Highlights from BronyCon 2019: Gensokyo, Alatastica, and Coal Town

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Highlights from BronyCon 2019: Gensokyo, Alatastica, and Coal Town

In which a return to StableTop Games leads to some chance encounters with brony analysts.

Thursday, August 1, 2019: The First Day of the Final BronyCon

After lunch, the next major event on my agenda was Opening Ceremonies, which was all the way at 6:00 PM. So, memory serving, I asked the Chick-fil-A group if they wanted to play some Danmaku with me and Dark Wind.

Danmaku is a card game based off of the Touhou Project series of computer games. You see, the Brony D&D Discord group had game nights some Friday and Saturday nights (and yours truly has since made it a regular weekly thing), and one game night, Dark Wind introduced us to Danmaku. Needless to say (and he will attest to this), I was hooked. Nowadays, Danmaku is pretty much a fixture; we play it almost every week.

Dark Wind had mentioned that he had a physical copy, and that he would bring it to BronyCon.

When we returned to the Convention Center from Chick-fil-A, we headed straight to StableTop Games and luckily, we found a table big enough for a game of Danmaku.

While we were playing, however, a pleasant surprise came our way. Voice of Reason and Finn the Pony happened to wander by our table! (I would learn much later that it wasn’t by chance that they came our way; SharkGirl spotted them in the game room and asked them to come by. How she did so without me spotting her doing so, I do not know.) Needless to say, all gameplay stopped as we gave some time to these stars of Brony D&D, two of the Heroes of Alatastica. I ended up having to shuffle through my backpack to get what I wanted the two of them to sign.

You may remember from last year that I had made profiles of the Brony D&D characters. Well, this year, I made a second set for the Season 4 characters (minus Rime Bowerstone, since Aramau wasn’t going to be there ). And for Finn, given the unfortunate look of the autograph I got last year (visible here), I printed out an extra copy of Ivan’s profile.

So there was a lot of signing going on: two copies of Ivan’s profile for Finn:

And two copies of Jalerom’s profile for Voice:

And, of course, I asked for them to sign for Firebrand’s wedding gift. Finn was especially pleased with what I made for Firebrand.

Were you expecting a picture here? The gift is a surprise, remember? No pictures of it are going to show up until after Firebrand is married and sees the gift himself!

[EDIT 3/29/2020: Since Firebrand saw the wedding gift, here is a picture. Voice's and Finn's signatures are on the top.]

And, of course, if Finn’s around, you gotta get a hug from him! After I got hugs from both Finn and Voice, they went off. And I was so giddy at actually getting to interact with not one, but TWO brony analysts that I was literally squeeing! In fact, Dark Wind himself commented, “That is not fanboying. That is fangirling.”

To which I replied, “If this were any other circumstance, I would be insulted.”

Anyway, after the celebrity visit concluded, we continued our game, and Dark Wind won.

Afterwards, AnYPony (the Red Demoman in the TF2 Analysis Anarchy project) came by our table. He was giving out postcards with his OC on it. Needless to say, a lot of autographing was going on. I let him use my clipboard (I had brought one because of all the autographs I was planning on collecting), and my postcard was one of the last things he signed:

I’m already not letting you see my face. Do you think I would leave my name unredacted?

I also got him to sign Firebrand’s wedding gift, and off he went.

[EDIT 3/29/2020: Since I didn't make it clear earlier in this series, I'll clarify now. I made two copies of Firebrand's wedding gift, one for the Brony D&D case to sign, and one for other brony analysts to sign. Finn and Voice signed the Brony D&D cast's copy; AnY signed the analysts' copy. Below is the fully-signed analysts' copy; AnY's signature is near the bottom-center of the page.]

Now, we had played a second game of Danmaku. I do not recall if AnY’s arrival was before or during this second game, but given the way my notes are structured, I think that it was before. Anyway, the second game went very quickly.

You see, in Danmaku, every player gets a specific role. The game is over when a player is able to accomplish the task assigned to that role. In this game, Shark Girl was the Stage Boss: her goal was to defeat the Heroine (I forget who had that role). When it was her turn, she first equipped the item Mini-Hakkero, which gave her attacks extra range, and allowed her to discard two cards activate her character’s special attack.

She discarded two Shoot cards to activate her character’s special attack: an unblockable shot. Heroine took one damage.

She then used the attack card Melee. One more damage. Heroine is down to one life.

Her last attack was a normal Shoot card. By default, players can use only one standard attack per turn. However, Melee does not count against the attack limit, hence she was able to use this Shoot card. The Heroine didn’t have the means to avoid the last point of damage, and thus she went down. Congratulations, Shark Girl.

After that second game of Danmaku, we decided to go our separate ways. I went to get something to eat, then headed off to Opening Ceremonies.

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