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Gary Con lives on in Lake Geneva

Lake Geneva's Gary Gygax, who authored many game novels.

LAKE GENEVA--Mix together evil wizards, orcs, treasure, medieval warfare, fantasy, miniatures, unusually-shaped dice and a variety of people—some in elaborate costumes—with a penchant for role playing and what have you got?

Gary Con IV, the annual gaming convention that will be held March 22-25 at the Lodge at Geneva Ridge in Lake Geneva.

Gary Con’s website lists a wide-ranging series of games offered, including Star Frontiers, Paranoia and Chainmail. Participants are also encouraged to bring in any game they want to play. Scheduled games with names like “Last Varmint Standing,” “The Five and a Half Minute Hallway,” “Meanwhile Back at the Ranch,” and “DGS Presents: Terror on the Love Boat” fill the event catalog, and run from a mere three up to eight hours.

A small number of vendors will also be at the convention.

The event is named after the late Gary Gygax, the Lake Geneva resident and writer who is generally considered the father of role-playing games—most notably Dungeons and Dragons.

Gygax, who had co-written the game Chainmail in 1969, ended up leaving an insurance career to create Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR in Lake Geneva. By 1982, the company had broken the 20 million-mark in sales, and was translating its games in languages from Danish to Korean, according to its archival history. The company was purchased by Seattle-based Wizards of the Coast in the late 1990s. Gygax died in 2008.

Fans of Gygax say his influence can be seen in everything from the direction of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy of films to the Internet-based game, “World of Warcraft,” which boasts millions of subscribers.