After meeting the owners of Anime Maryville at Yamacon last year, I made sure to add their event to my schedule to give it a try. It’s a local event that focuses on interactive elements to give its own unique experience. As someone who has felt that the cons have been less and less about activities, I was very interested to see what was in store for me this weekend.

Now, this is normally the part where I talk about the guests, but Anime Maryville has such a focus on the fan experience that they don’t have a guest list. This allows them to give attendees a much more budget-friendly experience. For $12, you get admission to both days of the con, and that comes with a goodie bag, an activity booklet, a Funko Pop, a comic book, and a pack of cards.

The activity booklet was very handy for me to know what to look for, and I was glued to it for quite a bit of my stay. First, we have a schedule of events that includes various concerts, K-Pop panels, presentations, and showings. What really got my attention were the anime and K-Pop murder mysteries hosted by Motionxchange. You get to pick various icons from anime and K-Pop to play as, and using your phone and QR codes, you can add your entree to the game and use their handy website to scan the other guests to learn more about them. I picked Light Yagami in the anime one… and died in the first round. So I picked the first performer that caught my eye for the K-Pop one (I’m not great with their names)… and died in the second round. In fairness, I never said I was good at this, but it was still so much fun. I also liked how they had a trick-or-treat event since one of the days was on Halloween.

Using the activity booklet, I was able to find out about the convention’s stamp rally and ribbon monster hunt. The stamp rally really made me look at various vendors that were participating to buy items to fill out the stamp book. Because they used the logos for the vendors in the book, they were very easy to find. The ribbon monster hunt was one of my favorite parts of the convention. For $3, you get a monster hunt badge and your first ribbon with a custom monster. You then look for anyone participating with a monster weak to the one you have to get another ribbon and continue until you find them all. Now, admittedly, it was hard to tell which members of staff and which vendors were participating, which made it a little bit of a challenge, but wow, was it fun to look around. I love ribbon games, and this was the first time I had this much fun with them in a very long time.

The contention also had a game room with various games, and normally this is something I don’t do because it’s something I sacrifice to stand in various lines at other events. With no massive lines, I had plenty of time to try out all kinds of new to me games. They even had coin operated gatcha machines. I don’t know their name, but it’s the type you see in Japan to get various figures. I’ve seen them in YouTube videos, but this was the first time I got to try one out myself.

This just goes to show how many events they had. I’m only just now getting to the vendors. There were some cool things to find here. I ended up meeting the developers of Caspian’s Quest, a game I backed on Kickstarter and mentioned in a previous article. It’s not going to take you long to get through all the vendors, but the selection is really good, and everything is spacious, so you have an easy time walking around and shopping. Plenty of figures, art, original merch, dice, and more.

Because the convention was formed by an anime club that’s “Fighting Illiteracy with Manga,” there’s a lot of Manga freely available to sit down and read. There are also rows of comics that fans can browse through and find a new book to take home. Yes, in addition to the comic book, you get for attending. My wife and I ended up with a few that I’m really excited to get to read.

Overall, you really get a lot for very little at an event like this. The price of admission won’t break the bank, and you get goodies of similar value upon entry. You have plenty to do and a plethora of reasons to take your time and check out each vendor. With loads of interactive events and no long lines to take you away from them, you can spend all day going from event to event until you’ve done it all. This is something I really wanted to see more of, and to see this so close to home has me overjoyed. I’m already planning on coming back next year.