Ugh, not much to say about this Hunt. I caught a cold and started getting syptoms on Saturday, which got worse as Hunt went on - I'm only now really recovered. Apologies to anyone I might have gotten sick; in retrospect I should have made the decision to stay away from people more. But Hunt...

Warning: Puzzle spoilers ahead.

( Kickoff )

Overall, I liked this year's Hunt. Massive bonus points for the writing team being who they were, for the theme, and for high production values (world map art and the treasure chest). Good job on metas and publishing plans for the School of Fish round. Meh about the story and missed opportunities. Endgame could have been improved a lot ( Read more... )

Sunday was the last day of the convention. I packed everything up and dropped my room keys off, then took the shuttle over to the convention one last time. I dropped my luggage off at the desk and went to wander aroud the open gaming area.

( Guts of Glory )

Saturday was the last full day of the convention. The major event of the day for me was a puzzle hunt, but I still got in a number of games.

( Temporum )

I had planned to get up early on Friday. It didn't help that I had gotten distracted by FreeCiv again. It also didn't help that the plumbing was noisy and I could occasionally hear an airplane go by. On the theory that I'd rather get as much sleep as needed rather than prioritizing waking up on time, I purposely didn't set an alarm and ended up ( Read more... )

Now that I knew what to expect, I was ready to dive in deeper. On the second day I checked out the lending library, stayed late, and got to play games I had only heard about.

( Qin )

BGG.con is associated with boardgamegeek.com, a great gaming resource that I'm a bit ashamed to admit I had never really looked into. I knew them mostly as an encyclopedia of games, but didn't realize they had their own convention until my coworker clued me in ( Read more... )

At a company games night earlier this year, a coworker mentioned he had picked up the game we were playing from a board game convention. Since I like board games, it didn't take much to convince me that this sounded cool and that I should check it out. Registration wasn't open yet, so it kind of fell off my radar until a few weeks after ( Read more... )

This year's hunt was very well written and tested, and I think it's easily one of the better ones I've participated in: the puzzle quality was high, the theme was very well done, and there were a bunch of nice touches that I hope will become standard.

Unlike last year, I managed to get a reasonable amount of sleep beforehand. Actually, I even got ( Read more... )

The trip home was uneventful; the most interesting thing was that we headed to the airport around 2 PM Thursday and (thanks to the magic of the International Date Line) had touched down at SFO and were on our way home around 2 PM Thursday. Oh, and apparently they made a live action movie of Toshokan Sensou. If I hadn't been familiar with the story ( Read more... )