16 reasons you should have attended Play On Con

Hillary and I spent the holiday weekend at Play On Con 2009 in Birmingham. If you're not familiar with Play On Con, it's a small (but growing) gaming-themed convention that just finished up its very successful sophomore event.

I'll do a more extensive write-up of the weekend later, but I wanted make a quick post to say that POC2 was the eleventh convention I've attended, and it was far and away the best experience I've ever had at a con.

I know a lot of our friends were on the fence about attending and ended up not going. To give just a taste of what you missed, here's a list of games, contests, and tournaments that we played over the course of the weekend:

• Blackjack (charity casino)


• Chick Flick Trivia (and pajama party!)


• Live Action Wiz-War


• Pandemic


• Arkham Horror


• Citadels


• Diplomacy


• Balloon Cup


• Virulent


• Scarabs and Scorpions


• Gamer Triathlon (Suicide Chess, Dice, Memory)


• Bang!


• Munchkin Bites and Star Munchkin (tournament)


• Small World


• Dance Dance Revolution (tournament)


• Rock Band 2

Quite a list, huh? And it doesn't include the programming we attended... or all the events we missed because we were too busy gaming (there was an entire floor of the hotel dedicated to nighttime parties and drunken revelry that we didn't even venture onto).

I'll give a more coherent look back at the con once I've recovered a bit (I'm still rocking an awesome sleep/nutrition deficit), but hopefully just seeing the sheer amount of gaming opportunities available will inspire you to attend next year.