice for Dropzone Commander and the annual Gen Con die. This is the first year that the Gen Con die has been two-sided. I found this out the hard way when having my event players roll it to figure out poll position in Pitch Car Death Race. With two sides filled with text, you have to call out which is the six and which is the one on the die… Pretty bad design decision this year.
Dice Tower has their booth in the hall and you can pick out the promos you want a la carte. Pro-tip: check out the various publisher booths for promos before. Czech Games had the Adrenaline promos for free and I didn’t need to spend money on them at the Dice Tower booth. Unless you just want to support them (which is never a bad thing).
Dungeon Crawl Classics gave away their intro book at the booth and after playing it at Cabin Con, this was an easy pick up.
Outside of promos, I made a few regular purchases like the new rulebook for Walking Dead, skirmish game. I haven’t had a chance to read it but it is an easy pick up with all the other Walking Dead I have. I’ll read the rules and decide if I need to jump in farther with all the stat card re-issues. With the comic series done, it’ll be interesting to see how far this can go.
The TTCombat booth was an easy stop as I wanted to pick up some of this year’s show exclusives.
On the last day of the Con, you can usually fine your best deals. BoardGameTables.com had a promotion for this board game bag for $25. I was on the fence at first but then spotted some attendee hauling a lot of games in his bag and I asked about it. He gave it some positive press so I went back and bought one. I also picked up Azul Stained Glass from the Cool Stuff Inc booth as it was getting price slashes throughout the Con.
In my last game pick up of the Con, I stumbled upon this little game from Itten Games, a Japanese publisher known for their breakout hit, Tokyo Highway. This is a little game of hide-and-seek where someone hides the Yeti in a room and picks a starting point where the Yeti can be seen from, takes a picture and then has everyone come in and try to find it from the start position. It looked cute and fun for the kids.
In terms of actual SWAG, the Song of Ice and Fire I made Colton play yielded some Lannister banners I was after as well as a bonus alt-sculpt of one of the Boltons.
In the Unmatched Tournament I won, I took home a copy of the Bruce Lee expansion. I wasn’t able to pick up Unmatched at the Con but plan to get it when it hits retail in a month or so.
For winning a grueling, but short, tournament for The Duke I won this laser cut plaque. I really don’t know what I’ll do with it but I guess it can serve as a reminder of all the good games I played. Maybe I can pimp it out a bit.
Last, I had Kwanchai sign my Catacombs box. It was such a great opportunity to meet him and he was a lot of fun.
While not a massive haul this year (I didn’t even need to pull out the spare duffle bag), it was a great Con and I feel good about acquiring just enough to have it worth it yet not so much that I get buyer’s remorse.