Reapercon 2018 - Part II

Part II.  Here's the mini-review / how to.

Home sweet home. The Embassy Suites in Denton Texas was so new it smelled new.

View from our room on the 11th floor. I suspect this will be filled in with commercial offerings galore next year.

The Good:

• The Classes.  The classes we took were excellent.  They are only an hour and 45 minutes in length, so it's fast paced and in some cases just a little too short.  We didn't take as many classes as we could because we were worried about fatigue, but we left each session excited and wanting more.
• The People.  As I mentioned in Part I, this is a tight knit, but welcoming crew.  Reaper Staff were great, and we met so many accepting people.
• The Venue. The new Embassy Suites was fantastic.  The staff (for the most part) were outstanding and got on board with our nerdly ways - for example, I saw employees wearing convention badge ribbons under their Embassy Suites badges.

The Bad:

• The GrowTix registration site is ... well, I started to type "not adequate" to be polite, but ... it's trash.  Sorry.  All of our tickets came out in the end, so no harm to us, but I was meticulous in figuring out their systems and double checking everything because the interface is so horrendously bad.
• The Auction.  Throughout the event, you can earn "Reaper Bucks" (play money) to use at the closing ceremony auction.  All in all we had fun, and even won a Badger Krome airbrush, but as tables started pooling their funds, it left out a lot of people who wanted to bid on items.  We were at a good table - thanks to getting adopted - but it was apparent that some people were frustrated.

Things to Do Differently Next Time:

• Pack a lunch.  We ate restaurant food and junky snacks from the time that we left on Tuesday until we got home late Monday.  It's hard to leave the venue, get food, and get back in a reasonable amount of time, despite a lot of nearby options.  Each room had a kitchenette that we could have made use of - even if it was PBJ or deli meat sandwiches.  And we spent a lot of money on food.
• Take more classes.  I don't want to spend every waking moment in class, but we could have handled more classroom time.
• Volunteer to run a game.  There wasn't a lot of board game / tabletop wargame options.  Reaper obviously only offers what people are willing to run.  Maybe I should step up - I'm thinking Shadows of Brimstone would be a fun thing to run.
• Enter the painting contest.  We pushed ourselves to get entries into GenCon and then the Miniature Monthly Masters.  I had things that I'd painted earlier this year, but didn't feel that they showed my current capability and left them at home.  I should have done SOMETHING though.
• Bring stuff to paint.  Although we painted in classes and did the painting events ("Sophie Says") I could have brought a few models to play with at Fort Wappel.