Day One!
The exhibit hall opens and for a few hours you just get carried along in it, which is more or less how I spent my morning. The place was already bustling before I'd finished my first few booths, thousands of bodies moving in that particular shuffle you only get when everyone's trying to look at something different at the same time. Somewhere around the start of hour two I caught myself standing shoulder to shoulder with the unwashed masses, sweaty and packed in. Luckily, I was able to pick up what I wanted and get back to the Hot Games Room. One would think that by now I would be accustomed to this, because that crush of people is somehow part of the appeal, it is not but rather than a tax on it.
There's something I try to notice every year and still can't quite explain properly, which is how free people feel to just be themselves here. Hair dyed every color that exists and a few that probably don't, full costumes that took someone months to build, people who spend the other fifty one weeks of the year dressed for an office walking around today as a completely different version of themselves. Nobody blinks. I don't know of many other places where four days grants that kind of permission, and I think there's something worth sitting with in the fact that it takes a convention hall full of strangers to make people feel safe enough to look exactly like who they are.
The Hot Games room was doing its usual thing, which is to say it was slammed, tables full and a line of people waiting for a seat to open up so they could get their hands on something they'd only read about online. Good problem for a room to have.
Dinner was at the Slippery Noodle with Julie, and it delivered the way it always does. Good food, and the drinks held up their end too. The Jager Barrel was the standout of the night for me, the kind of drink that makes you order a second one before you've really thought it through.
Back at the dealer room after dinner, I got a couple of games to the table, Mystic Baths and a little Oink game called Compression. The Compression one produced my favorite moment of the night, watching the math person in our group absolutely hate a game built on nothing but ones and zeros. You'd think binary would be right in their wheelhouse. Instead, they looked personally offended by it the whole time, which made it funnier with every round.
Got back to the room and decompressed the way this trip tends to go, sitting around with Lanie, Jon, and Julie letting the day settle. Beer of the night with Jon was the Pacer Courtside Cream Ale, and I'll just say it landed somewhere between forgettable and fine. Not every discovery on this trip is going to be a good one.
Tomorrow's another full day. Tonight I'm just glad my feet finally get to stop.
By Norman, BigGame, BGG Tabletop. Photography. Philosophy. The spaces where they all live.
