A'CampbellCon!

For those of you who haven't heard, Jon, Katelyn, Abigail, and Jeanmark and I put on a board game convention a little over a month ago! It's a bit surreal to say, but it happened.  This past summer, shortly after GenCon, I was joking to the four of them that we should have our own convention and call it CampbellCon, cause alliteration is awesome.

Soon after that, while I was at work, I got an email from Google Drive asking me to collaborate on a document Katelyn had started...the first draft of our schedule :)  We got the A'Kesslars to help us (hence the name A'CampbellCon), and together the five of us made an awesome schedule, organized invitations, registrations, prizes, logos, payments, talked to local game stores about more prizes, talked to press about writing articles, learned so many rules to so many games, invited so many people, planned a menu, shopped for the groceries, cooked a bunch of food, made some new games, made badges, and more.  Then we actually ran the Con, haha.

During the Con itself, we had about 5 games going on at a time run by us staff, plus over 100 games available for open gaming.  We had opening and closing ceremonies, panels on introduction to gaming, what gaming means to you, and a vespers on gaming in the faith where we skyped in a fellow pastor friend who uses gaming in his ministry.  There were several tournaments that took place over the course of the 3 day Con, including a King of Tokyo tournament, a Kingdomino tournament, an Escape Room tournament, and prizes for the most games played and most time played.  There were card games, board games, acting games, and more.  We had people as young as about 10 and people in their 70s.  There were expert gamers there and people who had never played anything besides the usual Monopoly / Clue type games.  There were atheists, non denominational Christians, and Adventists playing together.  We had 58 unique attendees, with an average attendance of nearly forty each day.  It was an exhausting 4.5 months of planning, and 3 days of doing, but soooo much fun and so rewarding to have so many people discover such a great hobby for the first time.

There were so many great and unique things about our convention compared to other board game cons.  It was small and intimate, without feeling too crowded.  You could look around the room and see what others were playing and enjoying without feeling cramped.  We had such a wide variety of attendees, which I loved.  We hosted six meals over the 3 days, and I definitely think that helped add to the community atmosphere and fostered relationships.  We altered some games, developed some of our own, and used some already developed ones to play during Sabbath hours and showed that this hobby and Christianity don't need to be relegated to certain days of the week.  Christianity is not meant to be compartmentalized!   We are definitely looking forward to planning a 2nd annual A'CampbellCon for 2019  and are super proud and excited by what's already come of the first A'CampbellCon!  Check out our facebook page for more info (https://www.facebook.com/ACampbellCon/).

If this sounded interesting to you and you want to know how you can do something like it in your area, check out our new business that has sprung from this and see how we can help you build bridges through board games! (www.acampbellconsultants.com)

Here is the Spectrum article on the Con: https://conversation.spectrummagazine.org/t/adventist-gaming-conference-connects-faith-and-fun/15159

Here is the Lake Union Herald article on the Con (pg. 29): http://luc.adventist.org/Herald%20Site%20PDFs/Vol109-11_web.pdf

And here are a bunch of pics from the Con!