LEIRIA CON
We travel to a gem of a games convention in the sometimes sunny Lisbon
Please allow me, just for a moment, to be crassly reductive and cliched. There are two sides to everything. Who we are in private compared to that agonisingly stretched face we show to the world, the things we think and the things we say, our need for rest and our need to cram as much as we can into these pitiful few years before we tear into the oblivion of death.
There are irreconcilable contradictions, oil struggling to pull itself away from the water it’s mixed with. Then there are those seeming contradictions, supposed opposites that manage to rub along together and, sometimes, manage to feed each other and create something vibrant and unique.
This is Leiria Con, an event that’s at once unabashedly local and at the same time, fiercely international.
Time is both insufferably slow and so fast it’s horrifying. A second and an aeon ago I was swapping awful jokes and uproarious laughter with a group of people that had gathered together for the same reason as me. To sit around tables and enjoy being in a room with others but that was a second and a aeon ago; now I’m sat in a lonely Lisbon praca weighed down by the fact that it’s over, the brisk wind of early spring blowing the weekend away into the cold streets of memory.
Leiria Con is a small convention held every year in a surprisingly luxurious hotel, 50 metres from the Atlantic Ocean at a time of the year that prevents it from being prohibitively expensive but, allows grim faced northerners like me to warm their bones. There are tonnes of tables set up in conference rooms on three floors and the ethos is very much silly blather and serious games.
Its organisation has been honed to a keen edge through fifteen years of practice. There is no doubt that the organisers reflect the character of the con. With the designers of Dom Pierre and Madeira among its ranks it’s clear that this is a group of people who like their games heavy.
From the moment you check into the hotel there is a feeling that the doors of Portugal have been thrown open to you. There is none of the coldness and distance of Northern Europe here, the hotel staff, the con organisers, the players pushing pieces at the tables are open and friendly and want you there. For all of this effortless bonhomie though, this is very much a proud, Portuguese convention that wants you to feel Portugese for the weekend. Even if you don’t speak the language.
Walk around for ten minutes and you will hear the crisp, snap of German, the affable blunder of the British and American swagger. For a couple of days the notion of who you are and where you are from is not diminished. It is gently pointed out though, that silly little things like language and nationality are no reason at all for division. We all love these games and whether we say Verdammt or droga, when we mess up our turn it doesn’t matter because we’re all taking turns.
And that’s what makes this the best convention I’ve ever been to, the people (I appreciate it’s hokey but it’s true).
Is this the right con for you though? There are things it isn’t. For instance, this has none of the wonder of the new that Essen has. If games are released here, as Dom Pierre was, it is done in a quiet, modest manner. This is not a convention about commerce. It is not about idling among booths and looking at wares, the publishers that do come here are few and are focused more on playing games and testing prototypes than marketing.
If you want an unadulterated gaming experience though, a bacchanal of moving pieces and diving headfirst into game after game then this is definitely the convention for you.
I played so many games over the weekend, from one of the few black box Glory to Rome still left in existence to the almost finished prototype of Pilgrim from Nick Case and Spielworxx. I was taught the wonderfully knotty game of Cafe from the designer and ploughed my way through an eight hour game of Through the Ages!
The highlight though might be playing the new version of Transatlantic and having the effortlessly graceful Mac Gerdts himself teach us. This one is coming out at Essen and while I couldn’t buy it at the convention, it is on my list for the second I walk through the doors in the Ruhr Pot.
And all of this, meals included, for less than a weekend at Centre Parcs. I paid, with flights, €240. You could easily spend more than that on a night out in London and wouldn’t have a tenth of the experience.
That was one of the great tragedies of Covid. That it went so against our nature, our need to be with others and it made us solitary and mean. It is events like Leiria Con that remind us that our salvation resides in one thing, people.
There was the eleven player game of Telestrations where we almost smashed the windows with the force of our laughter. Casually chatting with the owners of the magic brains that created the things that brought us together. Drinking beer and gulping down the wonderful conversations with Tony Boydell, Steven Syrek, Isaac Shalev, Uli Blenemann and a cascade of others, telling the stupidest of jokes and having the most serious of conversations.
No matter how Netflix and Amazon want us to suffer in consumer created pods they will never succeed because we yearn to be together and Leiria Con offers that opportunity with startling intensity.
Yesterday, leaving, I walked around the convention and said goodbye to new friends and old and although those goodbyes were weighed down with melancholy there was no doubt that I’d had a real experience. I had mainlined it and it had left me exhausted and exhilarated. A weekend that had lasted forever and was over in a second.
There are two sides to everything but when you flip the coin with Leiria Con stamped on it, both sides are heads and both faces etched into that coin, well, they’re both smiling.