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Origins was last week; I wasn’t there.

On the subject of Origins, a shout-out to FFG co-worker Corey Koneiczka, the designer of StarCraft: The Board Game, who earned a well-deserved Origins Award for his work on that game. Corey is the best hobby board game developer of whom I’m aware.

Although on Sunday morning at the Tidball Homestead we had fantastic bacon from the St. Paul Farmer’s Market, the enjoyment of said bacon was just a little bit diminished, because the Sunday of Origins is usually reserved for breakfast with Noted Genius Ken Hite.

Ken, no doubt, was able to find bacon without me, and the situation was ameliorated by the fact that Ken will be here in Minnesota this coming weekend, for CONvergence. We will no doubt find bacon soon at the typographically advanced Bad Waitress. But that’s neither here nor there (as they say); back to Origins.

Origins was the first major convention I attended as a pro. I was thrown into the deep end as a relatively new employee of Atlas Games when John Nephew and the other Scions of Atlasery (yikes, no good way to pronounce that) were otherwise occupied that weekend: I was sent east to Columbus with a van full of product (including the recently released Lunch Money if I recall correctly) to meet two personal friends of John’s business partner, who I otherwise didn’t know from Adam but who helped me run the booth for the weekend.

Good times. (With none of the sarcasm that usually accompanies the phrase).

Atlas being so small in those days—and in these days, I suppose, but that’s also neither here nor there—the big summer conventions were one of the places where I learned about the games business. Eager, young, clueless Jeff went in, and lots of professional relationships and strong friendships came out.

(The other place where I learned about the hobby gaming business was the Internet. I’m still trying to unlearn some of those things.)

But even though conventions have been critical to me professionally, my first experiences with the big shows were as a fan. I shit you not that I saved money from a newspaper-delivery job to go to GenCon the summer between 6th and 7th grades, and I didn’t miss a GenCon after that until I left the game industry in 2000 to go to grad school and find a new career. (Ask me sometime how that turned out.) I think I’m one of the few pros who actually miss convention gaming.

The point lurking around here is that I’ve got this deep-seated fondness for conventions, especially the big summer shows, but that when I try to describe to people why that is, it always comes down to my personal experiences instead of any list of bullet points inherent in the events themselves.

I’ve tried—recently—to enumerate the reasons I think other people should go to conventions. I eventually gave up and just let words to the effect of “You should go to game conventions” stand on their own.

So it boils down to this:

You should go to game conventions.

If any of the rest of you can explain why, with bullet points and whatnot, for the love of God, jump on it in the comments, and a thousand thanks in advance.