Danycon 2023

Oh my gosh I can’t believe I haven’t told you about Danycon 2023!  This was our 7th Danycon!  (8th if you count Danycon and friends.) As usual it was a ball of fun.  We did no kiddos again so Erin’s mom watched their kids and my parents watched ours.  Erin’s new job provides free standby flights but Erin had to be very creative to get here because apparently it was college graduation weekend in Boston!  We’ll have to take note of that next time… but I’m happy to report that everyone got here before the festivities actually began!

Danycon 2023

The Danycon 2023 gang!

Theme

This year’s theme was Murder Mystery!  We decided on this theme last year during a brainstorm with Erin and Mark.  For the shirts this year Will and I spent an entire night on Midjourney coming up with a detective corgi.  Midjourney had no idea what Sherlock Holmes’ hat looked like, but we ended up getting to our winner with “corgi detective in tweed hat film noir style”.  As part of our theme we held a murder mystery dinner and played a bunch of deduction games! 

Swag

The swag this year was very silly.  I wanted to give out copies of Larry Levy’s Deduce or Die (which is free to print and play), but since it was recently reimplemented as Loot of Lima (which we also own) we decided it might be frowned upon.  Instead I gave out disguises (aka silly glasses with noses, mustaches, and beards), invisible ink pens and uv flashlights with pads, licorice pipes, and the usual Danycon shirts.  The pads had secret messages written in invisible ink that lead to a board game scavenger hunt in the man cave.  The prize for the scavenger hunt was a copy of Hooky for each household.  The bags also contained a set of “Don’t Get Got” cards, a game that we’ve been playing lately at every family get together.  I will tell you that it makes me suspicious of everyone.  At one point Bailey swapped two entire bags of chips for her clue which I think was the most masterful execution of any of the cards.

Licorice pipes

Schedule

Once again Will used the same website as last time to create the schedule – it allowed Will to pick game choices in advance and everyone else to input their game preference. This made it very quick to swap from game to game!

Games

We got to play a lot of new games (some that we didn’t get to for the past Danycon!)  I think Turing Machine was the hit board game of Danycon, though Forgotten Waters was super fun and we all wanted to play again (but we didn’t have time).  And of course everyone seemed to have a blast with the murder mystery.  My favorite game was our 3 minute play of funky chicken crossed with happy salmon which was just utter chaos and hilarious.  For the total list of games we played, see below.

• Forgotten Waters
• Chronicles of Crime: Danycon Custom
• So Clover
• KuZOOka
• Paleo
• Mosaic
• Lost Ruins of Arnak
• Big Top
• Turing Machine
• Ready Set Bet
• How to Host a Murder: the Last Train to Paris
• Paint the Roses
• Hooky
• Turing Machine
• GAP
• Happy Salmon
• Pairs
• Strike
• Tapeworm
• Whirling Witchcraft
• Telestrations
• Don’t Get Got
  

  The crew playing Forgotten Waters

  

  The rest of the pirate crew

Activities

Scavenger Hunt

Our UV light scavenger hunt had each answer as a board game.  I had to change some of my awesome clues because Will got rid of the classic games.  Each player had their own set of unique questions, that lead to a silly word scramble metapuzzle.  Here are some of the questions from the scavenger hunt.  They are all searchable :) Here are the answers.  Oh and here’s the list of Will’s owned board games!

• Thats So Raven! Erm…so…shamrock?
• Will just bought this game so he can ogle Duke leto atreides.  Wait!  Is that why Will has a beard now?!
• Will’s only signed board game copy.  The designer and I share a birthday
• E

• This game is known by some as sir shuffles a lot
• Lexi is always playing at least one game of this on BGA
• This is the second of 2 games that have an author on the box instead of a designer.  He wrote the Kingsbridge series.
• B

• Quick get out the vacuum…err thruster jets…
• This game might be for horrible people but the people who make it are awesome.
• Drafting AND monsters?! This is sounding familiar… 
• U

• Alfred Hitchcock knows a thing or two about murder
• I would consult with this detective
• Plant me some beans
• R

• The only thing better than Happy Salmon?
• The very first game we owned from this green haired designer.
• A party game known in other circles as “eat poop you cat”
• S

• The hanging gardens of babylon, the colossus of rhodes, the statue of Zeus at olympia… i think there’s a few more….
• Jim darkmagic and omin dran?  You had me at magic missile
• I wonder if Matt leacock took his name off the game in 2020.
• G
  

  The game’s afoot!

  

  The first clue

Chronicles of Crime

Will and I (but mostly Will) created a Chronicles of Crime episode based on DanyCon (I just helped with the story).  We decided to use the Welcome to Redview edition because it’s a bit less menacing looking.  If you have a copy of Chronicles of Crime: Welcome to Redview and want to play it yourself I won’t spoil anything.  To play it you have to unzip this file then load community scenario in the app and select this file.

Here they are playing Will’s scenario – they have just discovered the card for Julius (age 5).

Murder Mystery

We did “How to Host a Murder: Last Train to Paris” which was good fun as always.  For dinner we had a vegetarian cassoulet and for dessert we had frozen cream puffs.

A motley group of dinner guests.

Bubble Tea!

We all (except Will) love bubble tea!  It was a bit of a disaster because I broke a pitcher due to the tea being too hot, but it was yummy!

Bubble tea!  (Various configurations.)

Overall a very successful Danycon.  We have been joking (or maybe seriously considering) doing a Danycon cruise one year… let’s see if it happens!