The Gen Con game fair came late in this year of rescheduled events.
In my first years going to Gen Con, I went as a miniatures and role-playing game enthusiast looking to have fun with my friends. Like the Renaissance festival, the Gen Con game fair is a place where lovers of fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird can be themselves and fully indulge in the things they love. This was especially important to me in the late ‘90s and early ’00s, prior to the cinematic releases of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or the blockbuster superhero films that would help make science-fiction, fantasy, and games like Dungeons & Dragons mainstream.
I’ve attended Gen Con as an enthusiast, as a game writer/designer (for Dungeons & Dragons), and as an instructor for games, improvisation workshops, and photography. The photography workshops were canceled this year, so I went to Gen Con simply to get out of town.
The lower attendance of Gen Con 2021 made it the most enjoyable Gen Con in years. There was plenty to do, but the convention wasn’t packed to the gills. We were able to try out new games, something that had seemed impossible over the past dozen years due to the crowds. More on topic, I found a game about photography that I wanted to share.
Picture Perfect
It is a foregone conclusion that I will buy a game at Gen Con. It’s a game fair after all, and I allow myself one. This year, we discovered a game called Picture Perfect, by Anthony Nouveau and produced by Arcane Wonders, in which each player plays a photographer arranging guests for a family portrait. Each player has a cardboard background and table, as well as standees for each of the guests. There is an envelope for each guest, and inside the envelope are three cards that describe where the guest wants to stand in the portrait. Each player only has a few envelopes, thus each player only knows the preferences of a few guests. In the game, the players gain access to more guests’ envelopes, and the arrangement of the guests changes as players attempt to match the guests with their preferences. The players gain access to new information/envelopes six times, and then use their cellphones to actually take the picture; some guests don’t want their faces to be seen, or they want to hide the face of another guest, so the angle from which you shoot the final image matters. A quick, easy to learn deduction game with attractive components, a relatable theme, and a few fun and innovative mechanics, Picture Perfect was a pretty easy choice for the game I brought home from the fair this year.
Sign
I also picked up Sign, a short role-playing game from Thorny Games. I’m a big fan of their last game, Dialect, a game about languages and how they die. Over the course of the pandemic, I learned that my true enjoyment for games has more to do with creating stories with other people in the same room and that the online experience doesn’t do it for me. I love the way Thorny Games creates narratives about expression, and these are the kinds of expressions and experiences I want to have in person. In Sign, the participants play deaf children in Nicaragua in the 1970s. Having no real means to communicate, the children invent a sign language. This game is therefore conducted in silence and is based on a true story.
Speaking of narrative and communication, my favorite part of Gen Con this year was the random conversations I had with strangers—mostly people on the street who had nothing to do with the convention. It was wonderful to stop and listen to others’ stories. They began to inspire me to want to tell my own again, as well as to take some time to pause and listen. In the midst of the pandemic, some of us promised ourselves that we would remember the lessons we learned; we swore we would remember to slow down and pay attention to the important aspects of our lives and the important people. I don’t know about you, but in my circles, that has already gone out the window as a desperate rush to a return to normalcy takes hold. Getting out of town, putting a pause on the panicked pace of the workplace, and opening eyes and ears to see and listen—that felt more like living than anything I’ve done lately.
A new Distant Era series kicks off tomorrow, with new looks and new stories to come.
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