Emerald City Comic Con: Snatched from the jaws of defeat

How fast can the Story Games Seattle squad go from zero to sixty when it comes to busting out a big can of con gaming goodness? We now know definitively that the answer is: extremely fast indeed.

Despite getting the green light at the last minute our troops assumed battle formation and rocked games all weekend long. Forty-five games total including Fiasco, Microscope, Zombie Cinema, Durance, Quiet Year, Shock, Dungeon World, Polaris, Coyote Won’t Talk, InSpectres, Kaleidoscope, Baron Munchausen, Remember Tomorrow and Serpent’s Tooth.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t think anyone was going to show up. I expected all our facilitators to sit around and entertain each other. Yep, I said the same thing last year but this year I had a very good reason to be worried: there was nothing about the gaming area on the Emerald City Comic Con web site (there still isn’t). No one had any way to know we existed and we didn’t have any gaming panels to spread the word. As the weekend went on some signs went up telling people there was gaming on the lower level but that was a pretty late fix. No one would know to come to ECCC to game.

But despite that, even if it wasn’t the apocalyptic deluge of gamers we got last year we got a solid stream of people looking to game, including a surprising number of people who had never played role-playing games before but who (inexplicably) seriously, definitely, absolutely wanted to sit down right now and play some of these newfangled story games. Brave and, as it turns out, fantastic new gamers. People can argle-bargle about the state of the industry or whatever but let me tell you: the gamers are out there and they are ready to play.

We also got to reconnect with lots of the awesome folks we met last year, all of whom have clearly spent the intervening year sequestered in monasteries training in secret kung-fu gaming techniques, because: damn!

Just like last year, being right next to Gamma Ray’s table was a perfect match. People would wander up and ask about games and the nimble Gamma Ray staff would flag one of our tireless volunteers to come answer any questions they had.

A fantastic weekend of gaming, defying all the odds. Hats off to the tireless facilitators who made the magic happen. Adrienne, Alex, Ashley, Caroline, Jay, Jerome, Jess, Marc, Martin, Miles, Pat, Sam, Shuo and Xander: you are a peerless crew and shining ambassadors of gaming. Kudos one and all.