Geek Nation Tours - Day 1

Geek Nation Tours - AdeptiCon 2015

Day 1, Wednesday March 18 - Welcome to Schaumburg, IL

Teras Cassidy and Me

This was my first trip to AdeptiCon, but luckily I was joining some friends who have been multiple times and was facilitated by Geek Nation Tours (facebook). This was also my first experience with Geek Nation Tours and it was excellent. Teras Cassidy has put together a fantastic tour organization and helps with all arrangements including hotel stay, food, transfers from/to the airport, flights, Adepticon registration, and meeting lots of great people in the industry. 

I was lucky enough to have some sage advice from friends and since I was flying, I didn't pack everything I owned for the weekend. This, as it turns out is a really good thing, because what I did pack was too much. I packed up some of my Victorian Guard, which I had plans to paint, but then never did. I packed up my Star Wars stuff, but then never played. In fact, I ended up only playing two games, but more on that later.

I got to AdeptiCon (hosted in the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel) the day before the convention. While watching my Facebook and Twitter feeds, I noticed requests for help setting up some of the vendor booths. Now, as a reminder, AdeptiCon is very small even with the recent years of growth. I wandered down to see if Secret Weapon Miniatures needed help, but they were pretty much set. Then I wandered around to get a feel for where everyone was going to be stationed and when I went around the corner, there were all the good volunteers packing AdeptiCon swag bags. I figured, I was going to get one, so I could pitch in a bit. 

After about 10 minutes of packing, this cheery English bloke pops up next to me to pitch in as well. That bloke was Andy Chambers. We finished up the packing, received an incentive for our hard work ($5 off DSG games miniatures and a $10 voucher for concessions) and when all the bags were packed just stood there. Now I knew that later in the week, Andy was to be having dinner with us as one of the Geek Nation Tours events, but I am an opportunist. I asked Andy what he was doing and then we went to the bar to meet up with the rest of the group. 

Ironheart Artisans Blast Template

Well here are some other benefits to booking with Geek Nations, we got our registration done by Teras and that meant that we didn't have to wait in line for registration. You can order drinks from Sal's Beverage World and they miraculously are waiting at the hotel when you get there. I picked a case of Murphy's Irish Stout and a case of water. We also received some great Geek Nation Tours swag, including a branded long-sleeve tee, an Ironheart Artisans 2"inch blast template with markings for a 1" blast as well. Alex has done lots of other branded templates and objective markers, if interested definitely check them out. The latest and greatest is the add-on sets for Mantic's deadzone Kickstarter. 

That evening, we had our first Geek Nation's dinners. This was in the hotel and was, overall, pretty good fare. Following dinner and a plethora of announcements, we played some Warhammer 40,000 RPG. I had the honor of playing with some great folk in a Horus Heresy setting with guest GM Adam Fasoldt of Masters of the Forge (facebook). While the original idea was we would be a dinner and during the evening become acolytes, it turns out that an untrained psycher can easily unleash enough craziness that we were clearly heretics. The game was lots of fun and especially heretical, but in the end we all managed to escape alive though barely and I'm not really sure actually alive.

Final AdeptiCon haul

During the 40k RPG event, we also received our AdeptiCon swag, which included an AdeptiCon pint glass, AdeptiCon t-shirt, 10 tickets for the AdeptiCon Charity Army Raffle, and a load of armies and other gaming pieces.I'll have plenty of additional log posts to cover all of the loot I got as I get through assembly and painting.

How could it get any better than beers with Andy Chambers, well the convention hasn't even started (and we had lots of beers with Andy Chambers).

Hope to you see you at the next AdeptiCon,
Chris