In mid-April, I spent a Saturday attending I-CON #30, the “Northeast’s Largest SF Con,” which is true enough. It is a consistently well-attended con, with big-name media and gaming guests. This year saw Julie Benz, Denise Crosby, Nicki Clyne, Cam Banks, Eddy Webb, Frank Mentzer and many more filling out a widely varied roster.

Based on my short visit, I planned very little of my day — save for attending Cam Banks’ Smallville game, which ended up with just me on the roster which meant we didn’t actually play. But we spent an hour chatting about the game and reacquainting ourselves. I also got a solid overview of Smallville, and I’m excited to go read the rulebook in more depth now. This ended up being a nice way for it to work out, because I got to go catch the latter half of my friend Ben Morgan’s “Spookybeans” game. Ben is an artist, RPG designer, and all around cool guy, and I’ve been trying to catch a Spookybeans game for years. It also turned out that he and a mutual friend, Lucas, were just about the only two people that I knew at the con. We ended up hanging out, getting lunch, and playing an excellent game of Fiasco with the Gangster London play set.

Finally, I followed them to a panel that Ben was slated to be on, and found a few other NYC acquaintances there – so we rocked a short panel, and more or less wrapped up our con.

Overall, I was really disappointed in my experience at I-CON this year. It hadn’t really struck me how young most of the attendees are (though it makes sense, being a college con), but more importantly, very few friends were there to hang out with. That aspect of the day really killed it for me more than anything else. I spent way too much time wandering between buildings just looking for something to do that interested me. My attendance next year is currently unlikely, but we’ll see what happens in the coming year.

Having been home for the larger part of the last few weeks means that much more need is placed on my time. Plus, World Cup Action. As such, I have been busy to the point where some things unfortunately get placed low on the priority table and the recording/editing schedule has been hit. Happily, I have wrangled the time to record and edit the next episode, but then I left the portable hard disk at the office. It’s always something. In the meantime, I’m going to get some gaming in at NerdNYC’s Recess event: a full day of RPGs, Board Games, and good company. If you’re in NYC and you like gaming, no prereg required, come on out!