Gamex is historically the smaller of the Strategicon conventions, but we were still kept busy with our playtests of “A Town Called Malice” and “Spirit of 77: Return to the Cruise Ship of the Damned“. (And of course our little corner in the Dealer’s Room.) Many things occurred, here’s some of the highlights –

• On a designer/industry level, it was a delight to see my friends Martin Greenberg, Stephanie Bryant and of course Christopher Grey. It was very, very cool to meet Wade Rockett in person. As I said on Twitter, he is a true gentleman and a hell of a nice guy.
• I will always give shout outs to Jim Sandoval who runs the RPG division at Strategicon, hardest working man at the convention in my estimation.
• Our two Malice playtests went really well – the core mechanics worked and nothing truly went off the rails. My thanks to Chris and Rob Hebert in that first playtest to help smoke test.
  • Moving forward, I will be expanding on the pvp mechanics should they arise in-game.
  • I’m also working on not being stingy about the gaining of Character Points – They really make the game more interesting when used.
• I also learned a lot from the second playtest’s group of Malice players having never played a story game before. They signed up as a D&D group strictly based on the source material description, which reassures me that other people would find a game like Malice intriguing. It was a really different flow compared to the first one, but a lot of good scenes in it.
• Return to the Cruise Ship of the Damned worked great. It was particularly interesting in that my players had never played the first Cruise Ship adventure, and three of them were new Spirit of 77 as a whole.
• This convention we sold more of the pamphlet games than before, thanks to the release of the new pamphlet game, Mars Hates Homework. It’s also made the whole concept of the Bedlam Hall Challenge Coin check a more entertaining idea.

All in all, it was a success. We’re looking forward to Gateway in September. See there!

[Added Note – The photo itself used here came from Wade’s Twitter account, soon after picking up our two pamphlet RPG’s. Wanted to make sure to give credit where it’s due. ~d]