Back from Ubercon, and I am seriously beat. Let me tell how this state of affairs came about.
I drove down Friday evening after getting out of work. After some requisite wrong turns, I found the hotel in Edison, New Jersey around 10:30. Picked up my badge from the evening con ops and found my friend playing Cranium WOW. That was an entertaining hour and a half, particularly when one player had to act out being Tickle Me Elmo.
Around midnight, my other friend kicked off Betrayal at House on the Hill, which I was seriously looking forward to. There was some wonkiness with the scenario as we were using the unerrataed first printing or something, but we got it all worked out in the end. The worm Ourouboros killed everyone but the plucky little kid. My cheerleader was a freaming machine for a while, though, as she had found the blood dagger while rooting around in the cellar.
The next morning, I realized I had failed to plan ahead by not printing out the games I had signed up for. I couldn't access the user area of the website for some reason on a laptop, so I was kind of lost as to what to do. Happily, I discovered the Rock Band/Guitar Hero corner. Not surprisingly, I was just sucked in to Rock Band, which I hadn't played before yesterday. I think I literally spent seven or more hours on Saturday strumming away at either RB or GH. I'm not a great player and it took a while to get used to the differences between the RB guitar and the GH one, but I think I improved a bit. Red-blue chords continue to be my bane, but maybe a little less so. Oh, and I absolutely suck at drums. As of now, I just can't play them at all.
Like Slurm, this game is highly addictive and I wouldn't have it any other way. Boston's "More Than a Feeling" had to be the top song of the weekend. There was one group of four who absolutely nailed it when I saw them play.
When I finally tore myself away from rocking out, it was like 9:00 Saturday night. My friend was playing in a Trivial Pursuit variant. I got to slip in when someone else was called away. The game was unfortunately marred by a quasi-dispute over how the GM chose to end the game in a sudden death in order to finish on time. Note to GMs: if you're going to insist your game end at a scheduled time, or find yourself having to wrap up before the game finishes in order to meet another commitment, be sure to have an exit strategy! Sudden death has to work and be fair, not just be something you make up off the top of your head.
It looked like I was going to be drawn into The T-Shirt Game with the same general knot of people, but then I spotted someone walking by, looking for players for Arkham Horror. I knew then where my fate lay: in a sleepy little town out to be overrun by squamous servants of an unknowable, uncaring god-being. It was 10:30 PM when we finally began the game and 3:30 the next morning when we wrapped up, having sealed six gates and prevented Azathoth from bursting into reality and automatically killing us stone dead. Except for like the last forty-five minutes, when everyone's exhaustion was really beginning to show, the game was a lot of fun. The GM brought CDs of mood music, but we were seated so close to the Rock Band corner there was no way we could have heard it. But the thought was appreciated, as were the Cthulhu miniatures he brought to supplement the standard cardboard tiles that represent Mythos beings.
We were playing with the Curse of the Dark Pharaoh expansion – surprisingly out of print, I learned – so there were not many Elder Signs available. As it happens, I pulled the only one seen all game during an encounter with a monster in the Black Cave. Otherwise, all five of us were hustling all over town looking for clues as to how to stem this seemingly endless tide of monsters. Instead of new portals opening, the ones already existing kept spewing forth more monsters. The terror level jumped by leaps and bounds for a while. I think the Curiosity Shoppe and Ye Olde Magick Shoppe closed in the same go. Things looked grim for a while, particularly the way monsters kept piling up on the Unvisited Isle, making it more and more unlikely anyone would be going to seal that portal. But the rolls went our way and everyone pulled together, in spite of over-tiredness and general fatigue.
In spite of falling asleep around 4:00 AM, I managed to roll out of bed around 8:30 AM. Plenty of time for a run to Dunkin' Donuts and a couple rounds of Guitar Hero before the main attraction – for me – of the day: Hex Hex. I first played this game back at OGC last summer during the wrap party. It was awesome then and just as fun now, despite the damper of one player feeling singled out for attack. After being the slowest to avoid Hex Hex Next – drop your cards and put your hands on your shoulders – I managed to take care of myself the rest of the game. Never lost Voice again and even managed to get a point back. Granted, it was mostly luck that I had the cards needed, but still, it felt like an accomplishment. What's more, I won a neat bit of swag since the proper recipient didn't want it: a tin customized to hold Hex Hex and Hex Hex Next together, with a nice magnetic decal for the lid. Admittedly, this means I need to buy Hex Hex Next to fill the tin properly, but I'm okay with that.
Some other items of note:
- The restaurant attached to the hotel, Harold's Deli, serves absurdly large portions of food. Like a sandwich serves four people kind of absurd. We got an order of chicken parmigiana that was a platter of chicken breasts lost in a sea of sauce and covered by a huge mass of cheese. Then we got what was practically a log of fudge cake to share. So big it had to be held together with a stick.
- Ubercon has an interesting prize system: each hour a game is played, the GM gets a prize button to award. The buttons are used to redeem prizes, with bigger items requiring more buttons. I was a little surprised when people started dickering over how many buttons would be given out, or who should get them. In my admittedly limited convention experience, prize tickets/redemption is usually a minor matter at best – probably because the currency in question is often much more scarce than it seemed to be at Ubercon. Which is good in a way, because it means more people get to take home freebies.
- The con suite surprised me as well. They had a space for convention attendees to relax and get free snacks and drinks. There were chips and soda, as well as vegetables, which was nice. That's another think I haven't yet encountered at other conventions.
- I saw Timothy Zahn, author of a number of Star Wars novels, holding a platter of doughnuts for the morning meet 'n greet with the guests of honor, including Zahn himself. Just wanted to throw that out there.
Ubercon was a lot of fun – more than I had thought it would be, to be honest. Getting away for a couple days was just what I needed, particularly to something awesome as Rock Band. It was interesting to hear snippets of conversations I've heard at my own area's conventions: dealing with the hotel, where and when is next year's con, did you notice what that one guy did? Some things are the same all over, I guess. I don't know if Ubercon was a rental car, twelve hours driving roundtrip and two hotel nights' worth of fun, but it was definitely a solid weekend for me. It also holds the somewhat dubious honor of Convention Where I Spent the Least Amount of Time Sleeping (eight hours over threeish days). If I go again, I think I'd like to pull together a group of people to make the trip and weekend more enjoyable.
Tags: Ubercon Conventions
