Last Friday night Stephanie and fought traffic up to Palm Springs to spend the weekend with my parents and watch the tennis tournament at Indian Wells. We had a lot of fun but got a little burnt out from being in the sun for a long time. We stayed at a cute little resort that had about 20 rooms and a 1960s flare about it.

While in Palm Spring we had some nice dinners but didn’t do much else as most of our time was spent at the tennis tournament. I did get to play some tennis with my dad and play Pandemic (boardgame) with my parents.

On Saturday we watched the mens’ semifinals where Ivan Ljubcic defeated Raphael Nadal in three sets and Andy Roddick defeated Robin Soderling in three sets. We then watched a little bit of the women’s doubles final before leaving. The matches were great and close and the area was interesting with lots of places to visit. The one problem was inbetween matches we went down for food at the same time as everyone else which resulted having to wait 45min in line. For some reason this did not occur the next day though we were ready for it.

On Sunday were the women’s and men’s finals. First Jelena Jankovic defeated Caroline Wozniacki in a quick two sets. After that Ivan Ljubcic defeated Andy Roddick in two sets but neither of them broke serve so it was 7-6, 7-6. By the end of that match we were all tired, sun burnt  and ready to leave.

Last weekend was Condor, a small local scifi and fantasy convention that I went to last year with the specific purpose of pushing roleplaying and other games at the convention. For the past four months I’ve been hyping the gaming at this convention at meetups, on forums and other events. I got game masters together and had 17 games over three days prepared. Unfortunately, only two of those games got played and most of the players were bored GMs.

I showed at noon on Friday. The gaming room was packed with 6 to 8 tables each with five players playing RPGA (Dungeons and Dragons organized play) D&D games which continued throughout the weekend. I had one table for play and one for putting out events. My partner, Kevin, showed up about 30 minutes later and helped out. His first event was at 2pm and my Doctor Who game was at 6pm. No one showed up to either but I was expecting Friday to be slow and I had fun playing pick-up games of Three Dragon Ante, Pandemic, and Settlers of Catan.

Saturday I got there right at 9am when the first games were supposed to go off but still no sign-ups. Kevin and I did some demos for D&D to pass the time. 2pm was the core time and I had five games planned including a Battletech demo by a group who drove down from Orange County and Joseph Goodman of Goodman Games playtesting his new D&D spinoff game. I got the Battletech guys settled and got one sign up for Goodman’s D&D game. We managed to get all the GMs and one player into that game. In the evening we did the same with a Star Trek rpg while another GM and I played in pick-up games of Pandemic and Munchkin.

Sunday was much the same with us grabbing people for Goodman’s follow up game from Saturday. After that I was so frustrated and tired I left. I’m not sure what I did wrong if anything and am currently trying to decide if I should try again or give up because this certainly wasn’t fun for me nor do I think it helped gaming in San Diego in anyway. There is also some other people planning a full gaming con for April so I might help them.