As always, Con of the North is one of the best weekends of gaming for me. I don’t know how many people attend it, though I suspect the number is in the 500-1000 range. There are bigger cons in the Twin Cities — good gosh are there. But none of the other cons has so much great gaming, all in one place.

Con of the North was at a new hotel this year. It’s west of me rather than east, which I thought would make the commute shorter, but it ended up taking about the same amount of time. Parking was a mixed bag, as I nearly ended up late for my first Friday game. But after that anxiety-creating first experience, I had a relatively easy time finding parking the next two days; and John informed me that there were whole lots of parking that I hadn’t discovered yet.

The hotel seemed at times to exist in six or seven dimensions, with confusing corridors that met in non-euclidean ways and ceilings designed to hypnotize. But again, a lot of this is probably just disorientation from being there for the first time. And the hotel’s concession food seemed to be more reasonably priced than the last hotel’s.

I ended up not staying for as much gaming as last year — ‘only’ seven games, and no boardgames at all, versus last year’s seven-ish RPGs and two non-RPGs. That was due to an incipient cold, and to choosing to catch up socially with Chad rather than participating in Bob’s game. But the games I got to be in were overall great.

Now to start thinking of games for next year…