Natterings From Nepantla

With no Pathfinder Society games lined up for this weekend, I thought I had nothing at all scheduled until I got an e-mail Friday morning reminding me that I'd signed up for reCONVene. This was a one-day convention put on by NESFA (the people behind Boksone), running 11am-5pm Eastern and thus starting at an entirely reasonable hour of the morning for me.

The first couple hours I spent in the gaming room, which was Board Game Arena. BGA is a highly developed gaming platform, with various modes and a bunch of games and some low bars for newbies to overcome before they are allowed into competitive play. Upselling is moderately aggressive, though not quite as bad as the undismissable pop-up which forced me to sign up for a free trial on Tabletopia (now cancelled).

There is some variation in how well the games are implemented. The first one was Tokaido, a game where players are Edo-era travellers sightseeing along the great road from Kyoto. It ran beautifully and we even got a second game in.

The second game was Takenoko, where you try to grow a garden of bamboo and a panda moves around eating it. It's only a smidge more complicated than Tokaido, but was immensely frustrating to play. One of the key aspects is playing a card once you've achieved the objective on it, but it's more than just matching the picture on the card, so you have to have some underlying conditions met. If you've missed one and you try to play the card, you get told you can't play it, but not exactly why. We abandoned the game at the end of the hour about 20% through.

After that I took a break for lunch, and the afternoon was taken up by general hanging out and a couple of panels: "Modernizing Fairy Tales and Myths" and "Worldblending in Speculative Fiction". Both sounded promising but both also got hung up on the cultural appropriation discussion and wound up spending most of their time on it. I don't deny that it's an important discussion, but having it take over two panels almost to the exclusion of their intended topics was a disappointment.

At 5pm Eastern there was a last-minute addition of a feedback session. Some of it was predictable: lots of people initially struggled with one thing or another but felt like they'd gotten a handle on it. Some things are still a work in progress, like figuring out how to present the information on how to find and log into all the pieces of the con so that people can find and use it easily.

There were several people who reported in the chat that they were taking notes for their own upcoming virtual conventions. One of them was for Orycon, the local convention out here. As recently as a couple weeks ago, it was planning to be a blend of in-person and online components. Now I know it's just gone to all-virtual.