Leaving for GenCon....
Leaving for GenCon
I'm writing this with a half-packed bag on the floor and a dice bag I've already zipped and unzipped three times, checking for things that were there the first two times. There's a particular kind of anticipation that comes before GenCon, and every year I tell myself I understand it a little better, and every year it still catches me off guard.
Part of it is simple. GenCon is the biggest tabletop convention in the country, tens of thousands of people packed into the Indiana Convention Center, and for four days the ordinary rules of a week fall away. Nobody's checking email. Nobody's rushing to a meeting. The only schedule that matters is the one you build around games and the people you want to play them with. But I think what actually pulls at me isn't the scale of it. It's the compression. A whole year of wanting to sit across a table from certain people, wanting to try certain games, gets folded into four days, and there's something almost unbearably sweet about that kind of density.
The Dealer Hall is usually my first stop, and I've learned not to fight what it does to me. Walking those aisles on day one, before anything's sold out and before my feet hurt, feels less like shopping and more like wandering into a library where every book is a possibility. I have a mental list of booths I want to hit, half-formed and already negotiable, because the real pleasure of the hall has never been the list. It's the game I wasn't looking for, the one a stranger hands me and says "just try it," that ends up meaning something.
Saturday is the day I keep coming back to in my head. I've got a table with Scott Morris and the rest of that crew, and I honestly couldn't tell you, yet what we'll play (I do assume that Rainbow Blvd. will be there). It doesn't matter much. What I'm actually looking forward to is the specific rhythm of gaming with people who I met through nothing more than showing up to a table and playing a game one year and then missing that fun for an entire year. There's a theory of friendship I keep circling back to, the idea that it isn't built in grand gestures but in accumulated hours of shared attention on something that doesn't matter, which is exactly what a boardgame is. It doesn't matter who wins. It matters that we were all paying attention to the same small, invented world for a while.
I've got a handful of games I'm hoping to purchase and get to the table while at the convention this year, new releases and a couple of old favorites that have been worn out from playing. I say this every year and every year I get pulled off course by something unexpected, and honestly, I've stopped minding. The plan is less a plan than an excuse to start moving.
The part I'm most looking forward to, though, is time in the Hot Games Room, helping the BGG crew run it. It's the room at the Hyatt where the newest and hardest-to-find games live, the ones people have been reading about for months and can finally sit down and actually play. Helping run that room puts me in a strange and wonderful position, close enough to watch dozens of small moments of discovery happen in real time. Someone opens a box they've never seen, someone else teaches them the rules, and for a few minutes a stranger's whole week gets a little better because of a game. I don't think I get tired of watching that.
So that's the week ahead. The hall, Saturday with Scott and company, a list of games I'll only half stick to, and a room full of other people's first plays. I'm ready to go stand in the middle of all of it.
By Norman, BigGame on BGG Tabletop. Photography. Philosophy. The spaces where all three live.
