…what a bunch of dicks
CritterCon 2025 (#18)
Con Day Two
In which soak in mud, watch more RQWC carnage, do kid wrangling, do game stuff, eat great food, and go on an RPG based Gaming Pub Crawl.
It is a long standing tradition that on Con Friday, a whole bunch of us go to a spa and spend about 30 minutes relaxing in warm mud. Well, those of us who are not cats. They get a different spa treatment.
So it was that after a deliocious breakfast at Waffles From Outer Space, we went over to the Blue Moon Spa and got muddy. Having gotten up a bit early, we, and there were 30 of us, were in the mud by 8:00. The children had things to say about this new experience. Things like…
“Wait! You WANT us to get muddy?”
“I’m a happy piggy in the mud!”
“This is very squishy feeling.”
“This mud smells like our flower garden.”
“It’s weird seeing everyone in mud!”
“I’ve got mud in my butt!”
The whole experience is pretty relaxing and refreshing, especially the shower after the mud. You should give it a try.
We left the spa at just after 9:00 and most of us stopped at one of the Jumbotrons to watch Round Two of the RQWC. The 18 teams starting today had 2 hours to get through the Wasteland of the DinoCyborgs and the Swamp of Terror, both of which are team vs team vs world areas. A lot of dying happened there.
The next 2 hours involved sneaking, fighting, running, and dying in the City of Madness, a no team vs team zone. Finally, the last hour was a frantic race through the Hell of the Mountain Queen, to steal one of the 6 Kneel Diamonds that would insure a place in Saturday’s session. 2 of the teams had a single member left at the end.
We didn’t watch all of it, but over the course of the day got filled in as we passed other screens.
From 9:00 to 1:00, I was on Kid Wrangling Duty with our granddaughter, Cupcake, Avis, and Spike. Mostly, we played lots of demo games in the Dealer’s Room, or walked around looking at people in costumes. We also stopped for ice cream.
At 1:00 the little ones were handed off to other wranglers and Spike and I arrived only about 10 minutes late to the “Overlooked RPGs” panel. It was well attended and we discussed lots of old and not so old RPGs. When that was over, we had about an hour before other duties, so we played a demo of a card game developed by Cupcake’s husband, Buck. The theme is designing an NHT Sanctuary. Since NHT undertakings don’t have money, labor, or bureaucratic problems, you mostly deal with natural/environmental problems, time constraints, and changes in design. It’s a fun game with great looking cards and only took about 40 minutes to play.
After that, Spike was off to attend a seminar and I joined our friends Peter and Brian for a fast paced heist RPG where we had 2.5 real time hours for out team of 6 to pull of the robbery of a mob casino on a moving high speed train. I’m proud to say we did it with three minutes to spare. I’m pretty sure all of us were sweating and out of breath. Well, okay, the two wolves were panting, but same thing.
I was back in the hotel by 5, for a nice relax before heading out at 6 with a massive group for dinner at Thai One On. The food and company was great. On our way back to the hotel, Spotsy incited a HUGE song & dance break, which I wrote about on Facebook, so read it there.
Once kids were in bed, dinners were settled into our bellies, and we had chatted, it was time for this year’s Gaming Pub Crawl.
This event starts at 9:00 pm and runs to 2:00 am, and includes the 20+ pubs, bars, saloons, and nightclubs on the Third Street Strip. The idea in previous years was to play different card and board games in different establishments. Lots of fun, camaraderie, and drinking.
This year, however, they twisted things to make it an RPG based crawl. Aat your first stop, you’d get a character sheet for either a fantasy, sci-fi, spy, or pulp RPG. Then you’d play in a 20 minute session with one of the many volunteer GMs. When that was done, the CritterCon app would text you and tell you the next bar to go to to continue your adventure. Pretty creative, really.
Groups are limited to 6 people max. Mine was Me, Grace, Peter, Holly, Avis and Ginie. Our game was a spy game and we were MI6 agents out to stop SPECTRE from poisoning the Nile river. It took us 3.5 hours and 10 bars, but by golly, we saved the day. Then we hung out with Brian’s group for a bit before we all took a horse drawn taxi (owned an operated by the horses) back to the hotel.
So, I’m drunk and about to hit the sack. More tales of con fun tomorrow.
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