Post-Mortem: GrrCON 2026
A recollection and review of Call Center Village while at GrrCON 2026 in Grand Rapids, MI.
Our journey to GrrCON was full of obstacles: our cargo-van rental was iffy, one of our volunteers lost a transmission en-route, and we almost ran the chat-portion of the CTF remotely. Despite the rough start, it was otherwise one of the smoothest Call Center Village runs that I can personally recall. I give a lot of credit to our volunteers and the GrrCON organizing team who delivered exactly as promised without over-regulation.
The last comparison was at the Las Vegas Convention Center via DEF CON 34, which has a slue of rules around what you can and can't do. The conference experience at GrrCON was ...refreshing.
Escalation Desk CTF Winner
Before we dig too far in, we should say congratulations to our winner, RoyGBiv, who came in first with 4,805 combined-points across the Voice and Chat CTF! RoyGBiv received a Call Center Village swag bag, a black 100 Trying flight-tag for reaching 600 points, the gold 200 OK flight-tag for winning, the not-so-famous Golden Telephone Booth Trophy, and a SenseCAP Solar Node P1 Pro for Meshtastic.
I left the not-so-famous Golden Telephone Booth Trophy at home so we've shipped it to RoyGBiv! Sorry for the annoyance!
The live operator challenge was not unlocked, as our AI agent referred to as Landon Pearce (The Guardian) did not budge for any of our participants. Better luck next time – but also Landon is on my watch-list to see if we need to reassess the difficulty-tier.
The final lead-change occurred in the last-hour of the CTF when RoyGBiv, who had been attending one last GrrCON-talk before coming back, took the win from v3x, who had been leading most of the conference.
Savvb rounded up 3rd-place while Kestrel had the most first-bloods (5!)
A first-blood means you were the first participant to solve a challenge.
You can also download the file from the events page directly.
Setting up Call Center Village
After losing a volunteer and shuffling around our ride-situation, we were able to get a (dis)functional team of volunteers into a hotel near the airport. It was a 15-minute drive up the freeway to the venue and 1/4 the price of staying downtown.
Having volunteered at GrrCON in 2025, I was familiar with the layout of the building for the conference, so I was informed enough to choose the correct loading dock the first time, and we got lucky that the doors were unlocked from the parking garage each morning.
I was also busy with work calls so our initial goal of arriving for the setup window at 12pm got pushed back until about 1:15pm.
After we unloaded and dragged most of our equipment upstairs into the vendor/village hall, we got checked in found our spot. We were able to dress the area up nicely, but the tables themselves didn't have a lot of depth to them so we were only able to get stations setup on one side, heavily limiting the number of stations we could run.
We ended up with 4 stations, down from the 6-8 we planned. Several participants utilized their own devices over our WiFi network to continue playing when stations were full, which was an a plus.
The GrrCON Experience
Day 1 (expectedly) started off a little-slow as most attendees were at the Welcome and Keynote sessions. However, once folks started hitting the main con-area, things stayed fairly steady. I'd guesstimate our stations were full about 80% of day 1 and 90% of the time throughout day 2.
Completely scientific guesstimate. Backed by real numbers. That I made up.
We didn't have any major issues caused by software, hardware, or service providers and the physical network-drop floor was a solid 10Mbps up/down (of a 1Gbps connections) – one of the best network environments we've had!
The only outage was approximately 5-minutes – caused by yours truly kicking a cable out of the networking equipment.
Roughly 63 conference attendees tried out the CTF in one-form or another while we saw over 300 stickers taken by visitors! We also gave out 10 Call Center Village gift/swag bags to various conference staff and attendees. A wholly successful run in my mind.
The only thing that was a little strange was that the main conference hall was a ghost-town by about 3pm [mostly vendors who packed up early.] I started thinking about closing early around 2pm, but since we had advertised we'd be open until 5pm we ultimately stuck to our word.
Tangentially, we're going to add some method of notifying players of any important announcements via the dashboard interface so we have the ability to do this in the future, should it arise.
The Drama That Unfolded
The words "flag hoarding" were brought up, but as best we can tell it was just a matter of timing and nobody did anything under-the-table.
Additionally, it appears that flag-hoarding is more-often just considered a regular part of many CTFs, and less-often considered actual strategy. I had to look this up.
In any case, we found that our dashboard user profile (which shows a user's points, challenges, history, and timeline) didn't properly sync the chat-based CTF challenge history with the voice-based, so that was a blind-spot for participants that we need to address.
We also found that first-bloods only show from the Voice CTF. This data will be added to the Leaderboard API for future runs.
That being said, we already do a variety of things that would make flag-hoarding less desirable:
- Our tie-breakers are based on the number of first-bloods and solved-timestamps. Hoarding flags all but guarantees a loss in the event of a points tie.
- The chat-based CTF automatically detects and submits flags when they are surfaced in a challenge.
- The voice-based CTF challenges can't be unset by the participant, so you can't withhold the fact that you've figured out the flag.
I'm open to suggestions if we need to make more improvements. Let us know if you have strong (or any) opinions.
The Conclusion
As best I can tell, we all had a really great time (sans the broken-transmission.) Hopefully we made a good-enough impression to return next year. GrrCON is quickly becoming one of my favorite conferences!
We're closing out the year with a busy November, hitting BSides Columbus, Queen City Con, and Guild Con in consecutive weekends. If you're attending any of them, please stop by and say hi!
Check out our upcoming schedule for more details!