The LinCon gaming convention for 2020 was cancelled and the one for 2021 pushed half a year forward to the fall. And this weekend it’s finally taking place, 2½ years after the previous convention! As usual, I went to Linköping for the first two days, Thursday and Friday.
This year’s venue, venerable high school Katedralskolan, has its advantages and disadvantages compared to the Humanities building on the uni campus where the convention usually is. This has much better communications, being only a short walk from the railway station and downtown. But the layout of the large multi-story school building is quite confusing.
Organisation was good though a bit shakier than usual: no programme was posted on any physical notice board, and only about twenty people came to hear my archaeology talk due to an unexpected and unannounced schedule change. But I’m sure everything will work fine come the next convention in May.
I played eight games, mostly with new friends that I made right then and there.
- United Systems Colonial Marines. A self-published RPG inspired by Aliens. Our group did pretty well investigating the buried alien space ship up until we had to drive fast under fire to a pickup point off-planet. Then our driver made a bad die roll, our vehicle crashed and we were all shot by the enemy.
- Atlantis Rising (2012). Co-operative resource management on a sinking island, like Forbidden Island for grown-ups.
- Pickomino / Heckmeck (2005). Classic push-your-luck dice game.
- Revolution (2009). Influence the leading figures of a small town with threats, blackmail and bribes! Funny and absurd situations arise, like when two players both threaten to beat the town priest up, but one of them is also bribing the priest, so he goes along with that one’s demands.
- Camel Cup (2014). Betting on camel races!
- Tikal (1999). Competitive field archaeology in the Yucatán.
- Kingdom Builder (2011). Endlessly varied map-based game where no session is like the last.
- No thanks (2004). Solid little filler game.
2021 was my eighth LinCon. Here are my impressions of the previous one.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
LinCon is, to some extent, still my “home con”. It has variously been in the C-Huset at Campus Linköping, at Katedralsskolan (it kept jumping between Folkungaskolan and Katedralsskolan after stopping being at C-huset, then eventually moved to Anders Ljugstedts Gymnasium (at least IIRC, r3constructing names from maps here), where it lived for quite a while.
Then there’s this big, gaping, hole where I have NO idea where it was.
I think it was LinCon 93 or LinCon 94 where the LinCon Kiosk was, for the first time, managed by the con com collectively. And me and a few friends, after a stint working in the kiosk, simply refused to hand it back to the con com. As our thank you for that, we were tasked to man it the following year. I ended up co-running the kiosk for about 3 or 4 more years, before I let other people (who’d been working with us in the kiosk) take the reins, and only occasionally pop by to make sure that things were going alright and letting people take a break.
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And looking through the pages, I noticed with some horror that the kiosk now has opening hours!
Back in my day, I guess it technically had that, too. “Opens a couple of hours before the gates open, closes about an hour after cleaning starts”.
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