I'm pretty sure I'm the only person from California in this forum, so this is probably a pointless posting, but who knows. Maybe there are some lurkers also from the area dropping by who'll read this.

I'm going to go and check out the Kublacon Game Convention this weekend. It's being held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Burlingame, California which is near the San Francisco International Airport. This isn't very far from where I live so I thought I'd check it out. The convention is for all types of non-video games, so that includes board games, collectible card games, role playing games and so forth. I've never been to one of these and I thought it'd be fun to check out something different, especially when it's right here in the area.

I found out on the Dragon Booster trading card game website that if you volunteer a few hours helping Score Entertainment run their events at the convention, they give you a free convention pass for the entire four day event in return. That seemed like a good exchange to me so I signed up. I'm kind of interested to see who shows up for the Dragon Booster tournaments their running.

Anyway, in the absurdly remote chance that someone else reading this happens to also live in the area, post a reply or drop me an email and perhaps we can meet in person at the event.

Bah, why don't we get things like this in Tasmania?

Have fun. :)

Or Queensland! Oh, well, have fun.

Thanks, I'm sure it will fun just looking around if nothing else. I might even enter the Dragon Booster tournament if people other than little kids show up.

You pretty much have to live in a big urban area to get specialty conventions like this. It's kind of nice at times (like when Disney's Broadway version of "The Lion King" came through last year), but other times you get kind of sick of being elbow to elbow with 7 million other people. ;) It's a trade off for sure.

I like living in a small town. It would be good to be able to get to all that stuff, but I just don't like living iin the city. Here it's nice and quiet and I can walk everywhere. I hate buses and taxis.

I'm sort of bracing myself for culture shock when I go to Canberra in June, I've lived in the country my whole life.

Not to mention the airport. :(

They call us the 'bush capital'. I hope it won't be too bad. :) The most exciting thing about our city is the nine public libraries. (And that's exciting enough, IMHO.)

Nine libraries? Awesome!

Isn't that so unfair? We wouldn't even have nine major libraries in the state!

*Bounce* I hope my aunt won't mind if my idea of sight seeing involves library hopping. :)

I thought I'd briefly share my impressions of Kublacon in case anyone is interested. If not, just skip this posting.

The convention was a lot of fun. There were 2000 people registered and it was a pretty busy place. This was my first time at a gaming convention of this type and a couple of things stood out in my mind. First, the median age group was older than I expected. At video game conventions, for example, there's a lot of kids. But there were hardly any kids at Kublacon. The median age range at the convention overall seemed to be approximately 18-35. For the collectible card games, the median age range seemed to be more like 17-25. The historical and fantasy miniature games attracted people in the range 25-35. Role playing games seemed to appeal to the whole range of 18-35.

The convention attracted primarily men. I'd say it was something like 95% men in fact, which surprised me. I would have thought board and card games would be equally interesting to men and women. The majority of the women were at the role playing games.

I must say I expected to see a lot of guys looking like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. You know, nerdy, overweight, out of shape, pony tail and all that. But out of 2000 people, I only saw a couple like that. It seems that despite spending hours indoors playing board and card games, these folks are still healthy and active and not nerdy.

Not surprisingly, the biggest attraction and the biggest tournament was for the Magic: The Gathering collectible card game. That continues to be the big one. There was one big room dedicated to Magic with probably around 100 people in a tournament round at any given time and 100 more just playing casually with other people on the side.

I was also encouraged by the total lack of sore losers. Despite 10's of thousands of games played at the convention where someone always ends up the loser, I never saw anyone get mad about losing. With things like road rage and more and more problems with fans causing violence at sporting events, you never know what's going to happen. Seeing 2000 people who can play games and not get mad about the outcome was very nice for a change. People who are attracted to these sorts of games are an incredibly happy lot.

Volunteering with Score turned out to be a really good deal. Not only did I get in for free (saved me the $50 registration fee) but the guy from Score who ran the events was really good to work with. During idle periods, we played two card games: Inuyasha and of course, Dragon Booster. This was the first time I played either and I thought they were both quite good. This was a great way to get introduced to them since this fellow was an expert at them. Until now, I didn't really have any experience with collectible card games and it turns out they have more depth and strategy than I imagined. I'm going to have to try and find a group to play against around here. Plus I also put my name in to Score to contact me directly if they ever need volunteers at future area events.

I think I will definitely be going to Kublacon when it rolls around again next year. If a gaming convention like this ever comes to a city near you, you might want to check it out.

Sounds fun. :)

Don't like my chances of there being one around here, but if there is I'll check it out.

nine libraries? Is that ALL? oh jeez...

Glad you had fun. :)