GenCon 2015!

It's that time of year again, right as summer is getting ready to turn the corner into back-to-school shopping. It's time to pack up the family and head to Indianapolis: GEN CON!

Gen Con, aka The Best Four Days in Gaming, is a giant yearly gaming con held in Indianapolis. I swear there are more people at this con than live in my entire town. And all of them are geeky. It's like having joined a commune of people the same kind of crazy as me, but only for a few days. And it starts tomorrow!

So, what am I doing this year?

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Ascension! I fell in love with this game when my husband first bought me the original game a few years ago.  We've bought every expansion and addition since. It's a deck-building game, meaning that you acquire cards through play that you then utilize to defeat monsters or acquire other cards. In other words, you build your deck of cards through gameplay. In the end the player who has earned the most honor (victory points) wins!

I'll be playing in a tournament with the new set. I don't know how well I'll do as I haven't had time to play with the new cards that much yet, but I'll love it all the same. The art is beautiful and the game mechanics are smooth. It's my favorite game.

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The Writer's Symposium! Gen Con's con within a con is a haven for writers, aspiring writers, and book-lovers. With sessions on craft, business of writing, and general topics of interest to writers (like body disposal, weaponry, or genre specific information), there's something for anyone with an interest in speculative fiction.

This year's featured speakers are Terry Brooks, Elizabeth Bear, and Chuck Wendig and I'm looking forward to hearing from all three of them during my time in the writing wing of things as well as authors I've met other years like Kameron Hurley, Jaym Gates, and Elizabeth Vaughan.

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Shopping in the Dealer's Hall will be definitely be a highlight. It's not good for my pocketbook, but it's good for my greedy little heart to walk up and down the aisles and see table after table of things I actually want to buy. This is not my usual shopping experience. I hate shopping under most circumstances, but at GenCon I have the chance to buy books, games, clothes, and art from the passionate artists who made them!

Luckily my family is geeky, too, so I can buy my holiday gifts here. The hard part is not using up my mortgage money!

I've also left myself some unscheduled hours to people watching, catching performances by singers, taking picture of cosplayers, and eating yummy things from food trucks.  This my friends, is my kind of summer vacation!