Saturday, November 23, 2024
Breakout Con was conceived to provide a local space for all manner of tabletop gamers, and its 2nd year went off quite successfully this weekend! Another year of tabletop board and roleplaying games with events, open gaming, panels and more. This year’s event was well attended – overly so as the event sold out on the Saturday! This year the board gaming space was hopping – not only were there scheduled events and tournaments, but Proto TO had a prominent mini-booth in one corner of the room and local/visiting designers were encouraged to set up prototypes for play. I really loved seeing more of a designer presence this year not just for panels but having this space specifically. There was even a great panel on board game design!
Not only were there vendors in the RPG and board gaming spaces, but there was also a satellite vendor space in a smaller room, which is great to see. I hope that there can be a larger cohesive space for this in years to come. And overall I hope the con has grown enough that it can move to a bigger venue for next year’s event – seeing the larger rooms for RPGs and board games at capacity is great, but some wiggle room for people to make sure they can sit down and play even in smaller satellite rooms would be fantastic. Late night gaming was one feature I thought was great to see, and was greatly attended too! You can’t get gamers to stop.
I got to play quite a bit over the weekend, including prototypes, which was fantastic! Games like Scythe and Terraforming Mars have evaded my table until now, and it was terrific to try those out. I even got to get Arcane Academy from the Play to Win library to the table and taught 3 people – we all ended up having a great time. I hope to see the BreakoutCON library grow before next year’s event, and even more Play to Win titles. Kudos to the sponsors for making that happen, and giving a lot of gamers happy winning smiles the last day of the con.
Toronto’s been lacking a good tabletop-specific con, and it’s great to see that after its first year BreakoutCON has built up enough buzz for the weekend to do so well. I know that there were other media folks who came in from the GTA and further (To Die For Games and Board? Games Co!) as well as board game designer from Ohio, Jon Gilmour, who came in for the event – and many others! Seeing this reach, I think that this a sign of greater things to come. I’ve been envious of events like Geekway to the West, and I do hope we can move toward an event of that scope yearly here in Toronto.
I think it’s funny that you mention Jon Gilmour by name but not Eric Lang. Perhaps he’s old hat there in Toronto…
It’s more that Jon came in from out of town that was the point 🙂