I just had one hell of a longass nightmare. I fell asleep for what must've been around 10 hours and spent the entire time dreaming. It started off sort of strange with a weird cast of characters. I don't remember much now but there was an asian girl with her white boyfriend and assorted others my mind automaticly classified as 'friends'. At some point the dream changed until I was a detective sent off to investigate a supernatural event at some Japanese school/shinto compound. A bunch of kids had died and it involved some real craziness such as someone mixing poison gas, malevolent supernatural evil, and people alternatively being forced to eat a cockmeat sandwich. Just when it was getting really disturbing, my psyche seemed to have pulled the lever on an escape hatch and the entire investigation turned out to just be a scary movie I was watching by myself. I immediately put it on pause and went out to the group of friends and told them they had to come watch it with me because japanese horror movies freak me out ever since that crazy girl crabwalked in The Ring. So, for some reason, we're sitting there two to a bed and watching the movie with blankets pulled up around us and things shifted again. Now we were all stuck in the movie, though now it was like a dungeons and dragons game. We all had spells and special abilities but an overwhelming evil was coming to eat us alive. The whole thing was now set in some sort of shinto temple with all sorts of winding passageways. We did our best to prepare but when the attack came it was overwhelming. We hid and then tried to make a run for it. The entire situation then turned into a LARP at gencon. We ran and made our way through the crowds as other LARPers chased us until I saw a cordoned off area for True Dungeon. The golden ticket run was just about to get started. They weren't going to let us through at first but then some of the staff waved us past. It provided a good hiding spot from the people chasing us and I also knew that we had a TD run scheduled as soon as the GT people went on theirs. As we were waiting for our turn, I knew that as soon as we finished the run it would be time for Killer Breakfast and I hadn't gotten around to preparing anything special for the event.

Then I woke up.

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King of Melons

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Sunday started earlier than I might have wished. I was hoping to sleep right up until I had to leave for the con, but stabbing pain had other plans. The real irritation is once up, the pain always gets worse and all you can do at that point is wake up, pop pills, and hope they eventually kick in. Since it takes up to 2 hours for that process to work itself out there was no opportunity to get any more sleep. Since I was up anyway, I headed over to the con early. To my complete lack of surprise, there weren't many people up and about. Certainly there were no games running and I spent my time playing old D&D games on the emulator until it was time for the Peggle championship.

As I recall, Lori had actually gotten the slot of first alternate for the competition but she hadn't been feeling well the day before and decided to skip Sunday altogether. Karen filled in for her and it was a Peggle duel to the death. I vanquished her in round 1 without too many problems but found myself behind early in the finals round. I managed to get lucky a few times and pulled it out. Here's a video of how Peggle works and a part of another game I played with last year's champion:



By coming out victorious, I won the grand prize. I never really was clear what the grand prize was, but I think it included a bunch of their game software. I guess I'll find out one of these days whenever they get around to mailing it to me.

If you think you'd like to give Peggle a whirl, here's a free version of it at Pop Cap Games. After a quick google search it seems that Peggle is pretty damn popular. It's made a number of most addictive/best internet game lists and has been ported to quite a few consoles. There's even a DS version set to come out soon from what I'm reading. Anyway, give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

After winning the Peggle championship, it was time to go back to running games. I taught and watched over a game of Dead Man's Treasure while simultaneously thumping Karen and Bernie at Ingenious. For my 'leet skillz, I was given a gift certificate for a 1 month membership to Board Game King in Bayonne. A bunch of us had made a trip there once to check it out but it's too far and I'm too adverse to going anywhere for it to be useful. Ideally, I'll be able to find someone to hock it to who might actually get some benefit out of it. Anyone willing to pay $20 for it? Retail price is $40. Anyone?

In addition to the Playroom games, I had also signed up to run a couple from Smirk and Dagger. The way the schedule worked out, they were placed back to back on Sunday with Hex-Hex first. I <3 Hex-Hex. It's one of those games that's quick and entertaining, requiring no real effort or thought. It's one game where I don't really mind the effect of luck and I personally think it's a lot more strategic than many people give it credit for. I took some video of the event:



Right after I turned off the camera, the guy who had held his cards in front of his face the entire time said 'some people think it's rude to take video or pictures of people without asking their permission' to which I responded, 'Luckily, I don't give a crap.' 10 to 1 he's probably some child molester on a FBI watch list. If any of you out there recognize him based on his forehead and hands, feel free to dial 9-1-1.

The game of Cutthroat Caverns didn't go nearly as smoothly as Hex-Hex. It ended up degenerating at some point into a pissing match between a few of the players. That seems to be a common phenomenon since so many of the cards end up being of the 'screw you' variety. Everyone starts politicin' trying to form cabals and convince people to hit others with the cards. If you let it go on, it usually degenerates into a mess. While I can usually sit in and play hex-hex while running it, I prefer to not play along with Cutthroat as long as I'm the one in charge. It makes it easier to push on with the game, establishing time limits and keeping the chaos at a minimum. In the end, the entire party perished by the time the last monster rolled around. I'm not sure they ever really got a handle on the whole teamwork aspect of the game, but they mastered backstabbing in spades.

By this point the con was winding down. There were only a couple games left on the schedule to be run and I decided to join in on a game of Pow Wow. This is one of the games I own whose box got crushed a couple of weeks ago.



I didn't end up winning, getting knocked out fairly early. I didn't have much to do after that so I wandered around twiddling my thumbs. As I was strolling past a table, someone offered me a white castle cheeseburger. Never one to turn free food, I of course accepted and in so doing picked up some unusual video.



And that was more or less it. Karen, Bernie, and I went to get something to eat at Harold's after that. I ordered a pastrami sandwich and an order of cheese fries, most of which I packed up and took home with me. Around halfway through the meal, I started to feel ill for some unknown reason. I broke out into a sweat and was having some stomach ache problems. I dunno what was causing it but I decided to cut the meal short and head out after that. Upon going to pick up my things, I found that some of my games had accidentally been packed up with the rest of the Ubercon stuff, though hopefully that'll be resolved at some point. At the time, I really couldn't spare the time to go into it.

And thus ends another Ubercon. It wasn't a total disaster, and in general went pretty well. I'll update at some point as to what I got for winning the Peggle championship and also if I ever get my games back from Ubercon.