Our First Convention
So, as I have mentioned in passing before, for many years now, I have been making and selling things at craft markets. This was part of the inspiration for The Valley, and it’s certainly part of why the market day phase can feel so… real. This also meant that I had no weekends, and all my evenings were taken up with crafting and doing admin for Copper Catkin, and Phersu Dancing before that, as well as working full-time. This meant that I never had free time to attend the other events that interested me – such as Wellycon!
With Covid 19 cancelling many of the usual scheduled events anyway, we had decided not to book any markets. This meant that we had a chance to attend Wellycon – but we had never attended anything like that before, so I in particular had no idea what to expect. I contacted Wellycon and asked what was involved in exhibiting as a designer. I assumed I was too late to participate, so my next question was going to be “is it ok if we bring along our game and invite people to test it with us?” but instead, I got an invoice and a stall allocation! So we were going to be at Wellycon! Aaargh!
The first thing we had to do was make sure that we had a playable prototype. Our current version had missing elements, cards needed correction, things hadn’t printed in the correct size or colour… but I will cover those in the relevant posts. Suffice it to say, we managed to pull together a good enough prototype that we had something to be proud of when we presented it at Wellycon.
But… what was it actually like?
I suffer from anxiety, so it was immensely reassuring to me to see this post in the official Facebook event which walked me through the whole place and told me what to expect before we got there. Thank you for that, Wellycon!
Pop over to the Wellycon Instagram page for some great photos of the event!
We were booked to attend on Saturday (our tickets were actually for Saturday morning, I got mixed up and thought it was the afternoon session, but as we arrived when the crowds were thinning, they let us come in, for which I am enormously grateful). We had debated bringing The Valley with us, but being unsure of protocol and the availability of parking, we decided it was best not to.
After inspecting our cool new souvenir die, we walked into the space, which was filled with people focused on their own tables, and awkwardly sidled over the the wall of games available to play. After some discussion, we decided to play Nova Luna – and it was really good!
We ended up playing one game, getting a nice meal supplied by one of our Friendly Local Game Stores (FLGS), Counter Culture, and then playing another round.
After our Nova Luna session, we play-tested My Date With A Zombie, which is now on Kickstarter here – see if you can spot our feedback! It was a great game, and we hope it does well!
Then, we play-tested Castleshire and bought a copy of Crimopolis. By then, it was closing time, so we headed home to debrief and plan for the next day.
George and I both knew that he won, but I accepted the win for the sake of the selfie.
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