This was the first NOVA Open I attended and I had a really good time, here are few pros and cons (nothing major, just my thoughts).
Pros:
- Location; it was nice being really close to Washington DC and being able to take a few hours for sightseeing.
- Food Trucks; it was great to have food trucks right outside the main entrance to grab a quick lunch or even dinner if we didn't want t stray to far away from the hotel.
- Silent Auction/Charity Raffle; that is a nice touch for their causes.
- Bar/Food Discount; they offered 20% off at the breakfast area for coffee and pastries and each night the bar had a selection of $4 beers.
- Vendors; it is always great to have vendors at cons like this since I am more of an impulse shopper. Most of the vendors also kept longer hours which was nice.
Cons:
- Physical Space; the physical space for me I thought was a bit weird and tight. Some other players may like the separation, but I thought the separation was too much. They had events across four different floors, and if you did not have an event on that floor, you would never visit there or the other games. I can understand the space limitations and some can say the quietness is nice, but if we did not look for the Warhammer 40K hall (on a different floor) we would have never known it was being played there. I understand that is the limitation of the hotel and how big the event is growing, but it may be time to look for a smaller convention hall in the area.
- Gaming Space; I really loved the extra side boards that used in between each 4x4 mat for Warmachine/Hordes gaming area, the problem then became they had no dedicated Iron Arena area space. You had to find an open event table and hope it was not going to be used (it had happened to us and we had to clean up our stuff and find another table). LVO/AdeptiCon they all have dedicated tables for Iron Arena.
- Open Gaming; there were no tables or an area setup for Open Gaming. They had a board game room, and if you asked nicely they would let you play in there (until needed for a board game).
- Vendor Area: this was in a weird location. It was setup in the common areas of the main floor all spread out in between the elevators and escalators, no dedicated hall for them. It was nice you could get to them easily, but it was a little sporadic down there. Some of the vendors were even on a different floor. Having the vendors in their own would be better, and that common area could be setup with open gaming tables.
I am going to wrap this up with just a few pics of some of the items I picked up this weekend.
0 comments:
Post a Comment