ScrumCon
Feb 29th
Silver Spring Civic Center
ScrumCon is a new one-day tabletop gaming convention with 2020 its second year. Unlike a lot of other new tabletop game conventions, this one seemed to focus on role-playing and miniature games rather than boardgames. WashingCon, other newish game convention in DC was described to me as boardgame focused while NOVAOpen is older and miniatures focused. This year ScrumCon was at the Silver Spring Civic Center is just inside the Maryland side of the DC Beltway. This is the first convention at that location I have attended though it only took up three or so rooms. I managed to avoid the curse of DC parking since downtown Silver Spring has municipal garages that were free on weekends. A writing group I attended a few years previously had been located nearby so I was familiar with the area and did not bumble around looking for it. Unlike the previous conventions discussed I did not have a chance to volunteer for this one. The convention didn’t have any panels or even a dealers room, just gaming tables and a swap table for people sell their old games. I discovered this con by seeing a flyer posted at a shop only a few weeks before it happened which was too late to sign up for the headline games but still managed to find some good ones.
There were two gaming session slots for the con and I found interesting games for both. The first was a homebrew Buck Rogers style pulp warband miniatures game with old-fashioned flattened miniatures. Everyone had a squad of miniatures, with some squads having named characters with special abilities and each player had their own objective. Throw in a large and detailed playing area, a dirty dive of a space bar with way too many ray guns and mirrored surfaces for shots to bounce off so mayhem quickly ensued. I played aliens whose objective was merely to leave with their loot and while my loot guy survived, he did not manage to exit the playing area before the game ended. Still, I got to see someone shoot a ray gun, miss, bounce off a wall mirror and disintegrate someone just as they were about to escape. The miniature was replaced with a melted 'dead' one, with smoke (colored cotton) coming out it that blocked one of the exits that everyone was rushing towards.
The other game that I played was a different warband miniature game called “This Is Not a Test” with survivors in a post-atomic apocalypse wandering the wastelands to get loot, experience and power ups. Yes, yes, it is more complicated and nuanced than that, but that works for a brief description. We played in an underground fallout shelter, again with each player with a different warband all trying to deactivate the MacGuffin and get the loot while avoiding the mutated monsters. I had a bunch of mutants (but not monsters), and while I scored well, I did not pull a win. Of course, I had never played the game before so that was not too surprising. Still, it turns out that the gamesmaster was the creator of the game and it was pleasant to find out that he was local.
He was far from the only 'celebrity' gamemaster there, with Zeb Cook, Ed Stark and Bill Slaviscek all names that were once connected with tabletop gaming (mostly during the 2nd and 3rd edition of D&D eras and with West End Games) gamemastering there. The downside of course those were the games that were sold out way before I was even aware of the con, but someone mentioned that they now worked locally so maybe next year! I also spoke with Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Productions for a few minutes. There were plans for people to meetup at a bar after the convention to hang out, but I did not feel like waiting for it. My inability to hang out in bars is the single greatest liability of my writing and freelance career. And that is only half a joke. I must admit by this time I was also socially exhausted from the three weeks of cons, so it was easy to convince myself to skip it.
Months later as I write this those were still the last in person games I've played in addition to being the last time I was at a full table for any reason. My big plans to attend many cons last year has suffered and the next con that is still happening is Cold Wars in April 2021. Whether or not these were the Last Cons, they will be last for a while.