Monthly Recap - July 2012

Another month down - here's the recap:

I mentioned last month that I'd gone to Seattle and to Protospiel - that technically was THIS month, but who's counting ;)

A friend of mine got engaged, which doesn't really count as my news, but seems like it's worth mentioning. I've sent a handful of emails to people on OKCupid.com lately, but none of those online sites ever seem to work out for me.

As for gaming events, I attended Gamesmiths (game design meeting), Ides of Gaming (monthly game day), and a new group that meets about once a month at Cartel Coffee Lab. I got to test one of my games (Alter Ego) at Gamesmiths - I'm not happy with that design at all right now and I think it needs a large overhaul. Ides is the game day put on by the Southern Arizona Gamers Association (SAGA), an organization of which I am the president. It was at a new location this time (Something Sweet) because our old venue got remodeled and didn't have space for us anymore. I liked being on campus, but Something Sweet isn't bad so far. This new group that meets at Cartel Coffee Lab, a coffee shop/restaurant on Campbell north of Grant, as well as up in Oro Valley. Cartel is near my house, so I thought I'd check it out. I went about a month ago as well. This time there were 20+ gamers there, which is a lot. The place was also fairly packed with regular patrons as well. A photographer from the local newspaper (AZ Daily Star) was there taking all kinds of pictures of the games we were playing. Maybe that means an article is imminent!

RinCon planning is still going on. Events are being added to the schedule, and people are signing up. We need to get some advertising going to make sure people know about the con - I'd like to take out ads in the paper in Phoenix, San Diego, L.A., Las Cruces, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas - all within reasonable driving distance (or perhaps a cheap flight). It turns out that when you run a convention, what you're really doing is selling hotel rooms, because in order to afford the banquet space, you have to guarantee a certain number of hotel rooms. So getting people to come from out of town will be key to this event's financial success! So tell your friends to come stay at the Holiday Inn and attend my con! :)

I did finally get some posters made, and they've been dropped off at Game Daze, Heroes and Villains, Amazing Discoveries, Bookman's, Casa Video, and hopefully Magic Tower as well. Game Daze was going to send some posters up to the Phoenix locations as well, hopefully that will pan out!

In other news, my hip has been feeling somewhat better - though it's clearly not 100%. I got some Joint Maintenance pills (Glycusomine, Chondroytin, And some kind of fish oil or something like that) which are supposed to help. I went out to pickup a couple of times - the weather was perfect for it: overcast, having rained that day but not still raining - and it's clear I'm out of shape, but it felt good to run again.

That's about it for this month. Next month I'll be heading to GenCon with Mikey in Indianapolis, so expect some TMG related new from that! In the meantime, you can check out TMG's latest kickstarter project: Stack It!

See you next month!