Demoed at Gen Con

I find the mark of a good demo is when I just want to keep on playing and see what happens next. Having bought so many games this year, I tended to stay away from the demo tables when they got so busy to allow room for new folks. I now wish I had been more aggressive in getting a demo of Under the Bed and Breaking the Ice.

- Ben pulled me in for my first Gen Con of the season. I wanted to say, "Watch it, my first demo last year was stumbling into Vincent for Dogs in the Vineyard." Polaris didn't let me down. The demo was hot and made me want to run the game badly. I sat in on a Polaris demo later in the weekend that was solid but not as great at that first demo. Polaris loomed large in my eyes as the game to go home, bust out and play.

- The next I remember was A|State. Malcom is a genius demoer. Once again I wanted to keep on playing. He inserted me right into a conflict and forced me to make some hard decisiosn about the going's on in Mire's End.

- Luke's The Sword was amazing in that I wanted to make a campaign out of th damned thing. It is just so iconic. The guy we were demoing with bought the game. When he was on the way to the register he said something interesting. it was something to the tune of: "This is just a normal RPG, right? I mean, its just a regular game?" i assured him that BW was a traditional game that was innovative in that it worked so damn well.

- Trollbabe was a rocking demo too, that was a demo that I sat in on because I was interested to see where Stranger Things was coming from but left me wanting to run Trollbabe on her own merits. I burn to run my girlfriend in this game, my girlfriend whose favorite character to play has been a Burning Wheel orc. Thor and I sat in on a game and Ron showed us the keys to the kingdom of Trollbabe, tipping his notebook on how he made the game happen. He's a clever fucking GM (I should really write that Actual Play post about the Sorcerer game and your damned Mayor... I digress).

- Tony roped me and a friend of mine into a demo and I was really burned, having run two games that day. I didn't enjoy the demo at all, just because of a lack of energy on my part. I liked Tony's bank robbery demo from Dexcon better but at the same time, I see the draw of running Major Victory as an NPC. Something about a super-hero stopping a bank robbery is just so damned iconic, though...

- Greg ran me on an Infinite Armies demo and it just wasn't my thing. However, I did him right by handing my demo off to a wargaming buddy of mine who bought the game and convinced two of my other buddies to buy it too. Sorry, Greg, but you got three sales from my lack of interest. I saw the clever game design but it just wasn't up my alley.

My friends who came with me are sold on the art of the demo. They want demo's from every game in the joint, are prepared to demand it. We had a long talk about mainstream games and demo's on the 10 hour ride home. As J.J. said, "Lamborghini, Porsche, Corvette, Mercedes, you can take 'em all out for a test drive."