Babycon IX

We need a bigger house. Only our second year in the new house and we had the biggest Babycon attendance ever. A whopping 24 people played at least one game at the event. If you count attendees (kids and spouses who didn’t play), we saw 31 people during the weekend.

First time attendees were George Lewis, Zoe Spencer, Dan Korn and, Rachel Silber (and their children, Zachary and Rebecca), and the entire Ruvinsky family (Bill, Stephanie, Jason, Alex, Rachel and, Rebecca). Yikes! We pretty much set up a full day care center in the family room!



We had planned Friday night’s kick off dinner at the new Red Robin hamburger restaurant in Germantown. Unfortunately, Red Robin ignored our twice-confirmed reservations for twenty-five people and forced us to make an on-the-fly change. We ended up at our old favorite, Old Shanghai, which accommodated all of us quite nicely. Despite the confusion, dinner was great.

One highlight of the weekend was the 18 player team Robo Rally using two boards in different rooms! When your robot stepped into a teleport space, you immediately appeared in the other room on the other board, not knowing what would be awaiting you. It was wild, loud and, chaotic but, a lot of fun. Much of the action took place in the board in the main room as the board layout made it rather difficult to get onto the teleporter to go back to the other board. The team that won (see the Master Tote Board) leapt to an early lead by killing off most of the other team. However, a small group (Steve, Glenn and, Alex) remained alive to rally and nearly won, making it an exciting finish.

Thanks to Royal and Eric, who provided most of the pictures. Also, thanks to Glenn who contributed to the prize bin and Mark who donated a couple of good games to Bob’s Ultimate Game Room for the enjoyment of all. Thanks to everyone who donated food and drink.

As always, everyone started with 15 Babycon coins and had to ante one per game. Jeff Spencer had a good year, winning the most coins with Bob close behind, followed by Royal.

Babycon 10 is looking to be the biggest Babycon ever. We are already deep in preperations. Thanks to Glenn, we now have a web domain. Go to www.babycon.org (now defunct) for all the details on Babycon 10, full color pictures, and a look at past Babycons. We hope to see everyone in May, 2003!