The vision statement here at Ideology of Madness is “If we geek about it, we speak about it.” This week my geek-ness has been all about Gen Con. This week saw pre-registration open up on Sunday and the housing block open up on Tuesday and have all the rooms sold out in about an hour.

If you are not a fan of table top roleplaying games, you may be wondering what is Gen Con?

Gen Con is a four day gaming convention held in Indianapolis from August 15th to the 18th.The scope and breadth of gaming available at this convention is large. The many options available make it a challenge just to decided what to do.

If you are a fan of D&D or Pathfinder, there will be a game available for you at almost any time of the day. Wizards of the Coast and Paizo both have  halls dedicated to their organized play. If organized play is not your thing, there are many people who run session of this game from there own world or older editions of the game. This ensures that all D&D geeks can get their fix.

If your tastes run more towards the small or indie style games, there are plenty of options for you as well. Games on Demand has a large presence at the convention. They run a large variety of these games throughout the day. You can drop by at the beginning of any of their two hour slots and see if any of the games on offer are something you might be interested in. Just like the big two these small games have their own adherents who come to Gen Con to run these games giving you the ability to play an indie game you may have not had the chance to try out before.

Roleplaying games aren’t the only thing available at Gen Con either.  Board games, card games, minatures, Larps,and electronic games all are represented here. There is one hall dedicated entirely to board games. It not only houses the games that are scheduled through the convention but has a library where you can  check out any number of board games and just sit down and play. The same is done for card games with the majority of the space taken up by Magic: The Gathering but plenty of smaller card games can be found on offering. I seem to remember even seeing some older out of print games like Highlander being played last year.

Gen Con has also been very proactive in making the convention family friendly. In the past few years they have addeda track for kids and for non-gamers. This makes it so that the whole family can have something to do and no one feels left out. There are also plenty of social events scheduled throughout out. There are meet and greets set up with the myriads of people connected to the industry, seminars on a large varieties of topics, and parties throughout the weekend.

I am excited about Gen Con this year. I have my badge and room all taken care of and am planning on volunteering for Games on Demand. I am going to run in the Orc Stomp 5k and hope to meet up with all the people I finally met last year and get some gaming in with them as well.

Are you going to Gen Con? If so, what are you looking forward to? let me know in the comments.

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