Another player, 45-year-old Keith Bobash of East Brunswick, had played it once.

But at Dreamation, a gaming convention at the Brunswick Hilton Saturday, learning something new and hanging out with other gamers often proved more important than winning.

"I like the social aspect," said Mekash, who attends a biweekly gaming "boys night" with friends in Franklin. "We sit and laugh and call each other names."

For those unfamiliar with the new spate of board games, role-playing games and computer games — and the people who devour them — a walk around the convention's rooms could spark as much imagination as the fantasy worlds from which many of the games draw their inspiration.

Township resident Steven Braun instructed a young man wearing a brown tunic about the fine points of "Dragon Dice."

"They go to the dead unit area," Braun said of the man's fallen pieces on a crowded playing surface dotted with multisided dice.

"There are ways to bring them back with magic and such, but for now they are dead."

The anime/video lounge showed a collection of subversive, rare and cutting-edge sci-fi and fantasy work from around the world. One clip featured a Franciscan monk running from ax-throwing vikings set to thrash metal music.

More axes — and maces and broad swords of the foam-rubber variety — could be found at a table helmed by Knight Realms, a real-life fantasy role-playing organization based in Franklin.

In the computer gaming room, young boys stalked each other with automatic weapons in bombed-out Moscow while playing "Call of Duty 2."

In the buzzing board game room, convention attendees sat around tables to play "Oh My God There's An Axe in My Head," "Venus Needs Men," and "Goa," a strategy game of resource management and auctions that looks, to a neophyte, like an inscrutable muddle of colorful pieces, cards and tokens.

And while Dreamation includes traditional games like "Scrabble" and "Monopoly," it's the newer games like "Apples to Apples," that draw the most attention.

Dreamation also runs a summer show called DEXCON, running July 18-22 this year. Badurina says the conventions draw people who spend a lot of time playing computer games or who don't have the time to get together with people after long days at work. She said she expected about 900 people to attend from Thursday through today.

"The classical gamer is not the most social person — maybe a little awkward," Badurina said. "This is a great place to gather together with people who are maybe more open. And it's also a great place to learn games without having to pay for them."

And for Kathryn Miller, a 37-year-old Pennsylvanian who brought her unpublished card-based role-playing game "Into the Mystic," it's an opportunity to test her game out while introducing it to new people.

"This convention is very receptive to independent game designers," said Miller, whose game involves a search for a city that appears every 1,000 moons.

Miller's game received high praise from Bill Segulin, a 40-year-old computer systems auditor from Scotch Plains, who wore a shiny red and black Spider-Man shirt.

"I like the narrative and cooperative exchange," Segulin said. "It's almost theatrical. We are telling this group tale."

And Miller said she has modest goals for her game, which she hopes people will download and print out on their own.

"I'll be happy if people just pick it up and play it," she said.

Back at the "St. Petersburg" table, the game was winding down when 41-year-old Sam Stember from Princeton spent all his play money on something called victory points. But after Mekash consulted the instructions, the group realized they should have been buying those points all along.

As a result, Stember lost and Bobash won.

"Yes, yes!" Bobash declared in mock-triumph. "The smell of tainted victory!"

And then it was on to the next game.

Rick Harrison:

(732) 565-7259

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