I really didn’t have a plan this year.  i took my camera. I took some pictures.  Here they are.

After seeking out a CVS drugstore on the streets of Indianapolis, I spotted this awesome monument in downtown Indie that I had never seen before. More on this later.

Another shot. I went and stood in the middle of the street for this one.

Wednesday evening, i wind up demoing my new Dwarves and Dragon game. This guy is looking at the components.

That’s me on the left, pushing the dragon around.

A slightly better picture. You can see the cover insert now.

Thursday morning, walking around early, went to that monument I started the tour with and found this old church with its tall skinny steeple.

Doing my best to look awesome from above in front of Indianapolis’s most impressive concrete.

Close-up. Steve Crompton is acting cameraman for me.

There’s Steve, doing the Trollgod salute.

Closeup of Steve. Doesn’t he look kinda like a Guido to you?

If there’s something wrong in the neighborhood . . . who ya gonna call?

I loved that monument. It had all this erotic, exotic statuary attached to it. Lady Liberty here looks like the figurehead of a ship.

Splash!

Inside the convention center at last. This is the entrance to the open roleplay area–dominated, of course, by That Other Game.

-Out in the general hall, there were plenty of minis, including this fine castle.

I finally spent some time in the Flying Buffalo booth on the exhibition floor. Several of my favorite comic superheroes stopped to chat with me. Here’s the Rocketeer.

I met a beautiful barbarian. She told me 3 times what anime she was from, but it was Japanese to me.

This booth babe looked so good I just had to take her picture. She was guiding people into a room to try a new online game.

Men in blue robot suits–I don’t get it, but these were fine examples of some of the hall costumes on display.

Rick Loomis, Steve Crompton, and I participated in a gigantic Settlers of Catan game sponsored by Mayfair Games on Friday night.  It was an attempt to set a world record for greatest number of gamers playing a board game simultaneously–the same game.  We did set a new record. 922 contestants in the same game, and someone won it on turn 48.  I had fun, but didn’t come even remotely close to the prize money.  What you see here is a couple of people sitting between me and the screens where they projected the dice roll for each turn.

Saturday in the Exhibitor’s Hall, Sir Lancelot stopped by to see me. It was a truly impressive set of armor.

Last picture in my camera: Steve and Rick are sitting in the food court of the Indianapolis airport posing with the Catan map I got 3 nights earlier. While waiting for our plane back to Phoenix, the three of us played 3 Catan variants on it. Kinda fun. It’s a pretty well-designed board for a small Catan game.

And that’s it.  I told you I didn’t do a very good job of taking pictures this year, and I’m not saying anything about the 4 Tunnels and Trolls games that I ran, or the people that I talked to, or the delicious suppers I had at restaurants on the far edges of town. Yes, we ate once in Steak & Shake, and it was deliicous.  Other places, including a Denny’s not far from our hotel, were even better.  I brought home a few purchases, and samples that I picked up at the con–nothing very impressive.  Maybe I’ll show those off in my next blog.

Hope you enjoyed the incoherent pictures.  Please forgive me for inflicting this on you. And if you weren’t there this year, don’t you wish you had been?

If you have done a better GenCon blog than this, please leave a comment, and a link so others can see the Con from your point of view.

–end

This is an old set. The 2011 dice are gray.

Every year when I go to GenCon or Origins, I try to get some interesting new dice.   In 2011 I bought the GenCon polyhedral dice set for the first time ever.  In truth, I have no use for polyhedrad dice, except that I use D20s for life counters when playing Magic the Gathering ™.  But I must admit that they are intrinsically cool, and so I have some, and if I found a D7 lying in the street, I wold stop and pick it up.

Over the last several years I have watched as the dice available have gotten cooler and cooler.  My Tunnels and Trolls game uses D6es.  The Death Dice from Flying Buffalo are excellent for playing T & T.  Their gimmick is that the ones have been replaces by skulls on the dice.  Thusly:

These dice come in many colors. I prefer the black ones, but I like them all. Note the nicely beveled corners for better rolling.

Flying Buffalo has several other distinctive dice.  Many of them are gimmicks, good for a laugh, and not much else.  Examples include the Pizza Dice and Decision Dice.

Can't decide what to put on your pizza? Let the dice decide for you--one roll per person involved.

Need an impartial decision? Let the dice decide for you. Choices include oldest, youngest, alphabetical, owner, left, right.

Game Science, a company founded by Lou Zocchi, is famous for their many strange dice.  I saw some real beauties at their booth during Gencon.  The one I just had to buy was this everything die.  Each face has a value for all the regular solid dice.  See if you can figure it out!

To use this die, you have to be enough of a dice geek to recognize the different faces. Do you see a D6, a D4, a D20 and a D12 here. D30 is in the center.

Perhaps Zoccchi’s most famous die is the D100.  The first time I saw one, I knew I had to have one.  It is practically a ball, and you want to roll it in a box or something so that it won’t simply roll away from you and disappear into the far corners of the room.

I have a white one. Don't think it was available yet in black when I bought mine from Lou Zocchi in person.

While I’m talking about Mr. Zocchi, let me put in my belief that this man is the single greatest expert on dice and the creation of dice in the 20th century, and maybe the 21st.  It is an education just to hear him talk about what it takes to create a D100 or D30 or everything die.  Being an extremely lucky person, I have had these experiences.

Lou Zocchi, wizard, hard at work selling dice and games at a convention.

A big hit at GenCon were the so-called Iron Dice.  These were metallic dice in various colors–gold, silver, bronze, iron, coldsteel, etc.  They were gorgeous to look at, heavy as hell, and cost a fortune.  It was a minimum of $12 for a single die.  I didn’t buy any.  Don’t know what I would have done with them if I had, but they sure looked fine.

Nobbly and heavy. Talk about dice weapons. If you got hit with one of these, it would really hurt.

Dice aren’t just about numbers.  Sometimes they are all about pictures or symbols.  Steve Jackson Games is especially good at producing such monsterpieces.

Madness! It's madness I tell you, and the tentacles don't help.

Losing your sanity has never been quite this much fun before.  And if gibbering mindlessly to the Elder Gods doesn’t turn you on, how about the neverending quest for brains.  As food.  Yes, it’s zombie dice from the same lunatics that brought your Cthulhu dice and Flux.

The first zombie to collect 13 brains wins, but watch out for the shotgun blasts.

Well, I could go on, but by now you either see the fascination of dice collecting or you don’t.  I like them.  I have a lot of them.  I’ve invented several little games that are really nothing but dice rolling.  Tunnels and Trolls uses lots of dice, mostly because I like dice.

(I began this blog in August of 2011 shortly after GenCon was over.  I finished it on March 19, 2012.  Just goes to show that when one of my projects gets interrupted I have a very hard time coming back to it.  Sigh.  But, at least this one is done now.)

If you like any of these dice, or have some pretty cool ones of your own, why not leave a comment about them?

–end