As I write this, I have gotten home from Cancon 2023. The day started at around 7 AM, then started on the con floor at 8:30, and following that we had to pack down at 12:30 and finally got ourselves on the road at 1:30. It’s now many hours later than that and much of my time has been spent recovering from the drive and the weekend of standing on my two feet and shouting at people a lot. What follows is memories constructed, as best I can, from the notes I took of the time, and the information present to me now.
First things first, this is a convention that differs from most I do by being so far away from my home that I have to sleep near the event. This year, we got lodgings in someone’s spare room, with myself, Fox, and the driver who took us. That driver, who I won’t name on this blog so as to not blow up their spot, was super helpful the whole time, didn’t have to be there and was generally 100% great. I do not know how to repay them the effort they put forth to help us get the convention run.
But anyway, we drove down on Friday morning; this gave us time to get to the convention centre, register our presence, then set up our table area and the display of our goods. Our displays this year featured three 3-meter long tables arranged in a L shape, and we had some card tables as well, that put some of our stock out away from us, and meant that you didn’t have to approach us as people to look at the products we were selling. I thought this was a bad idea because I thought our most useful tool for converting attention to sales was me, talking to people, but I also didn’t think it was good to argue about it, so I just let it go.
Turns out I was completely wrong: By having the table there, we invited people to stop from the flow of traffic, then I saw them slip in closer to avoid being an impediment, then they’d come to the table and just… buy things. Just buy them! No explanation, no hard sell, no rules explainers, just… they’d buy them based on the boxes.
That’s weird enough as it is, but know what made it weirder? The things they chose to buy. There are a bunch of games I sell that are, in my opinion, aggressively weird. Some of our games have a great clear aesthetic that pulls the eye – games like You Can’t Win, Hook Line & Sinker, and The Botch and The Botch Is Back are all based around clear and bright designs that I think hold attention. But Winston’s Archive is a game I made with an incredible niche theme: Sorting books. What’s more, Winston’s Archive is a game where, thanks to trying to incorporate dysexic-free fonts, the cover kind of looks a bit… drafty? Like a first draft. Like the things that would normally make it look more interesting make it harder to read, so the result is a box cover that I feel a little awkward about.
We have one copy of Winston’s Archive left.
I have no story about it, no viral hit, no explanation from some source about a game that infected a group and then they all came back to play it more. I have no story about that. I just know that somehow, left to their own devices, a bunch of people looked at this game box and went ‘oh yeah, I’ll have that for $15’ and they just straight up bought it. That’s really exciting!
Another memorable thing is that on the first day, I wore my This Shirt Says Trans Rights shirt. I did this because I figured it’d be the busiest day and if I was going to get into a fuss over it, I’d rather get it over and done with. What I got instead was a consistent response from strangers, even people I walked past, complimenting the shirt, which was really nice. What’s more, I wound up having a lot of conversations with queer gamers and parents of queer gamers who wanted to be able to connect to people, and also get games that didn’t seem they were going to be likely to shock anyone with anything upsetting.
It reminded me of that awkward phrase I don’t like, ‘find your tribe,’ where the whole point in our disconnected landscape of socially unmoored people-bubbles, there are definitely factors that let us anchor ourselves to one another, and bereft of anything else, finding one another is helpful, it’s a way to be able to say ‘I can connect on at least this.’
We sold a bunch of Queer Coding too; a game that I think of as just an icebreaker, something you want for cons and meetups where you’ll be dealing with people you don’t know. Similarly, Senpai Notice Me flew off the shelves, but it always does: people love a meme and this one is also very pretty. Finally, You Can’t Win continued its weird presence selling itself, because despite the game being very clear about how hard it is, people kept buying it.
The other thing I usually bring back from Cancon, aside from stories of people I yelled at and a sore throat, is a haul of games I bought, and this year I didn’t buy any. It was a conscious decision: I was busy, and afraid of spending money at first, but then as things became more relaxed, and the large stall I was excited by dropped their prices more and more, I found myself nonetheless deciding to instead not buy new games this year. This wasn’t a wholly painless choice: What I wanted to ‘buy’ effectively, was more space in my house; by not buying new things until I had exhausted what I owned, I was making sure I didn’t have an ever-growing stack of games I didn’t know if I wanted any more.
There are a few things I kind of wish I had picked up, but not enough to have actually done it; Red Rising was down to $20, B’Twixt: A Game Of Thrones is a game I want to have a copy of but not a Game of Thrones copy, and that’s all we have so far. Wise Guys, a $100 big box game, was going for $10 and I passed it over, and I even saw games on my wishlist – like Not Alone and Fog Of Love at steep discount, and decided to not get them.
I am thinking about this feeling, this decision to do things this way and about how excited I was to see how many of the games I took to the Bring-And-Buy had sold. I want to make sure I’m not focusing on acquisition and instead on what board games are; Experiences.
The last story of Cancon – at least for now, as I remember it – is of my Tyranids. I have some Tyranids, a whole army’s worth, from 2004. I have played with them once, and then they sat in a drawer, in a box. I decided this year to try and rehome them, to put them in the bring-and-buy and sell them on to someone else. Since it’s a whole army, it’s expensive, and people interested in the field have told me it’s a good price for them… but also someone needs to want to buy a whole army’s worth of Tyranids, even retro metal ones.
They didn’t sell, but I’m not upset about it. I want them to go to someone who wants them, not someone who was afraid of missing out. We’ll try again at MOAB and maybe if they don’t move after enough tries, we’ll find some other place to put them. Who knows, maybe the spaces for play will have opened up enough that I get to play with them. I know One Page Rules is a cool looking system with something Tyraniddy in it. Could be useful there!
But this is the joy of material games: They are material. I can share them with people and I can give them away and nobody controls the central authority on how people play with them.