Jean Wells GenCon Tournaments

     These are the tournaments that Jean Wells ran at GenCon in 1980 and 1981, courtesy the respective program schedules:

GENCON XIII, Aug 21-24 1980

Basic Tournament  - Head Judge - "a tournament for those who have just started to play D&D using the Basic Set Rules"

Delta IV - Judge - "Can you secure a mining treaty for your home planet and return alive? Delta IV is a yet-to-be published boardgame written by the referee"

GENCON XIV, Aug 13-16 1981

Beauty & The Beast  - Judge - "a fantasy role playing event using AD&D (and a few other) rules"

Outpost of the Forgotten Lands - Judge - "An AD&D game, with variations!"

* * * * *

     The Basic Tournament is interesting because as of mid-80, Holmes Basic was the only Basic Set in print. So this tournament was possible a Holmes Basic tournament. And possibly this tournament was an early version of Wells' Palace of the Silver Princess, which was written in the 1980. So Palace was possibly even originally written for Holmes Basic. On the other hand, Moldvay Basic came out in early 1981, and was probably in development by Aug 1980, so it's entirely possible that this tournament previewed the revised version, and that Palace was always for the same.

    In her 2010 Save or Die podcast interview, Wells mentioned a boardgame that she had completed that was not published by TSR. Here 2010 Grognardia interview also mentioned the same: "I also worked on a space travel board game with play testers, one was Ernie Gygax, and they all had fun, but Lawrence [Schick] said no. I even had it at cost too". A "space travel board game" sounds like the description of Delta IV from GenCon XIV above, so I'm going to conclude these are all the same thing.

     I don't know anything else about the Beauty or Outpost tournaments she ran in 1980.