I'm just back from PoRtaL XII, which was back in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 6 years after PoRtaL VI , which is - incidentally - only 3 posts below this one on my blog, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. And this means I failed to review the past two year's PoRtaLs, also excellent. Here's some representation for them. Back during PoRtaL 10 in Krakow, I did a presentation called Designing larps with intent . It was streamed, and can be found on Youtube. For PoRtaL 10, I also wrote and ran a larp Journey to Tau Ceti - an expanded version of the Arrival at Tau Ceti. I was a mess at documenting it, and it still remains in an unpublishable state. Both of these were run on Friday, which means I haven't really see much else on the convention that day, but I did on Saturday, when I was also able to play Ties that Bind larp by Alexandros Alexiou. I skipped Sunday, as we had to go early to drive home. For documentation purposes, full program listing is here . At next year
The PoRtaL conference had truly gone international. After the first year it had gone to Hungary. It switched between Budapest and Zagreb several times, until it went to Plovdiv, Bulgaria in 2018. I skipped the seventh, which was in Kyiv, Ukraine as I could not have made the journey at the time. I was on the eighth one - in Zagreb, in March of 2020., subtitled "Infinite play" and ran by Terrible Creations. PoRtaL 8, pre-pandemic To say it was great would be seriously underselling it. It was very diverse, with a lot of friends, new faces, and some big names in international larp. I might have fanboyed a little too hard over finally meeting (and playing with) Mike Pohjola whom I interviewed on this blog all the way back in 2012. Great talks, larps in the evening, and hanging out in general. During the event, I promised to write about it on this blog but (until now) I never did. The week after PoRtaL 8, everything changed and the world turned to a living nightmare due to the pan