Last weekend, I was at Gamevention with the Warcrafters. It’s the first German convention in years and it was great to see new and old friends there. We had a booth exhibiting our things and had so many visitors – I also spoke so much German, haha. I am always surprised by how unpopular English is in Germany. I was happy to practice my language skills, though.

Anyways, getting off track. The convention was a fusion of many things – cosplay, gaming, medieval market and music festival. The cosplay hall was quite well-made – it had a lot of interactive booths where people could try casting with resin, working with cosplayflex etc. There was also a team of cosplayers who made a cosplay from scratch during the 3 days and it turned out really cool. The cosplay hall had a long stage/catwalk through the room and 3 times a day, it had cosplay catwalks with different themes, which was a really nice idea and very popular – the hall was full every time this happened, even the very last one. It was really great to see so much support for all cosplayers.

The gaming hall was a bit less interesting for our group as none-Germans and there was a noticeable absence of the usual merch hall – to a point that I kinda even missed the usual eBay-style things that are almost always a stable at any convention.

The outdoor medieval market made up for that, though – there were lots of cozy little booths with loads of interesting things – from swords of both LARP and metal kind to clothes, mugs, kitchen utilities, clothes, mead and different foods. The first day was a bit rainy, which was a pity for the outdoor area. But once the weather cleared up in the afternoon and for all of Saturday and most of Sunday, it was great. I even managed to find a new LARP frying pan after the one I made for Rapunzel died during a particularly enthusiastic cosplay catwalk.

The music festival was at the end of the medieval market on a huge stage. Sadly, I didn’t really have time to check who was playing when, but I feel like the area in front of the stage was often quite empty. I kind of wish there would have been a smaller stage closer to the market – sort of like how other medieval markets do it, to add to the mood of the market. One of the bands I heard was heavy metal, and while the music actually was pretty good, it also didn’t really fit that well with the outdoor theme of medieval festival and felt a bit like a weird mix to me.

There were quite a lot of booths from educations, police, ambulances, banks etc. They might have made more sense to locals, but to us foreigners, it was a bit confusing – especially because they didn’t seem to speak English at all and the rest of my group did not speak German.

I know there were a lot of events I missed – mostly because I couldn’t find a schedule. There were cosplay excursions to photoshoot locations, but I had no idea where or when these were happening. The venue didn’t have schedules or maps posted anywhere – probably because they had an app developed that supposedly had all information. But I’m not sure if it was just our roaming that was bad or the amount of people overloading the cell towers, but most of the weekend, I could barely post instagram stories, let alone download and check an app. I also didn’t really want to install an app in German that I would only use for this single weekend – I’m old-fashioned like that. I hope next year there’s gonna be some easier to access schedules and event overviews, preferably even before the event starts, since I honestly don’t have time to research what’s happening once I’m at the event in my cosplay.

Overall, though – it was a really great event and I’m so happy we got to join! I hope we get to return next year!

Oh, and I finally met Loreley’s Hairdream in real life! She has even longer hair than me – and it’s beautiful! Photo below along with other photos from the event.