Reading · Love from Portugal

Last month, I went to my first-ever board game convention.

They have conventions for board gaming??

Yes, indeed! The world of board gaming has changed completely since my childhood of Chutes & Ladders, Monopoly, and Sorry. Just as there are conventions for comic books (Comic-Con), there are now conventions for board game lovers to play new games, to sell games and to find one (or three) to buy at the bring and buy, to play games that are still in development (your input is important), compete in a tournament and win games, and meet your favorite board game designers!

One of the new-to-me games I played: Borealis

This convention is called, imaginatively enough, LeiriaCon. Yes, it’s located in Leiria. It seems to be a common naming convention (didja see what I did there?) to toss the place name in front of con. This was LeiriaCon’s 19^th year, and a bit under a thousand folks came from throughout Portugal, and also other places. A woman I played a couple of board games with is from Denmark.

LeiriaCon attracts about 900 people in a hotel with many rooms to play games in. Above is the Big Room (imaginative, eh?). Not exactly a nice quiet, calm environment in which to learn a complicated new board game!

As these things go, LeiriaCon is not the biggest. That honor goes to Spiel Essen (Germany) with 220,000 visitors. (For those new to board gaming, this may comes as quite the shock.) Next up is GenCon which saw 71,000 people. Gen is named after its home site, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. But wait! It’s now in Indianapolis, IN, and keeps its original Wisconsin name.

Portugal boasts more than just LeiriaCon. There’s also AlgarveCon in the south, and others. Here in Lisbon there are places to buy board games (instructions are not always in English, but you can always find an English copy online. I’ll note that we do have board games with Portuguese words in the game itself. What a great way to further my Portuguese!), places to play board games from WhatsApp groups and MeetUps, and at least three restaurants that host board game events with their own sets of games. Indeed, it was the first real way we made friends here, and some of those friends are friends still.

LeiriaCon is held in Praia da Vieria, in the District of Leiria. I suppose PraiaDaVieriaCon would be a tad unwieldy.

Leiria, the namesake of the conference, is the blue pin in the bottom right. The conference is in the teeny tiny town of Praia da Vieria. We stayed at an airbnb in the modest town of Oureiros da Vieria. The total distance between Praia da Vieria and Leiria is 25 km/15 miles.

Hotel Cristal, the site of LeiriaCon, is a sprawling complex of hotel, striped building rentals, and many, many conference rooms. I kept thinking it would be awesome for kids, across the small street from the beach.

The hotel is built around a green space with a pool and playground.

Praia da Vieria (literally Beach of Vieria) may not big (700 people according to a 2021 census), or have the usual charm of small Portuguese towns (architecture is mainly 1950s boxes), but the beach is something else. For the entirety of our four day stay, the long beach rollers never stopped, and the views from the boardwalks over the dunes were fabulous. Plus, they have ladies selling fish.

Some of the boardwalks and dune, different sidewalk designs, and that gorgeous ocean.

Small, wood stalls with striped paint, selling fish. — I was surprised that the photo of the lady at the fish stall didn't show her rolling her eyes. I'ma gonna guess this place is the subject of many a turista.

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that the fish stalls are looking a little worn. Remember us yammering on a while ago about a month of clouds and rain and storms? Between mid-January and mid-February we were in the midst of some big storms. One of those, Kristin, was the strongest storm recorded in Portugal. It came ashore at Leiria. In essence, a Cat 3 hurricane, but since it was in the winter, it got called an extra-tropical cyclone, not a hurricane.

The drive from Lisbon was through devasted forests. We passed miles and miles of bent trees, snapped trees, trees ripped up by their roots. The closer we got, the more the storm damage became obvious: metal posts bent nearly horizontal, houses with gaping holes in their roofs.

Fire season is going to be especially bad this year with all the fuel lying about.

In Praia da Vieria – a month and a half after the storm – it was unsual to see a building that was not heavily damaged and/or not being worked on. Businesses are closed. Streets and sidewalks and parking lots covered in sand. Apparently, being able to hold LeiriaCon at all was a bit in doubt. In fact, while we were there, the internet went down across town, and the vestibule for the hotel was closed because it was unstable.