DundraCon XXIV is in the books. Mike, being the only one adventurous enough to accompany me, proved to be an awesome companion. It was hard to get away from Santa Cruz, but we eventually hit the road late Friday night, stocking up on junk food for a weekend of pure geeky bliss. If you've never been to a gaming type convention, I would recommend going to at least one, you can feel the childish excitement and playfulness in the air, not to mention geekyness. For those of you who are not into that kind of thing, and have transcended into coolness and maturity (I pity the foo'), well...I guess you can go back to your night clubs and televisions and such. Anyways, Mike and I found ourselves skipping to the entrance of the hotel. I, as usual, was giddy with the thought of hundreds of fellow gamers,kindred spirits even, ready and willing to engage their imaginations for the next 72 hours or so. So we entered the Con, the first sight of all these interesting, weird, and sometimes eccentric people is really kind of exhilarating, you could feel the creativity flowing through the place (ok, so maybe I'm being a little dramatic, but it's the Con, you gotta love it). We found a note left for us up on the message board, next to other notes like "Sir Raven has the gold coin" and "Rutalas: Meet the others at moonrise in the dark hall". We met up with my old friends Bernard, Julie, and Scott who were already packed in for the weekend and planning out their games. Bernard was hooked on that new game The Sims, so he had brought his laptop with him and was busy making a housewife cheat on her husband or something. Mike and I dumped all our stuff and took the royal tour of the San Ramon Mariott in it's new and enlightened state. LARPers, open gaming rooms, CCG rooms, miniature rooms, military strategy rooms, the SCA, arcade games, and of course the Anime room were all greased up and ready to go all weekend. Finding a lack of open games at the moment we decided to sit down and plan out a game to run later on in the con. Eventually we found a game with a couple interesting folks and played till about 5. Saturday we partook in some of the SCA events. Mike fought his first knight, although it was a valiant battle, the knight had armor and Mike didn't, so Mike took pity on him and gave him the win. I, on the other hand, killed my first knight this year, underestimating my expert swordsmanship (a result of numerous years at the Con), the second knight I fought lost his head to my noble duct tape wrapped sabre. Then there came Monster Smash, the strategy game famous for being one of the coolest games at the con. We all received a good amount of PlayDoh and took about half an hour building our ferocious monsters. Mike had this funky little blob guy with dreads, I made myself a CyberSlug, equipped with laser, slime trail, and treads. The battle raged on for a good 5 hours, a cry of "Death, Death, Death...Finish Him!" was raised about every turn after the first 5, it never got old! You can download the first installation of monster smash pictures. (Some of the pictures didn't come out so well as I had predicted, so I put the best ones in the zip file. There's another whole roll yet to be developed which I used a 400 ASA so hopefully there will be some more good action shots, I'll scan and post them as soon as I can.) Then Mike and I rallied up players to play in our Werewolf/Mage game. That went on for about 6 hours, it was fun moving the control of the game back and forth between each other, and playing out various NPCs. Very cool game overall. On Sunday, abandoning a couple would be games and seminars Mike and I took our leave of the chaotic place, back to the land of the drones. So many games, so little time.