If I Ran the Zoo Con

Cheryl Morgan’s blog carries a report about some UK conrunners’ recent attempt to play If I Ran the Zoo Con, the role playing game that allows to you lead your sf convention to glory or infamy.

The comments will be interesting to anyone who’s ever played the game. I had to agree with this one:

…Often key points of information are not provided.

Remember the point made by Tom Cruise’s character in A Few Good Men when he asked a Marine corporal how he found the mess hall if its location wasn’t in the Corps training manual.

A real Marine knows how to get the answers that aren’t in the book. And when the game was premiered at the 1987 Smofcon in Massachusetts, the macho implication was that if you had to ask certain things, you weren’t a smof!

I wonder how many of us still remember everything we knew at the time we first played If I Ran the Zoo Con? Ben Yalow, of course. The rest of us might appreciate an annotated edition of the game. There’s a lot of entertaining fanhistory woven throughout its scenarios.

2 thoughts on “If I Ran the Zoo Con

  1. “I wonder how many of us still remember everything we knew at the time we first played If I Ran the Zoo Con? ”

    Hell, I can’t remember most of my own anecdotes, of my own experiences, from those days, that I used to tell.

    They were funny, though, I assure you. But you’ll just have to take my word for it. Whatever they were.

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