This Swancon the guests were Anne Bishop, Jim Butcher, Isobelle Carmody and fan guest Sally Beasley.

This Swancon the guests were Anne Bishop, Jim Butcher, Isobelle Carmody and fan guest Sally Beasley. I was really looking forward to Jim Butcher as I quite enjoyed The Dresden Files, the books particularly, and the tv show, what I've seen of it so far, is pretty fun.

We got to meet the guests in depth at the guest dinner which was good, because of course, once you hit Swancon, all bets are off for planning, at least for us. They were all very nice! I would have liked to have seen more of them, but hey, it was my choice.

We taught a lot of board games...we played a lot of board games. Delightfully, Jim Butcher hit the game room for a couple of hours too, apparently, playing, um, Terra Mystica I think.

We had a couple of things we had to do, Ugg-Tect as a panel game which went down most amusingly and was highly successful - and of course, teaching board games. So the big successes were Ogre, Sails of Glory and Takenoko. (there will be a link to the photos at the end of this post)

Rob was awarded the Mikey Award services to the board game community, in particular introducing learners. He was quite overcome.(I know what it felt like, it was my turn last year). I was too, so I didn't take any photos. If anyone has photos of Rob receiving his award please share them with us! Naturally he couldn't take photos of himself.

We enjoyed ourselves hugely, the convention ran well to our eyes, and the hotel staff were ever helpful to us, even making us GF toast in the morning for our breakfast. And we REALLY enjoyed Damien Magee's video quiz. We must go to that now for future Swancons and I'm quite put out that we've missed so many previous ones!

The Masquerade was super fun, such great costumes, and a lot of people faithfully scanned and were amused by our QRcode tshirts describing our lazy virtual costumes.

After the convention we had the post convention meet up at the Old Shanghai, and some of us then went over to San Churro's.

Lovely convention, and a huge thank you to the committee, volunteers, guests and attendees.

If you played Wez's shortly-to-be-Kickstarted game COGZ at Swancon or elsewhere and don't mind writing a review of whatever size you're comfortable with, that would be really great! Put it here if you do! http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/150294/cogz

And now, photos.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/+RobMasters/albums/6005490551043556817 Click on a photo to look closer and see the captions and comments to the right.
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/150294/cogz