Welcome back to Friendly Ties. Today we are going to be talking about the wonderful world of Board Game Geek. So this is going to be our second convention episode in as many months, right? I mean, it's our third convention episode total, but it's our second one in the last, you know, recent, recent. This year. We're just going for the easy content.
The World Series of Board Gaming, we've also featured the World Board Gaming Championships. But we thought that it would be fun this time because Jonathan has gone to Board Game Geek Con, not just this year, but... a bazillion times that it would be fun to feature. This is my ninth year, actually. Nine years. We decided to hit while the iron was hot. I flew back three days ago. My voice is mostly better from playing games for six days straight. But yeah, this is my ninth time going.
Yeah, we've interviewed Nick a whole bunch about the conventions he loves. We're going to put, yeah, we're going to put John on the spot and we are going to talk about yeah what it's like to go to a convention that has not about competition in any way shape or form but is just about uh playing games and hanging out and being with other people who love board games. Yeah. So, like, the high level on BoardGameGeekCon, first of all, even though I've been nine times, I feel like...
I feel like I'm not an expert or anything. Like it's been around for 23 years, 22 years, something like that. Yeah. I didn't even know BGG was around for that long. I think it started like a year or two after BGG started. Yeah. Yeah. Like 3,500, 4,000 people. Again, don't quote me specifically.
But to some people, that's going to be a big con. And to other people, that's going to be an itty-bitty little con, right? When you think of like Gen Con has like 60,000 people. Put that in contrast. So wait, from the conventions you go to, Nick, the World Series of Board Gaming, how do people go?
uh it's like less than a thousand wbc is about 1500 okay so this is a little bit bigger than both of those yeah so i i first went in 2014 and i fell in love You know, I've been almost every year since then, you know, a couple of years there where... But it's just all about playing games. And that's what I originally fell in love with it for. Also, it's the first board game convention I ever went to. So, you know, there's got to be some...
some bias there. You know, I never, I never been to one when I went into 2014 and I was like all super nervous about it. I went with a couple of friends, which definitely. ease into it but it is a convention that runs from wednesday through sunday so five days uh with an asterisk where you just play games the convention is just open from 9 a.m i think it was on wednesday until like 5 p.m And it's 24 hours a day. The whole time, all the convention spaces are open.
huge haul like actually 24 hours like i'm gonna go downstairs at like 3 a.m and i want to play games 3 a.m.? That's early. Oh, okay. We're going to do – I'm ready. We're going to do like a day in the life. We're going to get to that. Keep going. High-level overview. It goes the whole time. And one of the biggest selling points of the – beyond, like, just play games like crazy, is it has an immense...
I'm not sure how it stacks up to other conventions. I think things have changed a little bit in the past. Like, I think Dice Tower West's convention has gotten substantial. But the Board Game Geek library is...
The first time I walked in, you hear the angels, the light shone down. It's this room, and it's so many games. It's thousands and thousands and thousands of games. And one of the main selling points... to me, at least when I first started for BGGCon, is that it is almost always the week before Thanksgiving, which also means it's almost always about a month after Essen in Germany, which is the convention where...
All the new Euro games come out. I mean, not all of them, but it's a huge convention for releases. And not everybody can make it over to Germany for that convention. And not everybody wants to attend a 100,000-person buying frenzy. and you can find spaces to play games in the cracks, whereas BGGCon is just about playing them. And they bring the hot games from Essen. Like, they literally put them onto crates in Germany, and they ship them over to Dallas so that they're there in time.
And they just really focus on having new stuff. I could go into a lot more details, but that's like the high-level overview on it. It's just playing games for as long as you want to for... You think five days is a lot of days to play games all day long. But every time Sunday rolls around, I'm like, oh, wow, that was the fastest five days of my year. So most conventions that I am familiar with have like a schedule.
But BGGCon, it sounds like it's very heavy on the open gaming side. So does it have a schedule? Is there a structure? Yeah. So I'm not hugely familiar with the scheduling part of things. My way of doing PGGCon is I show up on Tuesday.
And then I just play open gaming for essentially six days straight. I said it was a five-day convention, but a lot of people show up on Tuesday and turn it into six. But there's a lot of events, actually, that are run or at least listed on tabletop.events, which kind of integrates a lot of board.
And, yeah, people get together for a bunch of different games, like tiny games. Like, hey, we're going to play The Thing. One of my friends went to a scheduled thing. They played the game The Thing, and he'd been wanting to try it as a lover of, like, Battlestar Galactica. And he just went and played with some people he didn't even know. He just went to the right place at the right time. It was free. It makes an event, but you get a quote-unquote ticket.
And there's all sorts of those things. There's also bigger events like the virtual flea market and the bazaar. just a crazy live flea market. There's trivia, there's tons of different things. And all of those things are events that you can see online and sign up for, see who else has signed up for it. It's, again, not something I've really delved too much.
give me the like lay of the land right so like what is like the open gaming like i think i saw a couple of photos this year but like is it just like one giant room if you don't know anyone can you like wander in and find a game? Is it just like, what does it feel like? What does it look like? There are several open play spaces, but the main one is a gigantic If I had to guess, it's like... Like a hotel conference room, right? Because that's what it is, right? Yeah, it's like 100 feet by...
700 feet or something like that, 600 feet, and it's got thousands of tables in it. Probably, math is hard for a human on the fly, but yeah, it's just... A gigantic room. Like people on the other side of the room are small. You know what I mean? They're so far away. But there are also like breakout rooms, like smaller rooms where people can go and play in like a quieter setting. And this changes from...
We, like a group of our friends, we kind of camped out on the same three tables off in a corner for five days straight and that, you know, we didn't reserve it or anything like that. Although I think there was a table reserving feature used this year, but we didn't.
But you mentioned, or you asked about like, you walk in and how do you play? I have to admit, I'm going to say this a lot. I'm like, yeah, I've been so many times, but I'm not really an expert on a lot of these things because I've been privileged to always go. Like the first few years I went, I went with a couple of friends in particular. We shared a room and we just, you know, the three of us played games.
the whole way through. In the last couple of years, I have a wider group of friends. So I have never actually experienced the looking for a player, looking for a teacher type thing. they do have a system for that. You have flags. They say, you know, looking for players, looking for teacher. And you just put it on your table.
And I think that does work. I don't know how successful that is for other people because I haven't actually interacted with it. But I know it's been a mainstay since the first time I went. That's been a mainstay for a very long time because not everybody is able to fly out to Dallas with like a group of people to play with the whole.
So yeah, there are a lot of facilities there to allow people to play these games and do that kind of thing. I know one of my friends, it was his first time coming this year, there were many times he just kind of wandered the hall and looked for open play. as opposed to staying with one core group. There's a lot of ways. I have some theories about this question, but I'm curious. It sounds like you camp in your corner, you play games with your friends.
and maybe other folks that you've kind of met over the years. Why BGGCon rather than let's go to an Airbnb in the woods? What's the vibe that makes it different that like you like this experience? in coordinating games that way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have done the kind of Airbnb in the woods with a small group of friends thing, and I do love that as well. I think part of it is the fact that it's in Dallas. It's like the center of the country. And I have...
From around the country. It seems like, for the most part, people I was playing games with were from the United States. Although there are people... further. But I think part of it is playing with friends who are not necessarily local. But the first couple of years, I did go with friends who were local. Those two friends I talked about, they also live out here. They're part of my game group out here. And I think the allure was... Well, and still is. Just the transportive magical nature of...
You know, you're not having to drive anywhere. You're not having to do anything. It's just everything is there. It almost feels like Vegas for board gamers. Like, there's no clocks on the walls. It's brightly lit all the time. There's a lot of joy that can be found in, you know, getting an Airbnb with your friends and whatnot. But this just has a different kind of energy. And also to circle back a little bit to what I said earlier, it's got all the hot new games.
You know, if you want to try the new stuff that might not be available in the States for like six to eight months, it's a little bit better now, but certainly in like 2014 when I first went. a lot of those games that you're really excited about that came out in Germany would not get localization in America for like a year. And oftentimes only if it was good enough, if it sold well enough in Europe. So that's one of the main allures.
The library is there because it's not just new stuff. It's also thousands of old games, and it allows you to play that thing that you just never got. repeatedly. You know, like last year, I played El Grande for the very first time. I've heard about El Grande forever. I just never was in a room with somebody who had... It's there in the extended library. We got it played, and that was just a very cool thing to do. It is very easy to focus on all the new...
There's just so many games in there, you can almost get lost in it, I guess. So yeah, that's, I guess, one of the main... Also, if you're getting an Airbnb in the woods with your friends, you're probably going for a long week. two and a half days no i mean i i i want to i can you know i want to comment on this a little bit too because
I was actually supposed to go this year and something came up and I unfortunately had to cancel my trip at the last minute. And I thought about this a lot. And I think the thing that I... it's funny because when I was kind of talking about this with my partner, it was like,
You know, she was pointing out like, well, you know, a lot of the people that you're going with, you know, John mentioned his friends and his game group. You know, we have a lot of the same friends in the same game group. And, you know, I could see them all the time. Right. But. there's something about planning a week with your friends in this circumstance where this is the focus because the the crazy thing about you know life is that we're so, we're so busy all the time that it just.
Somehow, even friends that I could see all the time, I don't see all the time, or I don't see all the time in this context. And so I think that is, I think, the allure of the convention is just like the five days single focus. And it's been so amazing to meet so many people all over the country and get to play games with them online. And then here's this nice central location to be able to meet up. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Jessica has attended several times, my wife.
She, the very first time she was like, oh, it's summer camp for adults. essentially like yeah you go out here and you just like you know you you set the week aside and you just there are no clocks and the food is It's not good, but it's very close and a lot like summer camp. And you just have fun. Different people are going to get different.
out of this convention for sure. But yeah, for me, a huge part is the people that I get to, that I don't see all that often, that I love to play games with. And, you know, coming back to... There's something really like... Like from an endorphin hitting perspective, there's something really satisfying about it.
So you check out one game at a time. Everybody has a badge and has a little QR code on it. And if you want to check out a game, you just take it from the slot, you walk to the exit, and they scan your badge, they scan the game, and they say... It's due in four hours or it's due in eight hours. The hot games, you have a four-hour slot. All the other games, you have an eight-hour slot.
And that's the only game you can check out. So if you want to check out something else, you've got to check the first game in. And you can get up to some shenanigans like badge passing and stuff like that to make sure you and your group of friends can get the stuff that you want. It's a really interesting thing. You finish a game. You pack it up. You're like, okay, I'm going to go to the library. So you go to the library. You check it in. You walk in the door.
the game, and then you have to put it back where it goes in the shelf. And then you could check out a game. You know, you could have one game checked out at all times. You have this feeling of like, well... Well, surely I should grab something else before I leave this room. Well, I guess I'll take a gander. So like every time you finish a game, you go back down into this trove of games and you look around and it also has that like...
Not a gambling thing, but like when you get lucky and you walk down there and then boom, the game that you've been wanting to play for three days, it's always checked out because everybody wants it. Somebody just slid it there under the rack. you feel like you just hit the slot machine, the jackpot, essentially.
And then, you know, you scan it, you walk upstairs and people are like, oh, you got it. And I'm like, yeah. It's just a really, it's just a fun kind of thing. Or other people do. I mean, River of Gold. We just talked about it in our last episode and I was really high on it. I still am. a copy earlier today, but I really wanted to play it at BGGCon. Not because it was new to me, like we played it a bunch, we recorded an episode.
You know, friends who can play it with me when my copy arrives in like a week, but I just wanted to play it. And I kept looking and I kept telling people like, ah, I keep looking for River of Gold and it keeps not being. And then on the Saturday, like the very last main day of the convention, my friend walks up, he taps me on the shoulder, and he shows me the River of Gold.
I just like screamed. It's like, yeah! This is a game I've played like a bunch already. I was just so excited that he got it. And the same thing happened. He just walked up, somebody was walking in with it, and he just grabbed it. The hottest games oftentimes don't make it to the rack. I remember I checked out Black Forest. and I went in to check it back in. The lady dooted it with the QR code. I turn around, and instantly someone's like, can I take that?
Like, oh, sure. You can just hand it to them and they walk right out. Can I just have it? Exactly. That's part of the fun is like you're watching the rack, but you're also keeping an eye on the stream of people walking in.
And, you know, frequently we'd like, several of us would get all checkout games. We'd go upstairs and we'd all read rule books, like have a big rule book reading party. And, you know, a couple of them might be like, yeah, this doesn't actually look that good. Or like, oh, let's play that when you finish the rules first. And so... Yeah, I find myself rambling now, but it really is hard to...
overstate the impact of the library, of the game library and how it affects the overall space. I mean, like I said, we camped out at the same table. when you combine just going from that table over the escalator down into the light. Back to the escalator. Up. Back to the table. Over and over and over.
I'm trying to imagine doing this, and I feel like I would be like, I'd get in the library, be completely overwhelmed by options. Love it. I probably could spend an hour in there and be like, what happened to you? I was just walking around.
but then like how do you choose right you can only choose one game how do you know if everyone wants to play it i don't know you're you're better than i am at just like being like i want to play this game and then like promoting it i am the person who shows up yeah yeah i show up to game day with like three bags and I'm like I brought options I don't know what everyone wants to play and I'm so
I'm one of those people where it affects me if you don't like the game at the table. I know that's a weakness, but it does. I'm always trying to find the game everyone else wants to play. I mean, at the end of the day, it's free, right? Like the cost to check out a game that you might not be able to get everybody on board with is that like four minute walk there.
But it's a four-minute walk, John. But we also frequently, somebody's like, I'm going to the library, and then three other people throw a game at them. So you could walk in with multiple games to check in for other people. I mean, that definitely happens. Like, I know our friend Dave checked out several games that he never even asked other people to play because he kind of got into the rules and was like, nah, this isn't really turning into the game.
And, you know, he essentially just checked out the rulebook functionally and then, you know, went back. You do have to go into it with, like, what do we all want to play? What are we going to do? I mean, at one moment on the Friday of the convention, one of my friends was, like, feeling pretty tired. And she was like, I could do with, like, one polyomino game and then I'm going to take it.
polyomino game, polyomino game. Wait a minute, Foundations of Rome. That's like kind of an interesting polyomino game. And I remember seeing it on the shelf. So I like went downstairs, checked that one out. We played it. It was great. They all loved it.
And that was just because I kind of remembered seeing it because I'd been down there and spent so much time looking at it. So you can go down there with a mission, definitely. But usually I went down there with just kind of a lazy gaze, just trying to see. Yeah. I actually want to ask you a question about. And noise. Yeah. Because I happen to know that you said that you didn't sleep, I think, this entire time that you were there. I slept some.
I saw a lot of photos with Red Bull in the back. Not just from you. You know, it's something that kind of struck me that, you know, I've been thinking about. I would game in person prior to the pandemic. But not that often, honestly. Just the nature of my taste in gaming and my friends' taste in gamings and things that were going on in my life. And then when the pandemic happened, obviously we met.
much of other friends and i started to game online a lot and one of the things that i have loved about gaming online is you sit down you do it you don't have to drive anywhere you can do it in your pajamas you know all those things go get a snack you know
I think you're just subscribing to BGGCon. Yeah, I was going to say. You don't have to drive anywhere, you go there in pajamas. Well, that's sort of where I'm leading to, right? Yeah. Because I have noticed over the last couple of years... getting back into in-person gaming or for me kind of starting up more in-person gaming you know I get like a lot more tired in person playing games. You know, my. My back hurts. You know, they're just different.
you know elements i get sometimes i get a headache like i don't remember drink water uh you know things like that it's just a different a different vibe that's not to say i don't enjoy it but i was kind of wondering like what is it like to just sit and play games all day not just for one day so i feel like i do a whole games day and i'm like i'm i feel great i'm super tired at the end of it but then to do that for five days straight right so what's it like it's like
It's like heaven. You don't get tired. You don't get a headache. Do you remember to eat? Assert dominance over your body. right like yes oh my god yeah so yeah look who i'm talking to the two of you nick you know didn't yeah okay i will admit that my audience there was one day where i looked at my watch and it was three o'clock in the afternoon And I'd been gaming since 8 in the morning. And I was like, oh.
I should probably eat something. And I wasn't even hungry. Like, I like food. I like food maybe a little bit too much. But when it comes to BoardGameGeekCon... I'm just, like, so fixated. Like, it's like a flow state almost, like, with games. Like, one game into the next.
that you can kind of forget those things. Like, yeah, water is also an important thing. I do a pretty good job of being vigilant about drinking enough water, but then that's kind of annoying because then like every 40 minutes, I got to go to the bathroom because I'm over-hydrating because you're in a dry hotel environment. But, I mean, what's it like? It is what you want it to be in a lot of ways. Like, you can approach BGG. It's a blank.
You could go there and do no events like me. I mean, I technically did, I guess, a couple of quick events, but you could do essentially no events. You could go there and have events scheduled all the time. You could wake up at 11 and come downstairs. playing games you could do overnighters like i definitely have friends who
Like they, you know, play the whole week and they sleep and then Saturday comes around and they just don't go to bed and then they get on a plane at like 11 in the morning. You can't see me shaking my head, but I'm just shaking my head. This is too much. I mean, I love games. Yeah. I want to be laying in bed playing the game then. But you ask, what would happen if you came downstairs at 3 in the morning?
Well, I can tell you from firsthand experience, there's going to be hundreds of people playing games at three in the morning. If you come down at five in the morning, you might be starting to look at like a hundred people. It's definitely going to start to trickle down for sure.
But, yeah, you could just approach it every way you want. The first few years, we, like, got to bed at midnight and then woke up at, like, 7 to have breakfast, and we were out there at 8 every single day. Got, like, a solid seven hours of sleep. It was good. that plot i essentially don't follow that anymore because i just it's just so much fun and you have this one week to do it and you know like the term i'll sleep when i'm dead it's like well sleep when when i'm back in california
Right now, this is what I actually want to do. And, you know, I might be getting tired, but I'm just having so much fun. I think, yeah, I think I got about 23 hours of sleep over the course of five. And pretty much every minute I was not sleeping. I was gaming or gaming adjacent. You know, I woke up at 7 every day so that I could be down there playing games at 8 in the morning. And then, yeah, I was making it back to the hotel room.
two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning every single night. And that's just one way that you could do it. I know other people who stay up until like three in the morning and then they show up at noon. Like they just have a, they sleep in, they have a lovely morning. The hotel is... Like, I'm not a connoisseur of hotels, but it's a nice hotel. It's a convention center, hotel, and down. So you could decide not to sleep at all, or you could sleep...
One of my friends disappeared every couple of hours, take a nap, just take some alone time in the pretty nice hotel room just to kind of veg out. There was a... Sanctuary Room? They called it Sanctuary Room. It's the first time they've had it this year. I read about that. I didn't actually go to see it. Did you go into it? No. Again, Flow State. I forgot anything. There aren't games in the Sanctuary. What am I talking about? Very specifically, it's a quiet space for...
But speaking of quiet. It was like a sensory awareness room that is just kind of like a hey. Because you're in this giant room, I imagine, with, like you said, thousands of people playing games. It has to be loud in there. It was surprisingly not that bad this year in particular. The ceilings are probably like giant. The ceilings are very high. Interesting. And this is the fourth year that I've gone at the new location.
The first five years that I went and the first like, well, not first, but for many, many years, like over a decade, it was at the Hyatt Regency inside of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It was actually, we had a joke, actually a kind of an ongoing joke that we'd never been to Texas because we would fly in. and then walk out the arrivals gate, walk through a garage, and walk into the hotel.
And then five days later, I'd walk out of the hotel, through a garage, into the gate, and then walk on a plane. It's like, have you actually been to Texas if you never left? the perimeter of like, you know, the air tram that takes you from one terminal to the next. And that's the way it used to be. You were in Texas soil. Yeah. And that convention center was...
It was fine. It was not as nice as the new one. And that the main ballroom, they had a huge ballroom there as well. It got quite loud. Like, I definitely remember that, especially on the set. Because, you know, a lot of people live in Dallas and they just go to the Saturday. They just drive over there. They don't take time off in the week. So the Saturday could get pretty crazy and very loud. A bit oppressive, honestly. But I haven't noticed that at the new venue. I've been there three years.
And this Saturday, I actually commented to one of my friends who was his first time going. He was like, this isn't that bad. And he's like, this is way better. had feared. And he actually has a bit of a hearing impediment. So he was like worried that it was going to be too loud. And he had.
So I think it's just maybe a better space, maybe people in general were being quieter. It's one of those social dynamics where it's loud, so you have to talk louder, but then you're loud for other people, so they talk louder. I think there's like a kickoff point where suddenly it escalates, and it never quite seemed to get there. I mean, it's still a room with thousands of people talking in it, for sure.
But again, there's also other places you can go to game. There's small side rooms and whatnot that I never actually went to, but there's definitely other places. Do they have tricked out board games like Giant Robo Rally or something like that? They had, there was, I think, a War of the Rings game happening, like, the entire convention. I don't know, it was like this, like a bunch of tables all penned together and it was kind of draped off.
They have a dexterity alley with just every dexterity game you could possibly imagine. But as far as, like, crazy big blinged out things, not that I could necessarily think about. I do actually want to highlight the dexterity alley, though, because it's... You don't know how many wacky dexterity games there are until you go to this convention. I mean, they've got Crokinole, other things like that.
but just a whole bunch of other strange, like wooden, for the most part, you know, flicking and tossing and sliding games, you know, dropping a little marble down a ramp into things. They have a Pac-Man one. Hit from the bottom. There's all sorts of... weird things that you can you can go to and frequently we would actually go to the dexterity alley on the way back to our hotel room at night so like we'd leave the ballroom at like 2 30 and it's like
let's just play this weird little game for a little bit. And then I, oh crap, that was 45 minutes. Now it's after three o'clock in the morning. But yeah, they just leave those games open the whole time. And it's fun to just kind of mess around with them because, you know, they're low state. That dexterity world is just so wild. I remember just a couple months ago, I didn't even realize there was a whole genre of dexterity game.
I like started going down the rabbit hole and I was like, oh my goodness, there's just a whole world here and totally different and really fun. I mean, obviously I wasn't in Dexterity Alley, but just kind of highlighting that element of game. It's fun to dive in. Yeah, this actually brings to mind a point that actually kind of applies to the whole convention as well. And that is also the try before you buy. You have so many...
you can try there before you actually spend money to buy them. And Dexterity Games in particular... these kinds like wooden crafted kind of things they could be quite expensive so i'm not going to name names but there was one that i It's been in my shopping cart box. Like I've hovered over the buy button many times, like $350 game. And then I played it this year and I was like...
Nah, I'm glad I never actually bought that. And it's not Crokinole. I love my Crokinole board. But that also applies to a bunch of other games. I'm not going to sit here and name names of games that I almost bought that I didn't because I didn't like them. But there was a couple games that I was very close to buying before. And I was like, you know, I'll probably play them at BGGCon. And then I did, and I was like, eh, this isn't actually scratching the itch that I want.
But the flip side is also true. I have purchased six games. Yeah, let's talk about the games you purchased today. I bought six games. You want to name names? Let's hear it. Yeah, what did you get? Well, I will name, well, I can name a few of them. Sure, why not? Like, I played Leviathan Wilds, and it was amazing. And I did the late pledge for that one earlier today.
But there's other ones that I never even heard of. Like, I am so, quote-unquote, into the industry. Like, I have a monthly video on Jongets Games where I talk about all the new games that have interested me. Like, I pay attention to the RSS. of every new game that hits BGG. So you'd think that I would know about all the games, but I do not. One of them that really surprised me was Rajas of the Ganges, Cards and Karma.
card game version of Rajas of the Ganges. I'd never heard of it before, but it got played by a friend who liked it. He taught it to me, and now I... And now it's on its way to my house because I really enjoyed it. And I didn't even know that existed, let alone like try before you buy kind of thing for that.
get a hotel room for, you know, five nights and fly to Dallas and all that kind of stuff. But in some ways, it is kind of an interesting way to try these things, especially if you're like me, where frequently I really want to try a game because it just seems neat. It seems interesting, but many games are like that.
And you could do a lot of play at once. That was cool. Maybe I'll play it again at some point in the future kind of games at the convention, which I... I thought it was kind of to your point of how many games...
I tend to think too, both by my own, you know, awareness of the industry and by being friends with you that like, I'm stay pretty up on a lot of games. Also, you know, we're pretty deep into the the coldies the uh the the going into the backlogs of games old stuff yeah and so like i'm like oh yeah like i i know a lot of games right and and you know but
following along at home and seeing the games that you guys were playing and then seeing the list of games you played i was honestly shocked that like i looked at i think i counted i think i knew like five of the 42 games that you played maybe maybe 10 like maybe 10 like i'd heard of some of them yeah and i was like that to me i was like I was like, whoa, that's crazy, you know, because there's so many. Yeah, but that's also like you make of the con what you wish.
Like, there's a hot games room. I can't believe I've gone this long without... where, you know, I mentioned that all the hottest games... sent over, a lot of them make it into the library and they're very hard to get a copy of because everybody wants to rent that game. But usually about 15 of them or so get set up into this hot games area. This year it was actually right next to the library.
And the games just stay set up. When you finish playing the game, you actually set it back up to be ready for the... people to play and then you walk away from the table and then somebody else sits down and the game is already set up it just it never well they pack it up at the end of the night but it essentially never leaves the table all day long and there are a lot of people where that's the convention
they will stay in the hot games room for like most of the first few days, moving from one to the next. I mean, you have to wait because you have to, you know, people have to leave and you kind of have to call dibs and watch. And that's actually why I have not played a single game in the hot games room the last two years I've gone. My weight when you have a gazillion other games to play. Right, exactly. And again, you can make of the convention what you will. Like for some people, like...
They have to play all 15 of those games. That's what they want to do, and you could absolutely do that because you have enough time to do that. Other people like me, I don't really mind so much as long as I'm playing something, then that's good enough. And that library has... I'm such a broken record. You make of it what you will. But my group of friends was really enjoying finding old, weird games.
in the gigantic older part of the library i thought i knew all the old weird games but you guys found old i mean of course i don't but like you found old weird games i mean there was this whole like mouse situation that I don't even know what happened. A couple of our friends made it a goal to just try and find every mice and cheese old German game.
in the library, and they found a surprising number of games about mice and cheese. And some of them were not good. Like, there was one that I played, Viva Toppo, it was called. And this is just a kid's game. Like, this is a roll-and-move game, essentially. And I'm sitting there playing it with a couple other, you know, 40-year-olds at 2.30 in the morning, and we're just laughing.
Like, because we're just having fun. Like, it's super late or super early, however you want to say it. We're playing a game for children, but the components are funny. We're laughing at the art, and it's just... you know, the joy of the play in a lot of ways. But then they found another game called Chateau Rockfort or Berg Appenzell, I think is the original German name.
I think I saw the photos of this one. This one. I have actually, that's one of the six games I bought. Like, I'd never heard of it before. Oh, heck yes, because I really want to play it. Okay, good. I've never even heard of it before, but here it is, you know, coming out of the depths of the library. This game is only like...
15 years old, I think. But it was just... Okay, let's get Dave over. We'll film it. It was an incredible game. And so I'm really looking forward to getting a copy of that. And I never would have tried it if I had other friends who had not decided to make it a quest. to find games with mice and cheese. And the fact that you can have a quest to find multiple games with mice and cheese in it will definitely tell you the depths of what the backlog of this library actually has available. No, 100%.
One of the things that I think is... of a convention like this even though i haven't gone to one is the fact that you know you're you're in the hotel Kind of to what you were saying earlier, Nick, where you're like, isn't that just what, you know, you can go downstairs in your pajamas, like you're, I mean, I'd probably put on clothes, but you're able to go up.
up to your room you know you play a game and then you're like cool i'm tired i'm gonna go lay down for a while like it's like you it's as if you're Your bedroom is just, you know, up an elevator, right? Yeah. As well as like a restaurant and like several restaurants. Yeah. There's a bar. All sorts of amenities, right? Yeah.
They're fine. Yeah. The food is the one thing that kind of convinced me. It's great. There's a bar and it has pretty good burgers and fries and stuff like that and beer, but it's also not very cheap. There's a restaurant. quite not very cheap and the food is fine there. There's like an Italian restaurant that I've never been to that I've heard is really dark. I don't really know.
But generally what I... I know, right? Man's selling it, man. Bad lighting. Good pasta. But then right down the middle of the kind of space, like right between the path between the main... the library they set up a food table thing like not really a cafeteria but like a long string of tables with a bunch of pre-prepared food on it like sandwiches and burgers and all that
And you can just buy it, spend way too much money for those kind of things, but it's super quick. And then you just walk right back into the hall like you can eat in there. So, like, you just go get food, come back, and you're eating. It's very convenient, and it's where I ate most of my meals. But also, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The food there is not good. The selection is very poor. Honestly, that's the biggest thing I've missed from the other location.
It sounds silly to say, but at the other spot, at the airport, they always had chicken tendons. And you know what? That's just like a go-to thing. You know what? I'm hungry. Just going to get some chicken tenders and some ranch sauce. Easy. Give me some chicken tendies. But now, like, it's like, it's a hamburger that's pretty rubbery for $10.
Or like a packaged sandwich that's not very interesting for $10. Or the thing that I ended up getting almost every day, not because it's my favorite thing, but because it was the most efficient thing. The walking tacos. It was an option. Walking tacos. Yes, which was literally $10 for a bag of Doritos dumped onto a plate and then like two heaping spoonfuls of ground beef.
Gotcha. So we should be budgeting at least 10 extra minutes of bathroom time every day. Wow. But the reason that was good is because they had a condiment table with just like infinite sour cream and infinite pico de gallo and cheese. So you do that and you walk over there and you just make a mountain.
mountain the heck out of it with the salsa and all that kind of stuff i think you just described really sad nachos like without any cheese like I don't yeah yeah you know what every other day they had Flamin' Hot Doritos as an option instead of the regular oh my god This obviously has been my biggest, like I had a whole plan. Like I had like.
like pre-scouted my trader joe's to be like okay this is what i'm gonna eat you know but i was like i was like how big is the mini fridge gonna be like because i feel like i'm kind of picky about my food and the grocery store thing is like a very valid I think. Yeah. I did that this year, actually. I got a bunch of breakfast burritos and Red Bull, and I didn't end up eating most of the breakfast burritos because I just forgot to eat in the morning.
But I will say, like, after ragging on the food at the hotel so much, there's a perfect solution for it, which a lot of my friends used for every meal. And it's called door. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was my plan. I'm just going to end up door bashing. Unlike the previous location, which in my opinion, the restaurant I think was a bit cheaper and it was the same amount of fine. And like we ate at the restaurant like frequently at the old.
But that was in the airport, like very far away from other things. The new spot is in downtown Dallas. And so like a good friend of ours is vegetarian and the options were not great at the hotel. He just door dashed. And, you know, they just come to the front desk area or like they drive in anyway to the, not the front desk, but the kind of drop off kiosk and you walk out there and everybody. Like, it was just constant. Couldn't your friend just have asked for...
walking tacos with no meat and then just fill the whole thing with pico de gallo? I think so. It's just, it's flaming hot Doritos, sour cream, unless you're vegan, then you're, you know. Yeah, green onions. I didn't hear mention of any beans. No, no, no, no. So, yeah, there are solutions. Like you said, there are many fridges and there's microwaves. Also, yeah, there's a ton of different restaurants that you can door.
I saw people getting pizza. Like, you could just eat in the convention centers. There's no areas, I think, where you can't eat. There's some areas where you can't game, where they're like, this is for eating only.
But it's very flexible with that. And, you know, people just do big orders and come in with a whole bunch of, you know, Indian food or that kind of thing. And then you're eating good food. And, you know, you're paying a little bit for the cost of the delivery. But honestly, you're paying way less than the...
I want to actually, I want to actually, speaking of cost, and I mean, I guess I can speak to this because I spent it and then didn't spend it, but as well as you, but I actually was really impressed with. how much this con costs. I mean, no convention is cheap, right? So, I mean, this... This convention is not cheap, but if you go, if you have a roommate, the actual ticket cost is only like...
I think $150. I shouldn't say only, but $150 for five days of gaming. And then of course you have to get your hotel. Six days, right? Realistically, because technically the convention starts on Wednesday. But tons of people, me included, and most of our friends, fly in on the Tuesday.
And the library isn't open. You don't even have badges yet. You haven't checked in. But BeachG is like setting up and they have various areas that are ready. And there are hundreds and hundreds of people there on the Tuesday. And we just played the game. So yeah, like $150 essentially for a six-day experience. And then the hotel rooms are like $150 a night for two kings or two queens, maybe two queens. And yeah, especially if you get a room.
like $500 or $600, you know, before you talk about food and flight. Right. And of course, food and flights and all those things. If you know, maybe a points or whatever. It's just. It's definitely, you know, I think we touched on this a little bit, you know, having an episode recently about the World Series of Board Gaming. You know, that is that is a more expensive.
convention to go to i mean that's obviously a completely different type of convention and you know you're gaming for prizes and there's prize money and there's all those these other things that that you know the ticket there's something very attractive. And I actually think, Nick, didn't you say that? that the wbc is is yeah i mean it's the same it's the same kind of ticket price and it's nine days yeah more for your more for your buck i mean the biggest expense with all of these is the lot
It always comes down to the hotel, how it costs to get there, eating the food every day, if you're door dashing or whatever. That's the stuff. The door dashing can add up. Yeah, for sure. I have one curiosity question. You're like board game famous. Do people at the convention come up to talk to you? Yes. Do they come up to talk to you and tell you how much they love your podcast, Friendly Ties, and your co-host, Nathan Anastasia?
No comment. Oh, man. That has actually happened before. It did not happen this year, though. Yeah, it is an interesting experience to be well-known within a niche. BGGCon was actually the first time that ever happened to me. The first time I ever went to BGGCon was 2014. I started John Gets Games in April. what, like seven months earlier? However that math works out.
Jessica actually designed these iron-on like templates for t-shirts that said John Gets Games like huge like ridiculously large because like I had a YouTube channel with like a few hundred subscribers and I was trying to like you know. be known essentially or like be more seen and so I was just terrified I was petrified with anxiety and everything wearing this t-shirt
And like, nobody's going to know who I am. I've had a YouTube channel for like seven months. And while I was standing in line to register, the person behind me was like, oh, I've seen one of your videos. And that was the first time that ever happened was actually while I was waiting in line to register for my very first. And yeah, these days I try not to be full of myself or anything like that.
it does seem like a lot of people know who I am. You know, just walking around, like people kind of like notice, like, but try not to notice and frequently come up and say, you know, Thank you, et cetera. And actually one pretty common thing is people are like, I thought I heard that voice. because I'm pretty loud and I tend to laugh very loud. I also swear quite a bit when I'm not rolling on the camera. I think that might surprise some people.
But lots of other people. There's lots of YouTube channels that show up, podcast people. You see people walking around with their merch for their podcast. I mean, the people who started Board Game Geek. They're obviously there. They're wonderful people. The people who are working the convention all wear big jerseys so you can see where they are. Yeah, just walking around. It's definitely a bit of a microcosm of the board game industry in a lot of ways.
Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that kind of funny? The things that kind of feel like celebrity to you, like. um i imagine though that most board gamers i think you've mentioned this in the past are like really respectful and like you know kind of like let you do your thing and be in your space and don't try to like you know and i i i mean gosh i love that about this hobby i love i just love that people are so
Yeah. And that, you know, and the way you guys have talked about these conventions and that's the thing when I eventually do get to a convention, which I'm very much looking forward to. I'm excited to just see a bunch of people who love hobby all in one space. And you just be ready for somebody to be like, hey, I know that voice.
yeah it's like yeah no one's ever seen my face so it's gonna be so i'll be like walking around being like i don't know incognito yeah so yeah that was my uh my ninth time going it was a brilliant time i just had such a great time with it fully expect to go again i'm not i this is kind of like a bit of a constant like this is just like one weekend
The timing is a little funky for a lot of people, I would admit. It's always the week before Thanksgiving, except when it's not. The last two years, it's been a week early. But I think that's because of pandemic shenanigans. Like, you know, everything canceled in 2020.
Moving forward, I think it's back to their preferred time of, yeah, the week right before Thanksgiving. So hypothetically, you fly back on the Sunday and Thanksgiving is four days later. That's really great for some people. Also for other people that kind of... takes it out of contention which is just a consideration i guess for how that'll I love it. It's so much fun. It's the only convention besides Essen that I've been to.
I've been to BGGCon nine times, SN three times, and Gen Con once. Origins once. all those kind of things. It was interesting to go to them, but I did not follow. BGGCon and Essen as well, but that's a whole different can of worms. If I go to Essen again next year, maybe we could do another one of these podcasts and I could ramble a whole bunch about that. Well, it has been super fun to listen to you share this with us. And yeah, until the next one.
We'll probably go back to games from here, so hang in there with us. We've got a few. John's come home with a few hot games that he's been talking about. We've been playing some stuff. Nick and I got some games in. while John was in Dallas. So we've got some things to play and some things to report on. So we're looking forward to that. So we'll hear from us soon.