Boston Fireside Gathering Recap
by JR Cook - 10 years ago show comments
The smoke has cleared and the cards are packed up, placed back into the Collection for now. Yesterday, at Comicazi in Somerville, MA, swaths of Hearthstone hopefuls from across Greater Boston gathered for the first major Fireside Gathering hosted in the area. BlizzPro, represented by myself, and Don’t Kick My Robot, represented by the leader and founder Poach, banded together to get this event off the ground and with logistics taken care of in the prior weeks, all that was left was to get to the shop and see who all would show up. The turnout did not disappoint, with about 25-30 people hanging out over the course of the afternoon!
The Early Going
As is wont to happen with any major event hinging on technology, some technical difficulties struck early on. The Internet we were relying on failed us. Luckily, one of the attendees was a network engineer and combined with Poach using his powers to get on the horn to Verizon, we eventually got things going again. I cannot say enough about the patience of all the people that showed up while we worked through this speed bump and it was great to sit around and see people create new friendships while debating the finer points of the game or talking about flavor text or generally just bonding over being fans of Blizzard games.
Every attendee was given a commemorative button and a code for a free pack of cards that I handed out as they arrived, which was a nice way to get to personally meet everyone. Poach and I gave a few introductions and talked about what our respective associations are all about and then we were off into bracket building for the two tournaments – a Hardcore version and a Casual version.
The Tournaments
Everybody happily policed themselves into the proper bracket that their skills and cards made sense for and after a quick lunch break and some meter feeding, we got things going! The rule set was King of the Hill style, where the winning deck stayed and the opponent got to pick a new one to counter that winning deck. The Casual tournament played Best of 1 series until their final rounds, where it moved up to Best of 3 and the Hardcore tournament played Best of 3 until the final, which moved to Best of 5.
Poach and I did our best to drum up some drama with ad-hoc shoutcasting while checking in on all the games as they progressed. What ended up being incredibly helpful for minimizing lag was only playing a couple of games per round at a time and also having people utilize their phones as hotspots to create “separate networks” essentially. There were a few times where we did run into some lag, which would hilariously add to the anticipation of finishing turns in time (Oh, Miracle Rogues…) or actually affect games where some damage had to be kept “in mind” due to not being able to get every valid action in. You could say that this was a true test of the patch change which added the in-game timer into friendly matches.
As the tournaments whittled themselves down to their finals, hotspots freed up and people started to work on getting their Fireside Gathering cardbacks. I can happily report that everyone that attended did indeed get their back! Mission accomplished.
In the end, Phoenix#12267 and Baklava#1842 reigned supreme in the Hardcore and Casual tournament, respectively. It’s worth noting, too, that Baklava traveled all the way from Maryland for a vacation in Boston just for this Fireside Gathering!
Wrapping Things Up
After everyone finished up their friendly games and tournament games, we proceeded to the raffle for Hearthstone posters signed by the developers as well as handing out awards for the top three finishers from each tournament. The grand prize for winning the Hardcore tournament was a Beatles Rock Band guitar signed by all of the Rock Band developers with graphic novels and comics of the winners’ choice for the rest of the top placers. Major thank yous go out to Blizzard for providing us with the posters and card packs and to Comicazi for supplying the awards for the tournaments.
Last, but certainly not least, some of us resurrected the Hearthstone Charades that Community Manager Zeriyah introduced at PAX East earlier this year and we had a lot of fun in the beautiful weather acting out some of our favorite cards for everyone to guess.
All in all, I had an awesome time and I heard from multiple people that they enjoyed themselves as well. People are already wondering when the next one will be and I’m sure that it won’t be long before we’re starting to get the hype going for the next Fireside Gathering!
On behalf of myself and Poach, thank you to everyone that came out and made this event a success, thank you to Comicazi for being amazing hosts and sponsors, and we hope to see you all again very soon.
For updates on future New England based Fireside Gatherings, join this Facebook group.
Had a blast! Thank You all for coming!