Convention Report: FallCon 19 - September 22 - 24, 2006

By Brent Lloyd
October 5, 2006

FallCon is an annual Boardgame and Miniature convention held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We primarily focus on “Designer� or “German� boardgames and miniatures with a few wargames thrown in for good measure. Recently held on Sept. 22 to 24, this was our 19th year. You can find out more about us and dates for next year at www.fallcon.com.

This past year was a trial for us. Our website was hacked and destroyed, this was the largest headache and obstacle we faced. The importance of our website cannot be understated for a convention like FallCon. We had a large number of false starts and set backs trying to get it back up and running. We currently have the bare bones minimum up and running. Good news though, we have now found a young man who has promised to help us out and we should have all our old stuff back up again in the coming months. This time without using easily hacked programming…we promise!

Attendance this year was the largest to date.  The official number sits at 252 this year. That does not come as a surprise with the growing interest in our quaint hobby. We have seen an increase in families, couples and more balanced (but not yet balanced) gender parity. This is our third straight year of increases and we expect the trend to continue, as more folks become familiar with FallCon. Last year we started doing and running more events during the year, game rooms at Westercon (http://calgaryin2005.org/) and other conventions for example. We hope to continue promoting and advertising FallCon through out the rest of 2006 and 2007.

We had a bunch of special guests and game personalities attend this year. Wilf K. Backhaus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalry_and_Sorcery) was play testing his latest creation “In Fair Verona� which I unfortunately was unable to play. Craig Besinque (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/designer/62) had his latest creation combining all of his “Front� games onto a massive table. Greg Scott (Xig Games) brought his yet to be released creation “The Sorcerer’s Sword� which combines nicely with his previous game Xig. We also had Mike Roy (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/24491) bring his very interesting new game “SuperNova�. I was really hoping to give this one a spin, but there never seems to be enough time at the convention. Valley Games (http://www.valleygames.ca/), with their newly published re-vamp of Die Macher, made a splash by supplying all the boards for the Die Macher tournament. They are the new guys on the publishing block and I wish them all the best.

FallCon also welcomes the various clubs and game organizations in and around the Calgary area to assist us in moderating events. Our thanks go out to TAC (Tabletop Armies of Calgary), Strategem (http://members.shaw.ca/stratagem/), and the Edmonton Wargame Group (http://www.edmontonwargamegroup.com/) and we are certainly appreciative of their help. Additionally, members of the Calgary Boardgame Meetup (http://boardgames.meetup.com/33/), the Edmonton gamers POGOB (http://pogob.blogspot.com/), and the Calgary Gamers Guild from the University of Calgary were in attendance and played lots of games. We just love it when a plan comes together! Gamers from all kinds of backgrounds spending a weekend playing games and socializing.

Our sponsors were very generous this year, donating a record number of games. Top of the list is Nick Kellet’s soon to be released game called GiftTrap (http://www.gifttrap.com/). Every person who attended FallCon received a free copy of Nick’s game to take home with him or her! I really hope this game catches on and I have yet to try it but you can read an excellent review of it by Tom Vasel at BoardGameGeek (http://boardgamegeek.com/game/23686), Thanks Nick!

Even our longtime attendees got into the act. Grace & Micheal Satre generously donated a copy of the Tenth Anniversary 3D edition of Settlers of Catan. It was the grand prize for winning our third annual Settlers of Catan tournament. The Settlers tournament was a great success with 34 people entering the preliminary rounds.  It came down to the final four (Travis Weber, James Istvanffy, Michael Reuvers-Gowler, Andrew Bachand) with Travis emerging triumphant. Wow, what a great prize for winning a few games of “Settlersâ€?, next year maybe it could be you.

We had many other great sponsors all of whom you can see in the picture below. We sincerely hope that all of our attendees will continue their support of all our sponsors. Conventions like FallCon really do make a connection between folks in the game business and a targeted audience. We are firm believers in the value of that connection and the success of FallCon is a testament to that connection.

In addition to holding over 50 different events, we also ran a game auction on Saturday evening. It is a good chance for some folks to clear out some of the games that no longer interest them. It is also a great opportunity to pick up a few games that were maybe on your radar but you never bought for various reasons. This year was unbelievable, 500 games sold off in just under 2 hours. That’s about one game every 15 seconds, yup every 15 seconds. For the first time ever, we had to cap the games at 500. As one of the auctioneers, I can attest to the quality of this bountiful harvest.  I am seriously considering just participating next year. I saw a number of gems go this year that I seriously to bid on.  Many games went for under $10.00 and a copy of Rail Baron pulled in $66.00. Heck, there were a number of games still in their shrink-wrap.

Overall, FallCon 19 was a huge success. I can say that without reservation.  From an organizer’s point of view, we had fewer “issuesâ€? than any previous year; registration was smooth, our line ups were almost non-existent, all games ran on time and we had plenty of extra boards to host many games.  Thanks to our moderators events ran without any hitches that I am aware of. What is especially pleasing is seeing lot of folks, playing games, socializing and having a lot of fun. Enough said, since we’ll see you next year.

Peace
Brent Lloyd
www.fallcon.com

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	FallCon 19
	FallCon 19 Organizers
	FallCon 19 Sponsors

© 2006 Rick Thornquist

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