Philcon 2022
Nov. 20th, 2022 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroPhilcon is a very “literary” sci-fi/fantasy con that runs in Cherry Hill, NJ. We’d been to a bunch of them before; it was actually ARR’s first con years ago. We missed the last two years for obvious reasons, but decided that we felt safe enough this year to give it a go.
Philcon didn’t feel heavily attended, but it also didn’t feel empty—it’s unclear whether they’re in post-pandemic recovery or a spiral. (Many of the volunteers and a lot of the attendees were older, which is generally concerning.) I give them credit for requiring masks and vaccination, which may have hurt their attendance, but especially as we head back into multi-epidemic season it was fine by me.
I went to one real “discussion” panel, the “Humans are space orcs” one that meandered a bit, but I give them credit that the panel was a fangirl, a writer and a biologist, which meant they got a broad range of stories. Which stronger moderation it could have been excellent. At the same time, Jethrien and ARR went to a ranking competition of Pokemon villains and had a great time.
Jethrien went to a bunch of panels and also got a chance to hang out with some of the Crazy 8 crew. As she noted, this was probably her last con as a “civilian” for a while.
I went to two anime panels, both run by the same guy: One was on “anime armaments and toon tactics” which ended up mostly being about whether the weaponry in cartoons was accurate to the real world, but also introduced me to an anime called Girls Und Panzer, which has the wonderful premise that an all-girls school has “tank battles” as a club sport. The other was “Bad Anime,” which focused on a feature-length film called Foodfight!, which apparently cost $45-60million to make; took 12 years between funding and (extremely-limited) release; starred Charlie Sheen, Hilary Duff, Christopher Llyod, Eva Longoria, Wayne Brady, and Ed Asner; and was an astoundingly-terrible Toy Story rip-off featuring supermarket logo characters and animation that would have looked bad on the Playstation 1.
We checked out the filk track, but ARR wasn’t feeling it. Jethrien took him to the masquerade which also had an extra performance by the musical guest (Rhiannon's Lark), and that was apparently a hit.
The games room was the most popular spot, bar none. We tried out an assortment of games:
The first game we played was Abandon All Artichokes, which was a really clever deckbuilding game: Each player starts with a deck of ten artichokes, and the goal is to remove enough artichokes and add enough other vegetables that you draw a hand of 5 cards with no artichokes. I may pick up a copy.
Similarly, Dungeon Mayhem is another 2-4 player game where each player has their own deck, but this is a preconstructed game of wearing down each others’ hit points via attack and defense cards. It gets credit for being really fast—ten minutes with two players—and easy to pick up. It’s an ideal games room game.
We tried four new versions of Fluxx: Adventure Time Fluxx was ARR’s favorite and feels similar to Batman Fluxx but with a different skin. Cthulhu Fluxx and Zombie Fluxx both have a mix of Keepers and Creepers and use “Un-Goals” that force the players to work together to prevent the game from ending without a winner; in addition to regular Goals. Family Fluxx is pretty close to the base game but adds special rules for kids, parents and grandparents.
Trogdor!! The Board Game is a cooperative game where the players work together to have Trogdor burninate the countryside and the peasants before the knights stop him. It was an entertaining time but I think there are better variations on the concept and the joke gets old quickly.
Unstable Unicorns is a race between players to build a stable of magical unicorns with a similar sensibility to Exploding Kittens. (There’s apparently an adults-only expansion deck, but we skipped that.) If a copy fell in my lap I’d play it again, but I’m not rushing out for it.
Sagrada is a complicated but intuitive game of building stained-glass windows out of dice that I had tried at an earlier con. If you like Tiny Towns you’d probably grok this as well, because it’s semi-competitive but mostly an individual puzzle for each player.
Alex and I took a brief look at Dragons & Chickens, which is a spot-the-match and grab game that I really think needs three or more players to really work. We also were curious about Adventure Mart but were tired on longer deckbuilding games by then so we didn’t actually try it.
Finally, Who Would Win??? is similar to Superfight, but instead of buff/debuff cards it changes the type of competition each round, and puts the emphasis on the strength of the player’s argument rather than who you actually think would win. (They also get credit from putting a short description of each person or character on each card, in case you don’t recognize the name.)
In the dealer’s room, I picked up a book with the annotated Eye of Argon (the legendary worst fantasy story ever) and ARR got a game called Happy Little Dinosaurs that caught his fancy.
As a reminder for next time: We stopped at Wawa on the way and got sandwiches for lunch so we didn’t need to forage in between panels, and that was definitely the right move. We spent all of Saturday at the con and got sushi for dinner and stayed at the con hotel; then we got hotel breakfast and did Sunday morning panels and gaming; then we got some pizza and visiting friends who live in Cherry Hill before heading home.
Overall: I did three different cons with ARR this summer/fall, and each was a different sort of experience, and I was happy with all of them. I think we might try to take it a little easier next year, though.
Philcon didn’t feel heavily attended, but it also didn’t feel empty—it’s unclear whether they’re in post-pandemic recovery or a spiral. (Many of the volunteers and a lot of the attendees were older, which is generally concerning.) I give them credit for requiring masks and vaccination, which may have hurt their attendance, but especially as we head back into multi-epidemic season it was fine by me.
I went to one real “discussion” panel, the “Humans are space orcs” one that meandered a bit, but I give them credit that the panel was a fangirl, a writer and a biologist, which meant they got a broad range of stories. Which stronger moderation it could have been excellent. At the same time, Jethrien and ARR went to a ranking competition of Pokemon villains and had a great time.
Jethrien went to a bunch of panels and also got a chance to hang out with some of the Crazy 8 crew. As she noted, this was probably her last con as a “civilian” for a while.
I went to two anime panels, both run by the same guy: One was on “anime armaments and toon tactics” which ended up mostly being about whether the weaponry in cartoons was accurate to the real world, but also introduced me to an anime called Girls Und Panzer, which has the wonderful premise that an all-girls school has “tank battles” as a club sport. The other was “Bad Anime,” which focused on a feature-length film called Foodfight!, which apparently cost $45-60million to make; took 12 years between funding and (extremely-limited) release; starred Charlie Sheen, Hilary Duff, Christopher Llyod, Eva Longoria, Wayne Brady, and Ed Asner; and was an astoundingly-terrible Toy Story rip-off featuring supermarket logo characters and animation that would have looked bad on the Playstation 1.
We checked out the filk track, but ARR wasn’t feeling it. Jethrien took him to the masquerade which also had an extra performance by the musical guest (Rhiannon's Lark), and that was apparently a hit.
The games room was the most popular spot, bar none. We tried out an assortment of games:
The first game we played was Abandon All Artichokes, which was a really clever deckbuilding game: Each player starts with a deck of ten artichokes, and the goal is to remove enough artichokes and add enough other vegetables that you draw a hand of 5 cards with no artichokes. I may pick up a copy.
Similarly, Dungeon Mayhem is another 2-4 player game where each player has their own deck, but this is a preconstructed game of wearing down each others’ hit points via attack and defense cards. It gets credit for being really fast—ten minutes with two players—and easy to pick up. It’s an ideal games room game.
We tried four new versions of Fluxx: Adventure Time Fluxx was ARR’s favorite and feels similar to Batman Fluxx but with a different skin. Cthulhu Fluxx and Zombie Fluxx both have a mix of Keepers and Creepers and use “Un-Goals” that force the players to work together to prevent the game from ending without a winner; in addition to regular Goals. Family Fluxx is pretty close to the base game but adds special rules for kids, parents and grandparents.
Trogdor!! The Board Game is a cooperative game where the players work together to have Trogdor burninate the countryside and the peasants before the knights stop him. It was an entertaining time but I think there are better variations on the concept and the joke gets old quickly.
Unstable Unicorns is a race between players to build a stable of magical unicorns with a similar sensibility to Exploding Kittens. (There’s apparently an adults-only expansion deck, but we skipped that.) If a copy fell in my lap I’d play it again, but I’m not rushing out for it.
Sagrada is a complicated but intuitive game of building stained-glass windows out of dice that I had tried at an earlier con. If you like Tiny Towns you’d probably grok this as well, because it’s semi-competitive but mostly an individual puzzle for each player.
Alex and I took a brief look at Dragons & Chickens, which is a spot-the-match and grab game that I really think needs three or more players to really work. We also were curious about Adventure Mart but were tired on longer deckbuilding games by then so we didn’t actually try it.
Finally, Who Would Win??? is similar to Superfight, but instead of buff/debuff cards it changes the type of competition each round, and puts the emphasis on the strength of the player’s argument rather than who you actually think would win. (They also get credit from putting a short description of each person or character on each card, in case you don’t recognize the name.)
In the dealer’s room, I picked up a book with the annotated Eye of Argon (the legendary worst fantasy story ever) and ARR got a game called Happy Little Dinosaurs that caught his fancy.
As a reminder for next time: We stopped at Wawa on the way and got sandwiches for lunch so we didn’t need to forage in between panels, and that was definitely the right move. We spent all of Saturday at the con and got sushi for dinner and stayed at the con hotel; then we got hotel breakfast and did Sunday morning panels and gaming; then we got some pizza and visiting friends who live in Cherry Hill before heading home.
Overall: I did three different cons with ARR this summer/fall, and each was a different sort of experience, and I was happy with all of them. I think we might try to take it a little easier next year, though.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-21 05:15 pm (UTC)