Speaking of general skeeviness, Mike and I bailed on the Doomtown tourney. By day's end, we were just kinda not that into it. And since the event organizer was absent the day before, we figured there was a real chance that we'd stick around until 7pm and get left at the altar a second time. Plus, our man Chris showed up for the con, and he was not playing Doomtown, so that would leave him abandoned for 5+ hours. So, no tears were shed. Maybe next year.

So what played us out today? More demos.

Here's Chris displaying the proper way to wind up little walking zombies, as used in the cutsey undead racing game, All Wound Up. Chris liked it, I didn't, no purchase.

Demoed the Fullmetal Alchemist TCG. Chris not so much, me okay, no purchase. It doesn't have enough of a hook for me to want to invest into it. While we were doing Fullmetal, Mike took off for an Othello match, but nobody else showed up, so he came right back.

They demoed some more Out of the Box games, and Chris bought some kind of letter guessing game. I usually find their stuff far too abstract, so the Out booth is never really a priority for me.

I really wanted to do a Villainy demo, since the artwork is super nice. A bunch of stoner teens were clogging the stand, but I waited them out and thought it was good enough to buy. So there's one of this year's Surprise Finds. Plus, the demo guy recognized my Ambush Bug t-shirt.

This dice game shown here was absurdly awful. Pure dice games in general tend to drag on me, and this one fluffs it up by having ugly character cards for everyone to look at.

I did the new Looney Labs game that is culled from the expensive wreckage of their Icehouse system. Kind of a Fluxx meets Zendo sort of thing. Didn't do much for me; I thought the various actions were too tough to interpret and apply.

And as usual, lots more free junk. Posters, pencils, pens, cards, boxes.

Here's a Pirates match in progress. Chris and I played three games of it tonight, since Mike sort of hates the game. Sure does look nice with the ocean playmat and sculpted islands, eh? Freaking hell.

We ended the night with a massive 60-point fleet game that went on for hours, largely due to my avoidance strategy. Chris had this giant ship with great cannons and crew, and I saw no need to risk coming in close to her. So I kept zipping around and transferring treasure until I managed to slip a winning amount of gold in under the wire. Fun stuff.

We also played a three man Monsters Menace America game, but we're a little concerned with the endgame... it seems too unlikely that one player could ever kill off two (or more) enemy monsters (unless the opponents both ended the game with really crappy life totals.) So more testing is needed.

We're still not 100% on tomorrow's agenda. We've done almost everything we really wanted to do. If we stop in tomorrow, it would just be more wandering and more on-site gaming. So we'll see. Could be the shortest Origins ever.