PAX Prime from the inside

General GTG Events
1

I'm scheduled to travel to Seattle tomorrow in preparation for helping work the >G booth at PAX Prime. Thursday will be for setup, then we'll have three days at the show and fly back on Monday.

 

Having heard the stories about the lines at the booth at GenCon, I have some apprehension about what awaits me in Seattle. Christopher and Adam have told me they don't expect it to be nearly as busy. We'll see. There were seven people working the booth atGenCon, but only five of us for PAX.

 

At Origins I ran demo games. I know at GenCon there were lots of full games in the booth as people participated in organized play and earned Sentinels Points. Running demos is somewhat exhausting and repetitive as it is constant teaching over and over again with the same decks. On the other hand, I got good enough at Origins that I could do it w/out much thought and really focus on the people who were playing and making it fun. It will be interesting to see how running full games is different.

 

To save money, the five of us are staying in a hostel a few blocks from the convention center. I've stayed in hostels before and I think this one is going to be a lot of fun and really, cool, but I hope everyone understands that >G does _NOT_ exist to make tons of money. It exists to have fun and help other people have fun.

 

I'm looking forward to sharing my experiences at PAX with you all. Is there anything you all are hoping to hear about?

2

I'd like to hear about all the money you'll be making. ;)

3

 

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Me, too.

4

I am in the booth! We got up super early this morning and were first in line for exhibitor badges. 

We (mostly Christopher) had the booth set up by about mid-morning and we've spent the rest of the day enjoying walking around all the other (huge, amazing!) booths and playing games in the booth.

PAX is totally cool. They have tons and tons of volunteers called Enforcers who do all sorts of things including being assigned to help out exhibitors. Our Enforcer is a cool guy named Evan who played an awesome five person game with us against Gloomweaver in the Tomb of Anubis.

By far the coolest thing today, however, was Adam and Ness getting engaged! Christopher actually friggin' _MADE_ the engagement ring. The ring was hidden in a game that Ness had long wanted. She was super excited when she saw the game and then even more so (of course!) when she found the ring. Perhaps needless to say, she said, 'Yes'.

Now the happy couple get to go back to a hostel and share a room with three other guys ...

Speaking of the hostel, it's totally cool. We've got a room to ourselves with tricked-out bunkbeds (lights, fans, storage areas); there's free food for breakfast, though you have to cook it yourself; and it's right downtown just a few blocks from the convention center.

Looking forward to tomorrow. I'm really curious how much traffic we're going to get. Our booth is behind a really cool booth that completely obstructs most of the room from seeing us. Still, I hear that the crowds here are huge, so I'm expecting lots and lots of people and lots and lost of games.

5

Congrats to Adam and Ness!

6

Don't they shut down the convention floor at a certain point so all the booth people can go to the big, cool PAX events? Have you guys been to any of those yet?

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Nope. At least, not that I know of.

I just left Christopher at the convention heading out to run demos. I'd gone out to dinner with friends before that, so I did miss out on most of the exhibitor mingle (I don't think that's the official name). But I'm exhausted and ready to crash - didn't get much sleep last night and it was a long day.

It was good, though. Lots of interest, although not as much as GenCon - it's a different crowd with a lot more focus on computer games. There is a lot of folks saying good things about it, though, so that's awesome!

8

Wow that was fast!

 

When I thought it was 11, it was 12:30. When I thought it was 2:30, it was 5! Maybe it was the difference between running 15-minute demos and running hour-long games -- fewer games seems liked fewer time?!

 

I had so much fun! I think we won every game we played except for when we tried to 2-man Blade w/ Legacy and Tempset. That game, though, was actually one of the best. Mind you, we didn't try very many hard games -- none on advanced mode, for instance. I don't know why Baron Blade keeps trying that teralunar impulsion beam. That thing hardly _EVER_ works.

 

I actually have very little sense of what happened at the booth outside of the games that I was playing. When I'm running the game I'm so focused on it that I just don't see anything else. There seemed to be a couple of occassions where some people who might otherwise have tried the game decided not to wait for a spot, which seemed a shame, and there seemed like a few times when we only had one game going, but for the most part having two games going at all times seemed to keep everyone happy.

 

We developed a bit of a line at the beginning of the day -- maybe ten people deep at most -- as folks came by to pick up KS rewards, but I think that was it. There was no coupon given out to everyone, which I understand was part of the reason the lines at GenCon got really long.

 

One of the highlights of the day was that Christopher not only chatted with Wil Wheaton, but Wil actually gave a really cool game to him. I'm not quite sure why Wil was handing it out, but I think it's at least somewhat encouraging for the prospects of SotM making it on to Tabletop. Rumor has it that the producer for Tabletop might stop by for a demo ... It's all just rumour and hoping at this point, so don't get expectations too high.

 

Also? My voice is _really_ shot. 

9

Yesterday was completely and utterly awesome!

OK, the highlight for me had nothing to do with SotM: I got to see a fantastic, fantastic, FANTASTIC show by Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm. Want to hear more? I'll happily blather more about that, though I might move it to another forum.

The show itself, seemed, quite surprisingly, to have less traffic to the booth then on Friday. A lot of it, I think, was because there was a rush Fri morning of people picking up Kickstarter rewards. Even beyond that, though, we had lulls that I don't think we saw the day before. Christopher postulated that people with 3-day passes try to see everything on the first day and then focus on a few things on the remaining days. That certainly matches well with the fact that we had a small but dedicated set of people who came back to the booth and played a bunch.

I cosplayed! I've not actually done that before and, frankly, it was hard to tell I was doing it yesterday. My costume is essentially clothes I would wear anyway, but with a faux police badge thrown in. (I'm on the card The Deputy in The Organization's deck). Still, lots of fun. 

I filled in for Christopher at the Kickstarter booth demoing SotM for an hour. It was mostly a bust. A huge crowd of people came through there, but they all had other agendas -- mostly picking up copies of Cards Against Humanity and/or free CAH t-shirts.

Christopher and Russ tell me that while I was sitting on the concrete for 2 hours waiting for JoCo and P&S they were at a retailer's room doing hours of simultaneous demos out of a single SotM set because one of the people there was corralling people and sending them to play the game.

After the concert I walked through the tabletop free play area and came across a person I'd met at the booth earlier. He'd brought his copy of the game and taught it to half a dozen of his friends and were in to there second game. One of them chose AZ for their first play and apparently had absolutely no trouble and chosen AZ again for their second play. 

SotM is tiny, tiny, tiny part of what is happening at PAX, but within our own little bubble of super happy awesomeness, it is making me very happy to see lots of new people discovering and enjoying the game.

Also? The weather has been fantastic.

10

Did Coulton have the full rock band with him, or was it like in the olden days of just him and an acoustic guitar?

11

I'd bet a lot of people who have 3-day passes may also wait to buy things until the third day so as to make informed purchasing decisions and whatnot.

Glad you guys are having a great time there, though. Hopefully, I'll be able to make it to PAX someday.

12

Too bad I don't have the money to do anything outside the central area of this state.  I would have loved to see Paul & Storm.  (Oh, yeah, and I'm sure there are other things too....)

13

I didn't make it to PAX this time, but if it was like "usual" then it would have been him and a small band (drummer + another guitarist) for most of it, and a section with just him and his acoustic guitar. And of course, a few songs with Paul & Storm, and perhaps other mystery guests. The first PAX I went to, it was Felicia Day singing Still Alive!

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Full band – drums, bass, and the occassional Roderick.