That Boardgaming Thing Wrap-up

As you can see from the myriad of pictures that I tossed seemingly randomly up to the blog over last weekend, two things happened:

• I got a new mobile phone to play with and


• That Boardgaming Thing 2008 came and went

The new phone was fairly decent, though the pictures were somewhat crappy. Note my clever use of the word "was" there as it died 10 days into my ownership. I took it back to the local Verizon store today and traded it out for a new new mobile phone. I'll keep you posted on its functionality, usefulness, lifespan.

That Boargaming Thing went a combination of very well and painfully poorly. Let's start with the very well, because it is both short and simple and pleasant to mention.

The attendees were plentiful. It was our largest group yet, and all fun folks to be in the company of. The mid-event group puzzle effort came off very well with a couple of our attendees putting the whole thing together. It was as clever as ever and resulted in some nice sculptured scenes of Mt. Fuji (wish I had pictures to show). And, speaking of pictures, this year's cake was spectacular! The facility in which we hosted the event had split-level gaming space, so we were unsure how that was going to work out, but it actually ended up as a very accommodating layout. So much so, that many guests commented that they would like something similar next year if at all possible. And finally, I got to play quite a few games with many friends. That always turns out well.

And now for the painfully poor pieces.

The facility. It sucked. It sucked big time. Other than the actual space working out surprisingly well, few things could not have gone much worse.

First and foremost, at least in my mind, was that the air conditioner was broken. Keeping in mind that we were occupying four banquet spaces, it was not just broken in one of them, but in all four *plus* the lobby. And it wasn't broken for a few hours, it was broken for all four days. They managed to fix one of four units (lots of 4's in there) on the second day which, in turn, partially cooled about 1/2 of one room. Their effort to remedy? They gave us three suites to split of some of our group among. We were basically able to squeeze 1 table each into two of the suites and 4 tables into the larger 3rd suite. While this did assist in keeping some of our folks a little cooler, it significantly impacted the large group dynamic by forcing it into multiple smaller cells. All said, we would have preferred to have had one or two large properly cooled rooms.

Second, the public restrooms on the first floor gave out due to plumbing issues on the morning of day three. With the foul condition (speaking at least in terms of the men's option) of the only alternate restroom on the second floor, this made for minimal options to that end. At least in this case, the facilities in the three suites came in handy. Fortunately for many, they were staying at the hotel and could simply go back to their own rooms when the need struck.

Finally, and I am sure that I have either forgotten something or am leaving out difficulties from guests that I did not even hear about, the leftovers of hurricane Hannah hit on Friday night and managed to flood the parking lot in the back of the hotel to the point that they were calling guests at 4:30am to move their vehicles and, in some cases, their rooms. I know of at least three of our attendees that had their cars flooded above floorboard level. So your hotel's parking lot is in a flood zone and you've known a hurricane was headed your way for at least 4 days now and you couldn't bother to warn your guests ahead of time against parking in that lot?!? Ridiculous. I don't have the complete details, but fortunately 2 of our flooded 3 didn't seem to have any related mechanical problems with their vehicle, though they will need a thorough cleansing. The 3rd wasn't so lucky and is currently fighting the hotel on repair costs.

Again, with all of those negatives, it still turned out to be quite the grand event. It made me even more amped up for boardgaming and I can't wait to see many of my annual friends next time around.