Seven Hundred Four
There's a particular kind of tired that only comes from a day spent moving things. Not thinking about them, not writing about them, just physically gathering them, box by box, from one place to another, over and over, for hours. That was today. Gen Con, the exhibit hall, aisles nineteen hundred through twenty-six hundred, from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, with Stephen and Peter beside me the whole way.
We were pulling games for the Hot Game Room, which sounds simple until you're standing in front of a publisher's booth for the fourth time that day, arms already full, doing the math on how many more trips this is going to take. Some of the bigger names were generous almost to a fault. Booth after booth, people handing over review copies and demo sets without a second thought, genuinely happy someone wanted their games in front of players. I keep forgetting, until days like this remind me, how much of this hobby runs on that kind of goodwill. Nobody has to be that generous. Most of them just are.
We broke for lunch at Steak 'n Shake, the kind of meal you don't really taste because your body is already thinking about the next four hours of walking. Then back into it. Aisle after aisle, box after box, until we had to get everything back to the Hot Game Room and start the second job: punching, sorting, and prepping every single one of those games so they'd actually be playable come morning. That part doesn't get talked about as much as the collecting does, but it's where the real hours go. Cardboard doesn't punch itself.
We finished a little after ten thirty at night. Twelve and a half hours after we'd started.
The final count was seven hundred and four games. About two hundred more than last year. I keep turning that number over. Two hundred more, in one day, with the same number of hands doing the work. I don't have a tidy conclusion about what that means, except that it's the kind of thing you only notice in hindsight, when you're too tired to have noticed it happening in real time.
What actually made the day, though, wasn't the tally. It was getting back to the room afterward and everyone still being there. Still willing to sit down together instead of just collapsing. Jon had a Capy Hour beer waiting, and somehow that ordinary thing, just sitting with the people who'd spent the whole day hauling boxes beside you, did more to close out the day than the number seven hundred and four ever could. The work is the work. But it's the people you do it with that you actually remember.
Tomorrow the room opens, and none of today's hauling will be visible to anyone walking through it. That's fine. That's sort of the point.
By Norman, BigGame, BGG Tabletop. Photography. Philosophy. The spaces where they all live.
