Indie Game Con

Last year, our friend who used to work for Zynga organized a con where local game design companies could come show off their stuff to the public, and make professional presentations to each other. It was fun but very crowded! This year, he got a much larger space, and it was still pretty full. We got D. to come with us – he mostly tagged along behind me, but I got him to try a couple of the games. He did the best any con-goer had ever done at “Save the Cave,” a tower-defense game with cute little cavemen and prehistoric critters, and he really liked “Fail Whale,” which he accurately described as a narwhal jousting contest. I didn’t try “Villagers and Heroes,” my favorite last year which didn’t work when I tried to download it later, but they say it’s on Steam now so I can try again. And D. was mightily amused by some sim-type game where one of the avatars had my first name and looked a whole lot like me – the main differences, really, were that her hair was parted on the other side, and I don’t wear white.

They cleverly had a trading card game, where each attendee received a 5-card pack (a playable hand) at check-in, and each exhibitor had a stack of cards for their own game, so we could take one each to build our packs (and incidentally remember the names of the games we saw). We haven’t tried to play it yet, though.