I was away with some friends over the last weekend, playing games. We do this at least once a year, renting a cottage and spending a couple of days with nothing to disturb the gaming and good company. It’s great fun, and I already look forward to our next one.

This sort of home-grown mini-con has a very different atmosphere to commercial conventions of the various types. Yes, even the ones that focus entirely on gaming, and even those gaming-only conventions of an old-fashioned, barely commercially-sane sort that I don’t know exist any more.

This time, we played our way through nine different games, including Puerto Rico (über-bling edition), Casting Shadows, River of Gold, DC Deck-Building Game (Dark Nights Metal edition, apparently), and Nucleum. The latter was the most complex, and it turns out that we did a couple of things wrong (none of us had played before), though that didn’t stop us enjoying ourselves. I’d like to try that again before I forget the rest of the rules.

If you’re interested in game design, then this sort of thing is well-worth doing. Even if you just like gaming as a hobby it’s a lovely experience. But for the designer, the more gaming experience, and the more different games you can play, the more of a library in your head you have to draw on, the more patterns you can see, the more ways to solve each puzzle you’ve tried out. Giving yourself time to more completely soak in the experience and the games is both more relaxing and (I’d argue) better at getting the info into your head. Far more often you’ll play a game or two on a normal evening, when there’s time pressure for a sane bed time as work looms the next day, family and pets distract, and so on. Daily routine. It gets in the way of novel experiences, which (I might also argue) was one goal of a good game. Or should be. A mini-con is its own novel experience, and enhances that of all the games within it. 

In practical terms, you don’t have to travel, though the change in surroundings helps me relax, focus, and absorb the experience differently, so I’d recommend some novelty in surroundings. The key is really removing all the pressures of any other commitments for that day or days. All you need to do is play games and hang out with your friends.

As an aside, I barely looked at my phone all weekend. I’d recommend this too, though a social media and screen detox is not the main aim. It does, however, remove many distractions and stressors, which is important. But you do you. I’m just optimising here. 

If you can’t travel, other ways of gaining a similar result of displacing yourself from the norm would be playing in a different room, at a different friend’s house, renting a local event space for the weekend, or simply timing it so your family are away that weekend.

Setting aside a dedicated time and space for gaming (or any hobby) changes the vibe, and for anyone interested in exploring something in greater depth, I’d recommend making the effort.