The Cones of Dunshire is no longer just Ben Wyatt’s obsessively-detailed, unemployment-fueled brainchild! This weekend, 33 lucky Gen Con attendees will get to actually play a real-life version of our favorite unabashedly geeky joke to come out of Parks and Recreation.
In Vulture’s micro-oral history of the game (and the episode named after it) last year, they spoke with Mayfair Games, creators of Settlers of Catan and the ones who made Ben’s dreams a reality, to Leslie’s horror. At the time Mayfair mentioned that there would be a real-life, playable Cones of Dunshire come August 2014. Right on schedule! Sort of.
Though we’re not seeing the in-stores version they promised, those congoers who paid $100 each will get to jump on the giant carpet outside the con, roll the dice to find out how many dice they roll, and accumulate cones. Because four cones win, but in order to get four, you have to build a civilization. Thankfully, that’s where the Spirit Cards come in!
Now, “playable” is a relative term, since the Parks and Rec writers developed the game as more of a joke than anything else. Just watch Ben rattle off the uber-specific character roles (“two wizards, a maverick, the Arbiter, two warriors, a corporal, and a ledgerman”) and other contradictory contingencies (“the thing about the Challenge Play is that it’s basically the game—in reverse”):
Photo: NBC
