I visited the Swedish town Linköping over the Ascension holiday with my family. The main goal was to present my game Gotlandia at LinCon, but also to have a nice family trip. LinCon is a game convention held yearly at the University of Linköping. We have visited Linköping several times earlier, but this was the first time where Linköping was the destination.
Gamla Linköping
A friend of mine drove up from Malmö with his two daughters so our kids had company for playing while my friend and I were playing games. The convention is located a short walk from Gamla Linköping, an open air museum with red wooden houses along cobblestone walkways. Both the forest and the museum showed itself from its best side with all the freshness of spring.
My friend had booked a puzzle solving event at the local detective house. Based on a kids book, you get to solve a crime in a familiar universe. The kids had a great time and correctly guessed the culprit. My oldest needed a little alone time after spending two hours indoor with three girls though.
The local parking app does not get many stars. Of the three of us, only my wife managed to sign up for an account and with only an option to pay by invoice. I still remember paying exorbitant fees for forgetting to check out and an invoice that came later by letter during the Christmas vacation while we were away. Don’t you just hate parking apps?
LinCon
I’ve attended game conventions in Denmark, UK and USA since the late 80ies. Besides a short visit at a convention in Malmö, my visit at LinCon this year is my first visit at a Swedish game convention.
Game conventions have many things in common but they all have their distinct flavours. Usually what keeps people coming back year after year are the other convention goers. You get to play games, but as you do, you also get to know people and become part of some of the sub communities within the convention community. When you visit a convention for the first time, it can be hard to learn the secret handshakes. So my advice is to join someone who is already a part of the community — or to bring your own event for the convention. For LinCon I did the latter.
I signed up my boardgame under development, Gotlandia. The sign up was easy, I got a confirmation after a few days. The website and the sign up system have their quirks but did the job. Check in at the convention was smooth and I found the play area for my event with a little guidance and got set up for play.
The default option in the sign up was to offer an event three times for four hours over the convention. This gave plenty of time to go explore the rest of the convention and for playing with the family.
Kids ended up spending most of their convention time painting minis at an art supply shop that offered a painting area for people to try out the Army Painter range. They were also very nice people.
I got to chat with Johan Nohr from Stockholm Kartell, the guy behind the visual design of MÖRK BORG. I also had nice chats with Triturus Games and Chartagon about the challenges of creating and publishing boardgames. It was also cool to explore the many play areas where people presented a plethora of exotic games and evocative terrain pieces.
Gotlandia
Four sessions of Gotlandia happened of which I played in two. Plenty of people were hosting games and it was a select audience who found their way to our corner of the convention. My players were experienced boardgamers with a relation to Gotland so an ideal audience.
I got great feedback both from watching the games and from the players afterwards. I’m still processing the feedback — and also found the missing components needed to play a six player game — so Gotlandia is still under development. Let’s see where it ends. Maybe I will come back with an updated version at LinCon 2025?
Nice write-up. Sweden really can be lovely.
Indeed, east coast has continental climate so when spring finally comes, it’s everything at once. By the way, the travel time by train Copenhagen Linköping is about the same as Copenhagen Hobro. Just saying.