Get Off My Lawn is a series of articles from guest contributor Ben “ObiWein” Weiner. Tickets to his article can be purchased during a window of 7 seconds at 3:02 AM Mountain Time.
The last time I was at GenCon was in 2006 as a vendor. Along with a couple friends, we set ourselves up as “Gone to Plaid Games” buying and selling TCG singles. The last time I was there as an event competitor was in 2003 for the World Championship of the Wizards of the Coast developed Star Wars game.
This time around was more fun in large part because the FFG created Star Wars Unlimited game is just great.
I was fortunate enough to chat with (FFG Designer) Tyler Parrot at the convention. Mainly, I wanted to let him know that SWU solves many problems that other card games have had in the past. It is impossible to get screwed over on resources by either having too many or not enough. It is also much harder to not be able to draw into cards that could help you impact the game state due to the draw two mechanic.
I also pitched something to Tyler that would be a dream of mine with this card game. Told him no reaction or comment was required and then said “R2-D2 leader card”.
Another thing that has massively changed GenCon is the Internet evolving significantly over the past ~20 years. I’ve discussed the impact of the Internet previously but not in terms of community. Having over the past many months absorbed various streams, podcasts, and articles it was super fun to meet many of these other content creators in real life.
Some notables that I was fortunate to have run into were Ryan from Rebel Resources, Jack from the Golden Dice Podcast, Wooooo, and of course the KTOD squad (Mike, Matty, Justin, Steve).
KTOD deserves a special shout out. Not only is their YouTube content a great resource, but the chat in their Discord has been extremely helpful to me in deck discussion and game theory as related to SWU. They also held a post Saturday large event hang out after the tournament ended a couple blocks away. Was great to have a couple drinks with those guys plus others from their community like Frank of set one Blonde Sabine fame, George the Lord of Hondo, and of course others that are too many to mention all by name.
As for actual tourney results, I feel like I made a decent meta call with a Sabine Yellow deck. At least one similar list got into the top 16 (Rebel Resources). Unfortunately my first and third round matchups were just really terrible matchup anomalies in the field. I think I played against one of two Bo-Katan Blue decks round one, and then one of two Kylo Red decks in round three. Not exactly what I wanted to see and would have preferred to face some slow, hard control decks all day.
At least a teammate of mine, Phil Titleman (Veers21 on Discord) got 10th place overall with a Young Han Blue deck. Was great to be able to watch his games and cheer him along after I had dropped. Another person from our play group played a similar setup on Friday with less success, but we tweaked it a bit after that event to obviously better results the following day. I need to get another Krayt Dragon so I can play it some at our local weekly events.
More post GenCon thoughts coming in the future. Some thoughts on how many dice vendors there are and some not related to the convention and more SWU specific.
Till next time, big gaming conventions are still super fun. Get off my lawn.
Ben is a technology professional by day. He has been an avid gamer for 40 plus years spanning everything from Dungeons and Dragons, board games, and through multiple past and present collectible card games. His non-gaming spare time is spent with his family and playing guitar. Warning: Do not play Jenga for money with this person.
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