Who's Yer Con 2015
Who's Yer Con is a small, free gaming convention held every year in Indianapolis as a way of giving back to the gaming community. This year it was held over the weekend of April 17-19, 2015 at the Wyndham Indianapolis West, over by the airport. This is a new hotel for them, chosen because it will give them room to grow.
We got there a little early on Friday, wanting to get through registration before my husband's first game. It was a good thing, because the line was already stretching well down the hall. I ended up standing in it while my husband found somewhere to sit down.
Although it took a while to get our badges, we still had enough time to do some looking around before my husband's first game. The dealers were still in the midst of setting up, so we didn't want to go into the dealers' room and get underfoot. We talked for a little while with some friends before getting my husband to his first game.
I went out to the lobby to sit, because that was the only area with chairs where I wouldn't be in someone's way. I'd intended to get some writing done, but I ended up spending most of the afternoon reading stuff on the Internet. When my husband was between his two games, we went to the dealers' room and looked around. We talked to some of the dealers about the con and some other cons they'd sold at. We also checked out the raffle, and discovered they'd made major changes. Instead of having one ticket that was in the basket for all the draws, you got three tickets and got to put them into the baskets for specific drawings. So you were betting on winning a given item and giving up the chances on anything else.
In the evening, after my husband finished his second game, we headed back home. I did make a few notes about a logic hole I'd noticed in the novel I was working on, and in the process discovered an even worse logic hole.
On Saturday we headed back over to the hotel, where I finally got a chance to talk with representatives from a promising new con. Although they're only a two-day con this year, and we really can't justify doing one so short because our setup takes so long to put together. But they're hoping that if they do well, they can grow to a three-day con with Thursday setup, at which point it might well be worth it for us to do it.
Then I went out to the lobby to try to get some writing done. I ended up writing detailed outlines of three problem chapters in my novel. Although I was still struggling with the logic holes, having written out as much as I knew really helped get the story in my head again. By the time we headed home, I was feeling a lot better about my situation.
When we headed back on Sunday, it was raining, which complicated the drive. At least we didn't have to worry about hauling merchandise back out in the rain, but I still didn't enjoy having to walk through rain to get into the hotel.
While my husband was playing his final game of the weekend, I continued to work on my novel. In the process of trying to fix some problems I'd found, I discovered even more issues, which made things frustrating.
I did make a point of going to the dealers' room and finally trying to win something in the raffle. However, I didn't get anything I tried to win, which was a disappointment.
On the other hand, this year they did have a final burn-off of everything they had left over at the end of the con, and I was able to win something in it. After that, I headed over to the gaming tables and found a seat at an empty table near where my husband was playing his game. It ran long, and they finally decided to just wind it up so everybody could go home. Apparently it had some really complex gameplay mechanics, such that a single turn could take fifteen or twenty minutes to work out. My husband and I both agreed that it would probably work better as a computer game, since the computer would be able do do the complex calculations in seconds.
As we headed home, we ran into a backup at the south split. A semi had rolled over into the grass, and everybody was slowing down to gawk. We ended up going down to Raymond Street and across, since we couldn't tell if there were more problems further down. We made fairly good time and I was able to get some writing done after we got home.
Copyright 2015 by Leigh Kimmel
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Last updated May 1, 2015.