KantCon: Where I Become a Sentinel of the Multiverse
By Cape Rust
After that amazing Ingenium game, I hung around KantCon for a while longer before I had to leave to attend my regular game. I would have loved to stay and try to sit in on a game, but KantCon is only once a year and my regular gaming group is there all the time. They would have been fine without me, but they are a really great group and I wanted to hang with them.
My normal gaming group wrapped up about midnight; add a 30 minute drive home and I woke up tired on Sunday. There was a split second when all I wanted to do was lay back down and sleep. I had been riding this gaming high and it felt like I had landed rough then was put away wet. Luckily that split second passed quickly and then turned into a wash rinse and repeat. About an hour later I found myself clean, refreshed and walking into the final day of KantCon. The tables were still full and I started what I came to know as my morning stalking. I snapped a few pictures and then I noticed something I had not seen during the entire Con, there was no one at the Sentinels of the Multiverse table.
I am not a big player of card games. I appreciate them, but I mostly stick to RPGs. Several people at the Con had told me that I had to check out the Sentinel’s table, but every time I had passed the table it was full of players and this longhaired dude with a beard. It turns out that the “dude” I was referring to was the developer of the game Christopher Badell. Now there are lots of creators who go to conventions and show people how to play their games, KantCon was proof of that, what Chris did was almost inhuman. I saw Chris running games almost non-stop the ENTIRE convention. He was there from open to close showing people how to play Sentinels of the Multiverse.
Chris was talking to the vendor next door when I sat down at the table, he politely excused himself from the conversation and got this gleam in his eye. It wasn’t that I want to sell you my game look it was the: “I want to teach you how to play my game” look. We shuffled the cards and I told him who I was and that I was covering the Convention for Roleplayers Chronicle. For the next hour or so I had his undivided attention. We talked and we played Sentinels. He told me about the history of the game and the forthcoming update. At no point did he lose that gleam in his eye. Here he was playing a game that he designed and even more importantly a game that I could see he truly loves.
The game is awesome and I had a blast, but the most important thing was the personal connection that Chris was willing to make with each and every person who sat at his table. I didn’t use the word customers, because that isn’t the right word to express how Chris feels about the people who play his game. It is rare to find people in this world who are willing to go balls to the wall in pursuit of their passions; Chris is one of those rare few. Against Chris’s recommendation I bought a copy of his game and I can’t wait to share it with my fellow gamers and my family, but the best part of that entire encounter was that a dude with a beard and long hair embodied the spirit of KantCon. Thanks Chris for making the multiverse a better place.
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