Dragonmeet 2019 report

Dragonmeet - Hammersmith, London 30th Nov

In amongst the kebab-strewn ruins of the previous evening’s revelry a strange sight emerges amongst the street-cleaners who are preparing the way for the transition from nightlife rogues to daytime shoppers. Studded between the early morning risers are pointy eared figures bedecked in leather armour, boiler-suited post-apocalyptic warriors armed with plastic rayguns, and more platform boots and eye shadow than you can shake a fistful of disassociated Goths at. A troop of husky men pulling bulging trolley bags behind them pass by, they are almost racing to get to their destination like a train of bearded Oxen hurrying to market. It isn’t the usual pedestrian traffic seen on these streets, and all of it is heading toward the hotel that is being invaded and taken over for one day of Dragonmeet, a long-standing and now rapidly growing tabletop gaming convention.

We’ve been attending for the last few years since it moved to the current venue in Hammersmith, West London and it has already gone from a single crowded floor of convention space to two floors and then three, and now consumes almost the entire hotel. This is no surprise as it is one of the most relaxed, convivial and above all diverse and welcoming conventions in the current UK calendar. Originally conceived as an opportunity for roleplayers to gather together for a solid day of slaying Orcs and protecting the Elven kingdom or slaying Orcs and protecting the Galactic Empire or, well, just slaying some poor old Orcs, it has branched out to include boardgaming, literature, art, cosplay and all manner of associated creatives – the big hit this year appears to be wearable horns, and as the day progresses we see more and more people sprouting bony growths in all manner of colour, shape and style.

The highlight of this year’s con for us was having an opportunity to play Gaslands with designer Mike Hutchinson himself on a simple two-gate track with standard cars armed with machine guns. Right on the first dice roll my son asks Mike if the track counts as road or rough and gets the response “Aha! So you already know how to play Gaslands” then when he later gears down, flings himself into a hairpin turn and swerves and spins across the final gate perfectly in line for a straight run to the finish line this becomes “Aha! So you really know how to play Gaslands!” We kind of sharped him a little I guess as I drove mean and pulled a swerve right in front of his car on the first gate to send him out wide, then toward the end I did the same thing again to force him into a ram attack that almost made him wipe out but also ensured that he ended up out of the race due to stopping his run short after only a few millimetres. It serves him right for machine-gunning me earlier. It was also nice to see that even the designer sometime forgets supposedly simple things like whose go it is or post-gate activations so I don’t feel embarrassed for constantly doing the same myself! He was really pleasant company, super enthusiastic about his game and genuinely delighted with the excitement and joy that people continue to discover in it.

We were booked in to a morning RPG session, a father and son team were kindly running a child-friendly session for which we were very grateful – despite being primarily an RPG-centric event there is a disappointing dearth of sessions aimed at involving and exciting a younger generation. I stepped back to watch my kids reaction as they found themselves immersed in a world where the time-travelling experiments of their ancestors had left them abandoned in the distant past with nothing more than some advanced cybernetic weaponry and mind-controlled dinosaur pets to keep them company. And guns, lots of guns. Mystic visions set them off on a quest to recover the remains of futuristic relics that might hold the key to reconnecting the time-bridge and reuniting them with their loved ones. I muse that things have certainly advanced since the roleplaying days of my own youth where we just went into a dungeon and murdered everything in sight.

My son is captivated but my daughter less so, and as I can see that the GM’s lad is really keen to be more involved in the game we offer him the opportunity to run her character and it works out nicely for everyone. The two of us go for a wander; we buy some interesting jewellery and Dragon’s Breath lip balm (cola flavoured), successfully hold back from spending a fortune on some incredibly cute handmade dice-holding critters, chat with some of the artists and writers, become the thousandth people of the day to tell Ian Livingstone how awesome he is, and then meet up with our friend Rob who runs the Playtest UK network. He has a big presence on the day with several tables and dozens of aspiring designers keen to get feedback from the general public. This is always our favourite part of the day, there is something enjoyably rewarding about being involved in somebody else’s creative process and real joy in the moments when you are able to provide them with a seed of inspiration.

The growing popularity of the Playtest Zone is making it harder each year to actually get a seat in on anything, but we are invited to try a real gem called Pooper Heroes and yes it is every bit as puerile as it sounds. A simple card game where you have a ‘poop pile’ in front you where you rack up unplayable cards that are literally poop in your hands but with some evil twists where you can play cards into other people’s piles or literally shovel your poop en masse onto someone else in order to bury them in the increasingly overused vernacular. It’s a fully finished game that will have a very small UK only release and is suitable for anyone pre-pubescent or who has a pre-pubescent sense of humour. We found it to be a lot of fun for a quick filler card game so we put in a pre-order for a copy even though I suspect the joke will wear thin pretty quickly.

Our attention was caught by Magnate which had a spotlight preview on it recently here. They were already booked out for playing sessions for the whole day but we managed to get a brief introduction to it in the morning while they were setting up, and it looked good enough to want to play some more. Later in the day we stopped to say hello and ask how the convention was going for them and found out that one of the late bookings had cancelled, so we jumped into a full game inviting in a couple of passing lads who were looking on with interest and who proved to be good company. I thought that it was okay with some reservations that it felt a bit like a typical Euro-gaming approach to piling a neat concept under a load of busybee activity work that fills in the requisite ninety minutes of gameplay instead of just getting to the point.

My son got way out in the lead and started to sell with the market on a precipice so the only logical thing for any of us would have been to hold out for another round in the hope that it would inflate a little further and give us enough of an edge to catch up on him, except it instead triggered pointless panic selling. This makes sense from a real-life perspective, if the market is about to collapse and you have an opportunity to capitalise your assets before they lose 80% of their value then you would take it, however the goal of the game is not to further your financial position but to have the most money. The panic reaction just resulted in sticking in the pin which worked in his favour and he properly took us to the cleaners as a result. I wonder how much more cold and calculating players will get in the endgame with experience; in order to maximise returns with only three actions per round you really need to start selling your smaller plots a couple of rounds in advance of the market collapse and timing your biggest ones to a tee. That for me is what the game is really all about, it was quite fun doing all of the buying, building and renting along the way though.

We tried a couple of other things of little consequence and did a minimal amount of shopping. One thing that I love about Dragonmeet is that they put all of the retailers onto a separate space on the lower floor which makes for an interestingly realistic dungeon-crawl. We’ve stopped going to the UK Expo because they intersperse shops all over the trade hall which means that there is constant jostling from unwashed dickheads with enormous backpacks thundering around looking for the next bargain acquisition. Having a separate trade area means that the people that are only there to shop and consume go straight downstairs and then many of them don’t even hang around for much of anything else. The main floor is pleasant and spacious and it was great to see so many families enjoying the day there, in fact the demographic looked every bit as diverse as the general public in the street outside. This is our favourite convention at the moment and I hope that it can retain the wonderful atmosphere when it inevitably moves to a larger venue in the next couple of years or so.

Playing with the designer and your son that way sounds super awesome real gaming memories stuff, warm and fuzzies.