Who's Yer Con 2014
Who's Yer Con is a small gaming con held every year in Indianapolis. It has always been free, a way for the organizers to give back to the local gaming community, but as it has grown, they've found it more difficult to manage solely on the basis of voluntary contributions. As a result, they've been pushing paid memberships more and more, although the free attendee badge remains available and does admit you to the gaming tables and grant access to the games library.
This year's Who's Yer Con was held over the weekend of February, 21-23, 2014 at the Clarion Waterfront Plaza on the west side of Indianapolis. Because we needed to take care of some errands beforehand, we ended up leaving earlier than we would've needed to in order to get checked in by the time my husband's first game started. And since we were allowing extra time, of course everything went smoothly and we arrived plenty early. So we checked in, then ate our lunch before his first game started.
We also found some time to look through the dealers' room once they actually opened for business. Most of the usual dealers were back again, and we spent some time talking with old friends.
For the rest of the day, I hung out in the lobby area and worked on "A Separate War," struggling to make my way through a difficult chapter. Somebody had brought some sour candies and piled them on the freebie table, and I quickly found them addictive enough that I had to watch how much of them I ate. By the time we were ready to head home, I could tell I'd had more than I should've.
On Saturday we had to get up pretty early to head back to the con. I was going to get a whole bunch of writing done, but because we'd brought the iPad, I ended up spending more time on the Internet than I'd intended. In fact, if the battery hadn't started running down, I might've done a lot more stuff on the Internet, at the expense of writing time.
By Sunday I was feeling rather tired, so all I was able to get done on the writing front was some notes about a YA novel I'm trying to get prepared to serialize at JukePop. I was rather disappointed to discover that no, this year there would not be a "burn-off" of leftover freebies, because either they'd received fewer donations or they'd paced themselves better on the drawings.
On the other hand, we did get some good news about administrative changes in Anime Crossroads. I'm hoping that will result in a much improved situation in the dealers' room next year, and particularly a reduction of some of the communications issues which created difficulties for dealers and members alike.
Copyright 2014 by Leigh Kimmel
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Last updated April 19, 2014.