Thursday, March 9th, 2006

by the Writer's Guild of Wunderland

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Last weekend, Alison and I went up to Poughkeepsie to be Guests of Honor at NonCon VI, a small gaming convention held in the Main Building of Vassar University, and we had a wonderful time! (Meanwhile, Kristin opted to stay home and work, in order to prevent her brain from exploding. (We have a LOT to get done before GTS next week.))

Things got off to a great start when we rolled in at 11 PM and almost immediately got into a 16-person game of Giant Circular Fluxx. I had the idea for this wacky Fluxx variation last summer, and games were successfully held at GenCon and DragonCon, and yet, I myself had never actually seen it played until now, since I skipped those cons last year.

NonCon's Tabletop Games Coordinator was Marc Hartstein, who just happens to be the Rabbit who ran the Giant Circular Fluxx games for us last summer, and he'd made these placemats for the different positions in the game, so GCF went pretty smoothly and it was definitely lots of fun. But it reminded me again that I really need to write up more complete instructions and such, particularly now that I've finally actually play-tested it myself.

Marc of course was one of our primary Rabbits at this event... the other was Jim Dunaway, who'd set up an impressive display of our games and related stuff, and ran a whole schedule of our games during the weekend. Jim (shown above) is particularly fond of Chrononauts (he was giving out handouts he'd made, of my Mysteries of the Timeline articles) and another high point of the weekend was playing Chrononauts with Jim and discussing other possible alternate realities. (He also gave us a nifty Chrononauts card-holding mat he'd created, for playing the game outdoors. Thanks Jim!)

Of course, we played lots of other games too, but there's one in particular I want to highlight here: Animals Fluxx. This was something we came up with during the Stuffed Animals Party, and it played quite well. You start with an EcoFluxx deck, then you add in a pile of Keepers and Goals from Family Fluxx: The Cat and the Dog, (they're both Mammals), the Mouse (counts as Mice), Rain (counts as Water), and the Tree (counts as Trees). Then add in all the Goals that use those Keepers, followed by the Keepers those Goals most require, like the Stick and the House and the Cheese. You'll have to make your own house rulings on some of the funny cases that will crop up, but here's one House Rule my little stuffed mouse Hefty wants me to state officially: Mice Love Cheese should be treated like an EcoFluxx "Eats" Goal. (For best results, Animals Fluxx should be played with your Stuffed Animals.)

Our games were being sold for us at NonCon by the staff of nearby local game store Alterniverse. This of course made it a very relaxing convention for us, since our games were available for sale but we didn't have to worry about tending the cash register. This meant we could just relax and play our games!

Anyway, thanks so much to Alterniverse, and to Jim and Marc and all the other Rabbits who helped out, and of course to wonderful folks at NonCon for inviting us to be their Guests. We had a lovely weekend!