Babycon 12 was held over Memorial Day Weekend, at the Jones’ house in Germantown, Maryland. Attendance was up from Babycon 11 with 23 players. We had several first timers to Babycon, Jason’s friend, Paul Bartholomew, Scott Percival, our good friend from the local GCOM sessions, and Ken Cline’s wife, Vasoula Hatzigeorgalis. With six children running around, we definitely had a full house.

For Friday night’s dinner, nearly everyone went to the local Hard Times Café for an all-you-can-eat chili buffet. This particular Hard Times has two huge recreation rooms with pool tables, darts, miniature golf, a wall of TVs and more. As part of the package, we had three pool tables to ourselves and played many games. There was (typically) some screwup on the restaurant’s part and we didn’t get the choice seating we had reserved, but we worked it out and everyone had a good time.

After dinner, we returned to the house and began our weekend of gaming. As usual, everyone started out with fifteen Babycon bucks. One buck was anted each game and the winner took all.

After last year’s complete domination, Alex Ruvinsky had an average year. High scorers on the Tote Board were Paul Czarnota with 42, Dan Korn with 38, Bill Ruvinsky with 28 and myself with 23. I guess it was the year of the “approaching middle-age” guys.

On Friday night, we committed to playing the new edition of Twilight Imperium. TI is an epic space civilization game where you expand your empire, conduct diplomacy, invest in research and battle it out with other empires. More people wanted to play than the game could support so we drew lots to see who would play. When the game ended on Saturday morning, they had played for about eight hours! The “winners” of the drawing certainly got their money’s worth.

The most played games of the weekend were Spinball, Einfach Genial, Lost Cities, Ticket to Ride: Europe, Octi, and Diamant. All told, 79 games were played.

Thanks to everyone who attended. Special thanks to everyone who brought food, helped cook, and helped to keep things running smoothly. Hope to see you at Babycon 13!