Origins 2009 is off to a good start. After navigating some flight snufus, we checked into the Hyatt Regency without any problems and snagged a late lunch at Barley’s Brew Pub.
Then we headed over to the convention center proper, wandered around a bit looking for the pre-reg counter, found it and managed to get our badges and events in under 5 minutes. That alone was a huge improvement over GenCon.
We’ve sneaked peaks at some of the gaming areas, which are downright cavernous. It’s cool to see all the tables consolidated in one place, unlike GenCon’s scattered approuch. I’m curious to see how it plays out noise-wise tomorrow.
After registering we chatted with David Moore, his wife Erin and various members of the Gamemasters Show while we waited for the rest of our group to arrive.
When we go to GenCon, we usually spend Wednesday night eating good food, drinking good beer and playing old favorites like Illuminati or Munchkin.
Except this time we forgot the games.
Fortunately Game Base 7 was around to save our Wednesdau They run a boards game library: give them your driver’s license, they go give you a game.
Confident we had a game solution, we headed out to Elevator, a brewpub on High Street, where we drove the bartenders slightly crazy by ordering four 12 beer samplers. The best one? Three Frog.
We returned afterward and headed to the convention hall, where we checked out Chez Dork from the GB7 library. It was a decent game, but our normal card game ruthlessness was held in check by the fact that we were learning the rules.
All in all, it was a good start to the con, and about on par with our experiences at GenCon. The only downsides so far have been the lack of nearby grocery stores and no free wifi on site. this means I have to go to an off site coffee shop to post blog entries and keep up with Twitter. (one more reason to get an iPhone I suppose…)