Jonathan Liu teaches a game prototype at GameStorm. Photo: Erik Wecks
Well, GameStorm is now over, all my board games are back on the shelves and I’ve caught up on my emails from the past three days, but it’ll take me a little more time to write up my experiences of the weekend. For one thing, I’m exhausted. GameStorm has 24-hour gaming in some rooms, and although I didn’t take full advantage of that, I was there until they closed up the main room at 3am one night. Last night I called it quits a bit earlier, but still ended up staying up and talking board games with Erik Wecks until nearly the same time anyway — so that’s part of why there wasn’t any post yesterday.
Over this week I’m planning to write up a little more about the games I played or saw other people playing at the convention, and talk just a little about how it’s set up. It’s quite different from PAX Prime in the way it’s set up, but since this is my first boardgame-focused convention I don’t know if this is a pretty typical way to run things.
The biggest part of my weekend, however, was taking advantage of the Game Lab. It’s a con-within-a-con that’s for game designers, prototypers, and playtesting. I didn’t know about it until the day before the convention. (I admit — my preparations consisted of picking out too many board games to throw into the trunk of my car). But Erik Wecks and I had started working on a game idea several years ago, long before I started writing for GeekDad, and we agreed this would be a good time to dust it off and see if we could do something with it. We ended up getting some very cool feedback on it, and on Sunday we even got a chance to playtest it — we were the “featured” Game Lab game!
Erik is going to write up the Game Lab in more detail in the coming weeks, and we’ll also share more about our board game idea and its evolution, but I was pleasantly surprised to spend much of my weekend not playing board games but instead thinking and talking about game design. While our game isn’t ready to release into the world yet, we’re hoping it will be soon!
In the meantime, I did get to play some pretty cool games, and I took a lot more photos as well, which I’ll throw into my GameStorm photo album on the GeekDad community site. Check out those photos, and watch for more about the convention from Erik and me in the upcoming week.
