PAX Unplugged Day 1
Whew. What a long day. At the time of writing this, I’ve been up for just over 19 hours and I can feel the wave of tiredness starting to finally catch up with me, so the goal is to write this before I fall asleep on my laptop.
So, lets start at the beginning: The drive up.
3:30 AM. I’m awake, I’m a little tired, but I’m surprisingly ok for how early it is. Time to get on the road. First things first, off to pick up my friend I’m carpooling with, then Wawa for snacks and energy drinks of course (snacks that are still helping me stay awake as I write). All is going well, the GPS says we’re gonna get to my hotel to drop off my bag right at 7:30, which is exactly what I was hoping. We got on the highway and set off on our 3+ hour journey. Everything was going as expected until we reached Baltimore.
For reasons unbeknownst to me, the GPS dropped us right in the middle of downtown Baltimore which, at around 5 in the morning, was barren. I think we saw a grand total of 3 or 4 other cars the entire time we were navigating through the city. Eventually though we make it back to the highway and keep going on our merry way, having apparently taken the scenic route.
Eventually though, the highway turns into a toll road, so I had to get off. We were driving around some state routes for a while as we moved through northern Maryland and eventually into Pennsylvania. Just before the border, however, the GPS took us over a hydroelectric dam, which was another interesting surprise on the route. Anyways, we dropped our bags off at our accommodations, I found my parking arrangement, and we made our way to the convention center.
At first I was going to wait in the queue blocks for the expo floor to open, but we realized that all of the open play tables were already available to be used, so we decided to just hang out there and play some Commander while we waited. Once the floor opened, we wandered around for a while, somehow missing our other friends around the hall for a while, and eventually finding one of them while playing a Chess variant where the rules change every turn.
After our game, we continued to explore the expo hall, learning about several new games in the process, before heading across the street to a little market to get lunch.
After lunch, we continued to wander a bit more, but the already long day was definitely starting to catch up with us. We took some time to sit down and rest for a while and I got some Magic packs to open while we did. I got 4 Foundations play boosters and 4 Mystery 2 boosters and got some cool cards I’m definitely looking forward to using. Not long after this, my friend had a panel he was going to, so we played another game of Commander and then he headed over to that. I took the time to let my phone charge (at 10% at this point, due to driving and texting friends to figure out where everyone was) while I did some work on a project I’ll probably talk about at some point in the near future when I’m not falling asleep. After the panel, we went over to the tabletop game library to check out Splendor Duel; the two player variant of Splendor. The game was fun, but we realized fairly quickly that we needed to finish the game fast because we had plans at 7. We started taking quick turns basically in complete silence as we locked in and focused on finishing the game as quickly as possible.
Once we were done, it was time for the big event of the evening: meeting up with several friends at the con as well as several friends who live in Philly but weren’t at the con for dinner. Those of us at the convention met up and walked a few blocks down the street to a little restaurant called Rhythm & Spirits. We had a great time at dinner, meeting new friends and old.
Happy to report that I’ve successfully finished writing this post and I can now go to bed. I’m looking forward to another full day of PAX Unplugged tomorrow!
