DunDraCon 47!

    This past weekend I had the immense pleasure of once again attending DunDraCon, a tabletop gaming convention located at the Santa Clara Marriott. I had an excellent time playing games, painting miniatures, meeting old friends, and making new ones. I love going to conventions and getting to hang out with like minded nerds for 4 days straight. I'm glad the Bay Area is home to 3 large yearly gaming conventions and I'm already excited for the next one, Kublacon, where I hope to debut my 15mm Vietnam War collection with some games of Charlie Don't Surf.

Here are some of the photos I took of the convention.

Me and some random stranger at the Marriott's restaurant and bar Saturday night. Some genius at the bar decided to cash in on the army of nerds converging upon their location this year and they added "Gelatinous Cube" vodka jello-shots to their drinks menu. They weren't very good but I still downed 3 of em.

 

DunDraCon hosts a wide array of activities for people to enjoy aside from gaming, such as martial arts demos, seminars, swap meets, dealer rooms, auctions, a room for watching anime, leather crafting, and miniature painting

There are dozens and dozens of board games being played at any given time, including a board game library where people can check out board games for free and return them later.

There's also a bunch of LARPs and roleplaying games for people to join. I tried LARPing for the first time last DunDraCon and actually found it to be very fun. I was interested in trying it again this year but did not get to. Hopefully next time. Instead I played in a Harry Potter dungeon crawl, a Palladium Fantasy murder mystery, and a game of Cyberpunk 2020.

The Cyberpunk 2020 game was the final game of DDC that I played and it was a great way to end the convention for me. The game went fantastically and was probably the best roleplaying session I've ever played, with the best group of roleplayers I've ever had the pleasure of playing with. We played until 1AM, an hour over our 8 hour time slot, and I would've gladly played it for longer. Our GM, Steve Kani, runs a connected Cyberpunk 2020 game every DDC and invited us all to sign up for his game  next year, I already know I'll be saving my future priority registration slips to play with these guys again.

The group had veteran players and GMs who had been playing Cyberpunk 2020 for 20-30 years so they were able to really bring the world to life and play really good characters, it also helped that they had known each other for decades, so had great chemistry. There was also 2 actual hackers who worked in cyber-security, their job experience gave them insight on how real hackers would digitally steal/gain information and thought up a lot of creative ideas to our hacking related problems. The other players were newer to the game but still were great at staying in character and playing how their characters would act, like our cameraman, who never fought and instead spent every combat round rolling his Composition score trying to record the best shots of the action that he could capture.

 

 

Our team, the "MCTV INVESTIGATES!" news crew. From left to right: Yes Egetti, fixer; Tiff Rhetter, Producer;  Jonly Bonly, Walmart trained security contractor; Dee Bauer, techie; Jack Daniels, host of "MCTV INVESTIGATES!"; Alice Errant, schizo netrunner; Harry Vance, another security contractor and my character; and Colm, MCTV cameraman.

Colm's Daytime Emmy award winning shot of the cult worshipping fish dudes trying to kidnap Dee Bauers while the MCTV Investigate crew tries to rescure her.

And lastly, the wargames. This was a big year for miniature wargames at DDC, and I'm proud to say that of the roughly 35 miniature wargames being ran, probably about 2/3s of them were being hosted by SBGC members.

There was Command and Colors, hosted by Bob Daily

Roy Scaif's Battle of Spartivento game using modified Dark Seas rules

Andrew Bergthold's homebrewed zombie survival game

A tabletop version of Mario Kart, using Star Wars ships

Bob Bergman's Form on the Admiral's Wake game

Brian Gutt's Lion Rampant game

Greg Guth ran several 15mm WW2 games using Fireball Forward

I ran 2 Vietnam War games, using Vietnam Skirmish and Chain of Command DMZ

Nick Stern's Battle of Snowshoes game, using Fistful of Lead

Jay White's Borodino Game using General d'Armee

There was lots of Battletech being played, this was just the nicest looking table of them all

Greg Wong's Battle of Hoth game

Ix Nichol's Ironclad's game, Fleet of Samples

Chuck Staedler's WW2 Dogfighting game using his homebrewed rules Sky's the Limit

Daniel Kerrick's Battle of Guilford Courthouse game using Live Free or Die

Peter Michel's AWI game, the Battle of butternut Creek using Rebels and Patriots

And last but not least, Nick Stern's other Fistful of Lead game, depicting a Royal Navy raid on a pirate base in the South China Sea

 

There were many other miniature games being played, but I unfortunately did not get around to taking a picture of all of them.

And that is all of my DunDraCon pictures, hope you enjoyed them almost as much as I enjoyed the convention. I will see you guys next week when I will be posting about my Leipzig game with the Fremont wargamers.