I turned 50 recently, so I hope you don’t mind indulging me in a bit of personal reflection today. I did quite a bit of navel-gazing when I was younger, often sharing thoughts here about being a stay-at-home dad, for instance, but these days I mostly write up games and include a little commentary in my Stack Overflow book columns. (I made the image above for my invitation—it’s made of components from 25 different games. Can you name them all? I’ll list them at the end!)
I usually try to host a board game day for my birthday most years. Between a bit (a lot?) of extra clutter in the basement game room and the hope that my 50th celebration might warrant a somewhat bigger crowd than usual, I decided to look for a larger venue. I ended up renting a large classroom space at my church—a lot cheaper than some of the other options I found, a decent-sized parking lot available, and a mini-kitchenette where I could stash sodas in the fridge. (It did mean I could only run until about 9pm instead of late into the night.)
I made up a guest list, sent out Evites, and selected a mix of games to bring. I knew I’d have a mix of folks: people I’ve known for years from local gaming conventions, some of my regulars at my game nights, friends who are newer to hobby games but wanted to come celebrate my birthday. I went with mostly lighter, shorter games, but threw in a couple big games for the hardcore gamers, expecting that I’d probably stick to the quicker games myself so I could play with more people. I called it the “Jon-a-Con.”
At the last minute, I found out about a local place that prints T-shirts (Foliage Prints), and it turned out I had just enough time to put in an order. A couple of Evite polls and messages later, I had a T-shirt design by my friend Alex Hart and enough interest to exceed the minimum order. (The shirts turned out great, though communication could have been a little better. Still, he got the job done in time.) I ordered some cakes from Costco, bought way too much soda, and crossed my fingers that there would be enough potluck food to feed everyone. Oh, and enough tables! By the day of the party, I’d gotten over 80 RSVPs and I was a little worried about how many tables and chairs we could actually fit in the classroom, but I figured a lot of people would pop in for a little while and not stay the whole time.
We started setting up at about 8:30 (after staying up a bit too late the night before playing games!), and there were a few people who showed up right away and helped me get the tables and chairs set up the way I liked, and then we just sat down and started playing games! For the first couple hours we had a slowly growing group, so we stayed at a single table and played a few party games like Bullseye and So Clover!, and then a lot of folks started showing up and we spread to other tables, eventually filling up the whole space.
We did have plenty of food—though a very large proportion of it was sweets and desserts, so if I do something like this again I might need to request more real food! Other than a mid-morning group photo and a mid-afternoon break where everyone sang “Happy Birthday” before we cut into the cake, it was mostly just gaming all day, exactly how I like it! I didn’t get to play games with everyone, but the great thing was that folks found each other and then just sat down and started playing games with each other. I did do a fair amount of teaching games, but there were several other experienced game teachers who took it upon themselves to teach throughout the day.
My model for this was like what I do at GameStorm, a local gaming convention that’s held here in Portland every March. (I wrote about it last year, but didn’t do a recap this year.) Alex Hart and I work together (now with a team of volunteers!) to put together a library, print up a menu, and then welcome people to play games all weekend. At my party, I did try to sit down and actually play games some more, though I just can’t help myself when somebody needs a game recommendation or some help learning a game! I’ve realized that, strangely enough, perhaps one of my favorite things about tabletop gaming is teaching people games. It’s something I started doing out of necessity, as the person who was usually bringing new games to the table, but now it’s something I look forward to. I love being able to introduce games to my friends, and making the process of learning a new game just a little bit easier.
We started winding things down around 8:30pm—I started packing up games and some friends started clearing away foods and leftover plates, though we did have some games keep going right up until the end! We got everything loaded out and were able to close up just about at 9pm, bringing the first-ever Jon-a-Con to a close.
There were some things I’d do differently next time: first and foremost, I need to start planning a lot earlier! My birthday is actually in early May, but it took me so long to decide on a venue that I kept having to move the date back. Memorial Day Weekend might actually be a good time to do a multi-day event, but not without advance notice. As it was, I was running into graduation parties and other end-of-year events. I’d love to have an actual multi-day event, but that would require finding a venue that could actually be used for a whole weekend; the church uses that classroom on Sunday mornings, so it was strictly a Saturday option. Maybe next time I need a bigger room, too, because this one got close to capacity. (And while I was happy to splurge this year for my 50th, in the future I’d probably ask guests to chip in toward a room rental.)
I used Evite to send out my invitations, and was surprised to see how many of them ended up in spam folders, so unfortunately there were some people who may never have gotten them. I also tried using their poll feature when I was trying to decide whether to make T-shirts, and it is really unwieldy. (And when I listed my wife as a co-host of the event, it turned out that she got a whole lot of notifications, but often did not receive the messages that people were replying to!) I need to figure out a different system for that.
Overall, though, I had a blast! I loved seeing so many of my friends in one place, and there were several folks who even drove in from far away to attend, which I really appreciated—these are friends that I usually only get to see once or twice a year, so having another excuse to get together was really fun and I highly recommend it. I’ve already had a few requests to do it again… before next year! Well, we’ll see whether I’ve got the energy to do this more than once a decade. Many thanks to my family for indulging me and all the friends who came to share the day with me! If you couldn’t make it (or your invite went to spam and you never heard about it until now), hopefully you can join me at the next Jon-a-Con, whenever that may be.
Ready for the answer?
Here’s the list of games that I used to make up the “50” above:
- Apiary
- Bullet
- Carcassonne
- Clank! Catacombs
- Decorum
- Deep Sea Adventure
- DroPolter
- Emerald Skulls
- Emperor’s New Clothes
- Holding On
- Kinfire Chronicles
- Let’s Go! To France
- Light Speed: Arena
- Magical Athlete
- My Father’s Work
- My Story
- Quacks
- Return to Dark Tower
- Root
- Seaside
- The Gang
- Thunder Road: Vendetta
- Tokyo Highway
- Vantage
- Vast
Jonathan H. Liu
Jonathan H. Liu is a stay-at-home dad in Portland, Oregon, who loves to read, is always up for a board game, and has a bit of a Kickstarter habit. I can be reached at jonathan at geekdad dot com.
