August is GenCon month in the RPG world.  I’m jealous, of course – I live in Colorado and was not able to make it to Indianapolis for the convention. (Side note: The company I work for does have a big presence in Indy, and I’m thinking about seeing if I can get them to send me out there for a business trip just before GenCon next year – free plane ticket for gaming!)

That doesn’t mean I have to be out of luck entirely – Labor Day weekend in Denver means TactiCon!  Now, I’ll admit that I don’t really know exactly what TactiCon is all about yet (the brochure is here).  I’ve never been to a gaming convention of any sort before.  But hey, it’s a 20 minute drive from my house so I might as well make the most of it.

I’m signed up to run two Living Forgotten Realms games for D&D 4th Edition on Saturday using my fancy-schmancy new projector setup.  Now that I know it works, I’m really excited to use it at the convention.

I’m also planning to do some shopping at the Con.  I don’t currently own any minis, and while the projector setup means that I don’t ever plan to own any monster minis, I would like to have minis for my own player characters, my wife’s player character and some generic player characters to keep on hand in case I run a game where they players lack minis of their own.  I’m assuming that a convention is a good place to get minis, right?  I don’t mind paying a little bit of a premium to get high quality – preferably metal instead of plastic.  My shopping list includes:

• A cloaked figure with a comically oversized sword to represent Kern, my Githzerai avenger
• An armored character with a normal sword to represent Rhogar, the character I play in LFR games
• A dragonborn mace-wielder in chain mail to represent my wife’s runepriest, Zaaria (or really any dragonborn character – Barbara loves dragonborn)
• A few other minis to fill out a random party – something wizard-like, something archer-like, something cleric-like

Naturally, I want to play some games, too.  I haven’t played LFR in a while, so if I could get into a couple of games to get Rhogar up to third level, that would be cool.  I love board gaming, too, and it looks like there are a ton of games scheduled.  Honestly, aside from D&D, I mostly want to explore games that I’ve never played before.  I want to check out new board games and play at least one session of an unfamiliar RPG.  I’ve heard good things about Savage Worlds, so I might try that.

What recommendations do you have for me, a con virgin?  It’s not GenCon, so it won’t be totally overwhelming, but what should I try to see and do?  I’ve taken two days off work, so I’m going to make the most of it!