It's pretty rare that we engage in dreaded continuity on the Make-A-Strip Stage, but we're bold gentlemen untroubled by convention.
I always end up here, trying to unzip the weekend after the fact, while in-room coffee cools. Four days makes it harder, but not by much; once you have this much information it's a penny/pound scenario and the decompression isn't a purely linear affair. For example: I can tell you that, having gazed into the precognitive orb that is the Expo Hall, the next couple years are gonna be pretty rad if you're into this gaming shit.
I'm certain things will continue to occur to me throughout the week, but I do have to take a moment to give my friend Mike Krahulik - whose name I will not butcher this one time - props on Thornwatch. I've seen many, many versions of this game, back since it was called Card Warriorz with a Z and wasn't part of the Eyrewood at all. He wanted me to make it fit in there and to answer some of the questions that would naturally arise from the game's assumptions, and I did my best to be of service to him on that side of it while he and the rest of the team made the rest of it work. I had the first chance to play the real, live version at this show, in a sealed box right off the assembly line, and it's beautiful - but it's also fun. There's no guarantee that after the kind of protracted gestation it had that it would arrive somewhere that wasn't simply Acceptance on some level. There's a lot of cooks and even multiple kitchens. I don't pretend to know how. But it's great.
I want to thank my longtime fixation Harmonix for bringing out Dropmix and a heap of custom decks for the final round of the Omegathon. Fruitalicious and Snapfarr duelled valiantly, but in the end they were defeated by Ducktales and Woo Hoo - people who'd come up with their handles on the spot because they were randomly drawn directly from the crowd at the first round. That they managed to go from the crowd to PAX East victors is a pretty incredible tale, and is just one tale from a weekend dense with them.
(CW)TB out.
