Howdy all, You've all been super helpful but I have a few questions not really related to each other that I figured I'd just throw into a single post to keep things tidy. I decided to fly in on Tuesday and take the opportunity to look around the area. As a result, I've got all of Wednesday free except for picking up badge and tickets. That being the case, are there any sites I should make a point to see in the area? Game related would be fun but it doesn't have to be. I'll be staying at the Holiday Inn Club Vacations At Lake Geneva Resort. On Google Maps this looks really close to the convention site. My question is, does anybody know if it's reasonable walking distance between the two? Is there a GaryCon related Discord server or Slack or anything that folks are using during the convention? Seems like it would be a great way to find games/gamers among other things. Thanks! EDIT: I moved my hotel so #2 no longer applies. In case anybody else is curious, I've been told from a person at the Grand Genva that it is walkable but not ideally so and that the best way to get from one location to the other would be a trolly that moves between locations on the property.
Gaming history significant places might be the house Gary and family occupied during the early years and the Gary Gygax memorial (3.3 miles according to Google Maps from the resort).
Less a memorial than a commemorative piece of footpath - it's fairly easy to find and has become one of the places to visit. Downtown is quite nice, plenty of TSR and GenCon historical locations. Just watch your speed if you're driving, the police are quite hungry. Also, remember to feed your meter, the ticketing agent has no qualms jacking anyone, even a Gygax, for fees.
Frankenparty Wednesday... Driving tour - Horticultural Hall... Gygax House, Riviera (the brick in the path) some pics http://gmbgaming.blogspot.com/2018/03/pre-garycon-2018-tuesday-wednesday.html Also locate the stores you may need, for Water, and other drinks
There was a facebook post about an unofficial discord chat. Not that I have any idea what discord is.
Much appreciated! I found the post. I'll have to check out the server when I get home. Discord is essentially a chat app, that is available on pretty much every platform (web, Windows, Mac, IOS, Android, etc...). It is very popular amongst gamers of all types because in addition to text chat channels, it provides voice chat channels. It will often be used by Roll20 games for instance to host voice chat as it is superior to the Roll20 voice chat in pretty much every way. But it's the text chat that's more of interest in our case. The way it works is sombody creates a server which is typially dedicated to a partiular group or area of interest. You join servers that you are interested in to chat with other folks who have joined the server. A server has one or more channels. A channel is just a place to funnel topics on a certain type of discussion. For a convention such as this one it is conceivable that the server admin may have created channels along the lines of #welcome, #general_chat, #lfg (looking for game/gamers/group), #ride_share, #lodging, and pretty much anything else you can think of (I haven't seen the server linked on facebook yet so not sure what he's done). If you were subscribed to the #lfg channel, you might get notified of and see a post such as: JasonM: @here lf 2 for DCC at such-and-such place in 1 hour. Let me know if interested. Otherguy: @JasonM me please! Anyway, you get the idea. Here's the server join link from the facebook page: https://discord.gg/Vnse9zt There's lots of game related stuff popping up on discord these days so it's useful to have the app on your phone and an account anyway. It's also pretty popular at conventions. Also, it's free.