US Championship for 2013 - Host Nominations and Discussion

United States volunteers,

Who will be hosting the US National Championship in 2013?
Discussion and decisions need to be made now.
If you want to nominate your city for hosting the event, please list your dates and city so that discussion can begin.

DragonCon (and Atlanta) is available again.

Advantages for Atlanta:
- major airline hub (more people pass thru ATL airport every year than any other airport in the world)
- major train hub
- $2 MARTA train from Airport to DragonCon hotels
- DragonCon has been going on for 27 years and has tons of other activities available to fill a weekend, memberships for 2013 are $65 for the 4 day event if completed in September 2012
- Labor Day weekend, so you can compete in events Saturday and Sunday and fly home on Monday
- August 30 - September 2, 2013
- L. Scott Johnson (available to sign copies of rulebooks, and play in side games)

Disadvantages for Atlanta:
- Labor Day, Los Angeles and San Francisco have major conventions that same weekend
- Those that fail to plan and commit early pay the price
DragonCon registration is:

• $65 to 09/14/2012
• $75 to 11/15/2012
• $85 to 02/15/2013
• $100 to 05/15/2013
• $115 to 07/13/2013
• $130 until August 17 and then again at the door

San Francisco does not have major conventions, certainly not on Labor Day Weekend. The Labor Day convention of the past has had its problems, was rebuilding, then a second convention decided to compete. Both kind of suck, and the locals are annoyed by having two gaming conventions with similar offerings on the same weekend. Which is how I ended up in LA when there was plenty of local gaming.

I would vastly prefer going to DragonCon than the Bay Area cons, though it is much more of a commitment of time and money. I can't speak as much about competing with Gateway in LA, though I found the offerings interesting this year if not what I consider major convention level offerings. My observation is that West Coast cons are not well-suited to anyone East of Denver or possibly even East of Vegas.

In other words, of these options, I see DragonCon being the obvious choice.

Other than DragonCon in 2013, the options that I see are:

- at the yearly Labor Day(ish) tourneys in L.A.
- a late-year tournament in Chicago, Denver, D.C., or NYC

I'm suggesting these as options because there was some talk of moving the US Championship around now that the NAC is no longer mobile, and these are the large cities which both appear to be the remaining options, have had late-year tournaments in the past, and appear able to support an ~20 player tournament

To be fair, I think that DragonCon is the likely choice again for 2013 unless one of the Princes of the aforementioned cities steps forward, but it's worth some amount of time to allow them to consider it.

If DragonCon is chosen again in 2013, perhaps it's reasonable to assume (like Origins) that the US Championship should be there permanently.

DragonCon, Origins, and LA in Labor Day (if they step forward about it) all seem great to me.

If LA wanted the US NC, I'd prefer they use their February convention over the Labor Day one. East Coast players would have fewer competing events over President's Day weekend.

i.e. ORCCON 2013, February 15 - 18, 2013

The US NC doesn't have to come after the NAC...

L.A. would definitely be willing to host the NAC here. These are my thoughts though: Memorial weekend would be better, I think, over Presidents Day weekend as I would think February would be a little to soon to do an NAC, and we would not want to compete with Dragon con during Labor Day. Thus our only option would be Memorial Day weekend. We would have a full service Strategicon Con to accommodate us and the con is small by some comparisons, but it is growing and we would have a nice high visible space to play. It's located next to LAX airport, so shuttles would still be available. It would be a nice spot to host an NAC. With all that said I know the west cost bias of coming all the way out here to play, and I get that. However, I believe anyone one who came to L.A.'s last NAC would testify what a wonderful time that was had by all. If the NAC ends up @ Dragon Con it would mean L.A. giving up one of our 3 main tournaments of the year. Although I have always wanted to go to Dragon Con, I don't know that we would be willing to make that move.

All that said, if you want to do the NAC in L.A. during Memorial Day weekend we would be open to host it.

Sincerely,
***JediMike***