MeepleCon 2015 – My First Board Game Convention

I’ve been playing modern board games for the past eight years but I didn’t get into the hobby hardcore until the past year or two. I’ve got almost 50 games in my collection and have been itching to go to a board game convention for a little while now, so when I heard about a one-day event being held where I live, how could I resist?

This was the first annual MeepleCon. The event was held at the Alexis Park hotel in Las Vegas and the entire event was housed in one large room. They had an extensive library of games that people could check out; booths by local vendors and big name publishers; tournaments for Ticket to Ride, Lords of Waterdeep, and King of New York; lots of Learn to Play sessions where people were teaching games; and a ton of people who brought their own games to play.

Lots of people getting their game on!

The AEG booth was selling all their games at 50% off so I grabbed one of their 2014 Black Boxes. MSRP is $50 and it was part of their Black Friday promotion. The box contains Trains, Doomtown Seventh Hero, Seven Seas Guildhall and Maximum Throwdown Overload. I purchased the box for $25 which I thought was an awesome deal since I don’t own any of the games in it currently. I was told that the inclusion of Trains made the box worth it on its own.

Gaming and some of the vendors

I tried to spend my day mostly playing games I hadn’t played before (even though each took longer since I had to learn them).

I played…

Trans Europa – A fun, quick train-related game. Will likely add it to my collection.

Tony explaining how to play Trans Europa

Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game – I LOVED this one. I am a big fan of co-op games and this was fun, fairly simple, and easy to learn. I’ll be looking into more of the Legendary games for sure!

Ticket to Ride 10th Anniversary Edition – I’ve played TTR a lot in the past (especially the app version) so I hopped in a qualifier tournament to try to get a seat in the finals, but I didn’t win. It was the first time I had seen the Anniversary Edition in the flesh and I have to admit, it is gorgeous.

Concordia – I know this game is highly-rated online but this “peaceful strategy game” wasn’t really my thing. The guy who owned the game didn’t explain everything quite as clearly as he could have in regard to strategy, so I think that was part of why I was a bit frustrated with it. I’d be willing to give it another shot.

Concordia in action

Dungeons & Dragons RPG 5th Edition – I’ve been a nerd and a gamer for most of my life and this was my first ever D&D session. It was awesome. They had pre-generated character sheets for those of us who were new which was helpful in allowing us to jump into the experience. I played a second session later in the evening with the same character and a different group of people. This is definitely something I intend to do more of in the future.

Battleborn Legacy – This game is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter and I’ll be posting a more in-depth review of the game in the near future. A friend of a friend is one of the game’s designers so I was lucky enough to get my hands on a prototype of the game for a couple of weeks. I taught it to a few people and although we didn’t have time to get through a whole game because of other scheduled events, they seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. They compared it to a fantasy-themed, more in-depth version of Risk.

Battleborn Legacy Prototype winning over some new fans

Concept – I’d heard of this party game before but hadn’t played it. We had kids and adults in our group and had a ton of fun. Trying to get them to guess “Marshmallow” seemed so simple and was IMPOSSIBLE. I have a lot of friends who game more casually than I do and Concept seems like something they would really enjoy.

Paperback – The night was nearly over so I opened my copy of Paperback to teach a friend from my board game meetup group. We didn’t get to finish before they kicked us out but we were really tired (after 16 hours of non-stop gaming) so some of the words we were attempting to spell were quite hilarious. We would lay out our hand of letters and just sound things out until a real word appeared before us. Like I said… REALLY tired at this point.

The game library

The clock struck Midnight and the con came to an end. This was unequivocally one of the most fun days I’ve ever had and I am looking forward to attending more cons, especially larger ones, in the future. I highly recommend that fans of board games who haven’t been to a convention before check one out. The volunteers and attendees were all so nice and helpful. They’re already planning on making MeepleCon a three-day event in 2016 and I intend on attending again!

What board game conventions have you attended? Which was your favorite? Leave a comment below letting me know which cons I should get to in the near future!