Trollcon

The store sat up at Trollcon this past weekend. Trollcon is a convention sponsored by Troll Lord Games focusing on TLG's house game, Castles & Crusades. Interstinly, last year about half the events that went off were D&D 3.5 and 4.0. This year, hapily, most of the events playe were Castles and Crusades. Guest of honor was Larry Elmore, who was rahter surprised at the 89 person turnout, since his convention manager had told him to expect a thousand people. Slight miscommunication there (not on Trollcon's part though as they had never said anything to Elmore's person about a thousand people).

Also in attendance was Aldo Ghizzoi, best known for Free RPG Day, who spent most of his time playing boardgames from the very well stocked Trollcon game library. I got in a game of Bohnanza with him, which I surprisingly won by 1 coin.

People traveled from quite some distance with attendees hailing from Arizona, Pennsylvania and somewhere on the East Coast, solely for the opportunity to play C&C with the creators and the chance to try out the new Fields of Battle mass combat rules, which went over pretty well as the TLG rack was emptied of them by the end of the con. Head Troll Steve Chenault even ran a C&C game for players under 14, which went over quite well from what I saw. The kids certainly seemed to enjoy it.

I guess the Magic tournament went off OK. Hard to tell as it was run by a local store and the players stayed shut up in their own room all weekend. The advertised Warhammer 40,000 tournament didn't go off. Apparently a local store decided to run their own competing event against Trollcon's and all the local players decided to go there again.

All in all, small turnout (but up about 30% from last year) and everyone I spoke to had a good time. And that's what counts.

Alarm

In case you were wondering why we changed the policy regarding letting Preferred Customers use the back game rooms after hours, it's because of the new alarm system. The alarms are hooked up to both doors and there are motion sensors inside the store as well, both in the retail area and the game room area. Ergo, any movement in either area after we've turned the alarms on sets them of, bringing a visit by the police and a call from the alarm company.

We are keeping the game room open later, til 9 p.m. on most nights that it gets used and Preferred Customers may request that we keep it open late for them to use. However, a staff member will have to stay so it depends on what our schedule is. Contacting us ahead of time is your best bet for using the game room late, though asking us the day that you want to use it will probably be met with a "sorry, no".

Magic 2011

Interesting reactions to Magic 2011 so far. The new titans have been a big hit and are the most sought after cards so far. A number of the commons are not that common. Out of two displays of boosters opened, we only pulled 5 Lightning Bolts, 8 Duresses and 6 Llanowar Elves. We pulled almost as many Rootbound Crags as we did Mana Leaks. The Intro Packs haven't drawn much attention yet, though from what I understand, the black/white Blades of Victory is the hottest selling deck, while the red/green Stampede of Beasts the slowest.

Though today is only the second day of release, I'm rather surprised at how slowly fat packs are selling as we usually move 8-10 of those the first day of a release and so far only 4 have sold.