Critique-al Hit: Little Cons the Pros & Cons
Convention Season never really stops for tabletop gamers. Whether you prefer TTRPGs, wargaming, board games, card games, dice games, or any other analog gaming, there is a convention for you. The best part? There are enough out there that you can find your perfect one.
When someone says “convention,” what do you think of? Do you think of massive event spaces with tens or even hundreds of thousands of attendees? Walls of people and deafening noise levels? Thousands of dollars spent on tickets, hotels, food, and airfare? That was all I knew of when I first started attending conventions.
There are alternatives! If you are put off by massive conventions, there are still thousands of smaller, local cons you can attend. There are pros and cons to all conventions but today, let’s talk about the smaller ones.
I recently attended Dragon Fall, a medium-small sized charity gaming convention that takes place yearly in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. It’s held at the Grand Geneva Resort and it being my first relatively small convention, I was instantly sold on attending smaller events.
Small conventions aren’t perfect though; they do have their drawbacks. So let’s get the cons out of the way first. They are frequently in smaller towns that don’t have immediate access to major airports or rail stations which makes them difficult to travel to without a vehicle. The remote locations can frequently mean dining options are limited. Some of the smallest conventions may have serious accessibility issues. The offerings in terms of classes, events, and shopping are going to be a lot more limited. It’s not always perfect.
That being said, the pros far outweigh the cons. Smaller events leave a lot more room for socializing. The more intimate settings allow for a lot more person-to-person connection for attendees. At a larger convention, there is a lot of time spent running around trying to connect with all of your favorite people. Frequently, if you want to see everyone you can, it means spending less time together or getting that time spent together in larger groups. With a smaller convention, your time spent socializing can be in smaller groups for much longer.
There might be few classes to take or panels to see, but the ones on offer are frequently top notch. At smaller conventions you’ll have a lot more opportunities for one-on-one feedback and more time for open discussions. At the smaller conventions you will get to see a lot of new faces teaching and leading panels. At some of the largest conventions, you will start to see the same teachers and panelists year after year.
At Dragon Fall I got to take some of the first classes taught by a few world class painters. Jamie Daggers (@jamiedaggers) was there teaching several painting classes as were Kyle Dalton (@pale_king_hobby), Dan Dugal (@dan_dugal), and Katie Louise (@ktlou_who). For a few of them this was their first year teaching, for a couple, it was their first time teaching at a con altogether. It was a joy to get to be a part of it and they were all heavily interested in feedback on how to improve going forward, it’s something you don’t get at much larger events.
There is less shopping options in terms of the vendors but that isn’t always a bad thing. Vendors at some of the smaller cons are going to be local shops and artisans, small businesses and creators. You’ll be able to find a lot of new vendors you may never have heard of. You’ll also get to spend a lot more time with the artists and vendors getting to know them and learning about their products and services on a much more personal level. No standing in hours’ long lines to grab the latest and greatest product from a huge company.
The gaming might be the best part of the smaller conventions though. The tournaments are shorter and less intense. The gaming rooms are quieter. You can spend hours finding a ton of new people to play games with and new games to try out. Fellow streamer and hobbyist Zambies took the time to run a demo of Warcry from Games Workshop for a table full of folks.
Saturday night in the lobby of the convention area, 20 or so professional mini-painters and their partners sat around and played MonsDRAWsity from Deep Water Games. MonsDRAWsity is where one player has twenty seconds to examine a picture of a bizarre-looking creature, then they must describe it to the rest of the players who will be frantically sketching out the monster described to the best of their abilities. Using just a dry erase pad and marker, we all proved that we might be great painters but we’d all make terrible Forensic Artists.
While there are a few drawbacks with smaller conventions, the joys of a small convention outweigh them. Find a local-to-you gaming convention and give it a try if you haven’t yet. And if you have, drop us your thoughts in the comments. Tell us your favorite smaller conventions from around the world. And keep on gayming!
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