We were all ready to go. The information we received had detailed schedule information. I already was familiar with the schedule since it was on the Origins website, but the booklet was nice to have for last minute changes. Mike suddenly ran off. He came back and told us he yelled at the 17-year-old volunteer who gave us the bad info. “What did he do?' we asked.

“Said he was sorry and offered me some candy.” Mike replied “Did you take it?” “Of course.” Kurt and I cracked up.

We all headed over to the dealer room. Mike bought a lot of stuff, and I looked over everything before I bought, wrongly assuming I'd have time later to buy what I wanted. Then we checked out the food court. They had the usual crap but also a Greek place and Thai food. I got stuffed grape leaves and hummus with pita and Mike got some awesome Phad Thai. After that we decided on a meet up time so we could check in to the Marriott, where we were staying. The guys went off to their games at noon.

I wandered around the dealer's room to look for some game demos, as I was looking for some new games to start carrying at work. I kept trying to play Arkham Horror, which debuted at the con, but there were either too many people or not enough people and the demo guy kept telling me to check back. I got the brush off a few times when approaching booths. At one place I told the booth monkey I had been looking forward to trying some of their games, as I picked up the rulebook to one of the demo games.

Instead of offering to show me how to play any of the 8 games they had on display, he handed me a catalog! I was irritated and my lack of sleep was getting to me so I decided to take a break and find the biggest bottle of Mountain Dew available. I sat down on a bench to consume my caffeine and started talking to some people who were planning on doing the CthulhuLive LARP that night. I had tried to sign up for it, but it was sold out. There were a few walk-on spots, but I hadn't brought a costume, so I declined.

Feeling artificially revived I went back to the game room and sat down to paint a metal miniature. I painted this cool Anubis-type figure. After that, I went to the Out of the Box area to play Apples to Apples. I always heartily recommended to customers at my work, but in actuality had never played it and thought it seemed stupid. It was actually as fun as people say it is. I won quite a few hands and could have played for a bit longer but decided to wander around. I wandered over to the WizKids area and played a game called Tsuro, which was amazingly fun. It had just been announced, and wasn't being released until September. The envoys who were giving demos were fun and actually excited about what they were doing, which many of the people in the rest of the dealer room were not. WizKids had been putting out some good products. Pirates of the Spanish Main was a huge hit and Tsuro looked promising.

I did one last spin around the dealer room before heading over to the Miniatures/Board Games room. Note: Wandering aimlessly is not a good idea. I ended up getting sucked into this weird space battle miniature game, mostly because I felt sorry for the guys who were trying to get people to play.