Okay, so Final Three Con (a local small-ish game convention primarily revolving around “social” gaming (namely social deduction, namely Blood on the Clocktower)) was last weekend, and I would have written this sooner, but you know. Stuff. (And Marathon.)
I say “small-ish” because it has close to 1000 attendees, but that’s smaller than, say, Gen Con (with its 70,000 attendees) and probably the only Magic Con I’ve been to (Philly 2023), but still, 1000 people is a lot – especially when they’re all there to mainly do the same thing.
It was a good time. I saw some people I haven’t seen in a while (despite ostensibly being a member of the same local gaming group) and played a lot of games.
I didn’t do much else but play Clocktower (and The Gang – the unofficial second official game of Final Three Con); the board games I had with me drew some interest, but not from enough people at the same time, and when I had some downtime, I was usually just waiting for another event soon-ish, so I hung out in my hotel room or wandered around for food, drinks, or other stuff like that.
Also, the Clocktower community is… weird. Like, in a lovely way, and it’s possibly because it’s so much smaller than the gamer community at large (so all the eccentricity is… distilled?) but as an, I guess, “normie” (where I’m not really all that unused to not necessarily fitting into a particular subculture) it’s… I don’t know… off-putting? Not really, but sometimes. Basically, it’s a culture that’s deeply online, to the point where if a game goes around and gives names, a handful will give some sort of online handle.
And it’s… whatever. I get it (I think). It’s 2026; we’d all rather be somewhere else, or someone else (or I guess maybe these are people who primarily play the game online, and so don’t want to make a link between that identity and their “real world” identity) and that’s fair.
It’s also an incredibly neurodivergent community. And I say that as someone who’s probably not 100% neurotypical (although I guess it depends on how “typical” one has to be). That’s definitely a good thing – that all of these people are welcome and comfortable and all just hanging out being themselves.
And so it was a nice weekend of games, friends, weird people, and not really paying any attention to the outside world. (Including the NFL draft that was going on at the same time. Apparently the Steelers drafted the mid quarterback from Penn State.)
It was fine.
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