This is the third and final recap of my Labor Day Weekend TCEP recap; previous entries cover Saturday and Sunday.

I arrived at the Holiday Inn first thing in the morning (9 AM), and found hardly anyone else up yet (and those who were up were eating breakfast). So, I set up my laptop and checked my email over the free WiFi until someone came along and challenged me to yet another game of which I'd never heard before, Dominion Intrigue. We jumped right in, and I picked up the rules and strategy fairly quickly as we played. Had we played a second game, I'm sure I would have done much better – Odds are, though, that it'll be at least a year before I play it again, giving me time for forget the important bits and requiring me to get up to speed whilst playing all over again. Fun, in any case.

I had signed up for the Car Wars/Battle Cattle card game tournament that was scheduled for later on in the morning (11 AM?) as I had really enjoyed that game last year. Unfortunately, it never happened – and since I was waiting for the game that never materialized, I passed up the chance to try to jump into one of the other games that was starting… Games like Munchkin Quest (I have all of the regular Munchkin games, but I've never played the board game variant) or another round of Arkham Horror (this time with the Innsmouth Expansion). By this point Ironkite had arrived; and I managed to find a quick and easy game lying around that I remembered, that I'd have no trouble explaining to Ironkite, and that wouldn't last long in case Car Wars (or something else we both wanted to play) materialized: Plague & Pestilence. We played a couple of games of that; Ironkite could have won the second game (by being the only survivor) but instead went for a mutual loss (none of us had any survivors, similar to one of the Nuclear War games we'd played the day before) because it was funnier.

After we all had to clear out before 3 PM, some people went to Denny's or some other eatery to hang out. I talked to Ironkite for a little while in the parking lot, and then headed straight home. First, I was tired; and second, Q had called me an hour or so earlier and told me that Richard had been punished and sent to his room, not to be allowed back out until I got home. I didn't think it would be fair to dawdle and leave him in there all afternoon (even though he's got a TV/VCR and game system and more other stuff than I ever had at that age if I was sent to my room!)

( Addenda )

I was tempted to join a D&D game (the original AD&D rules from the 80s, the last time I played the game) for nostalgia purposes; but it wouldn't have fit into my schedule (with the couple of things I'd signed up for in advance). Pity, because I still have some of the original polyhedral dice which I bought back in 1982-ish, although I sold or gave away all of the rule books (including a first edition Deities and Demigods with the Cthulhu Mythos!) when I gave up on the game a few years later. Also, in reference to this conversation with jefF, I looked up all of the boardgamegeek.com URLs in advance before writing this entry. Finally, to SethCohen, you were trying to explain my default strategy to someone at some point – I made an attempt near the end of my recap from last year (in the Car Wars/Battle Cattle section).

Already looking forward to next year.

Part one of my Labor Day Weekend TCEP recap (Saturday) is here.

I got to the Holiday Inn earlier on Sunday (just before noon) than I had on Saturday. The first game I played was Le Havre, with (among other people) Karl Musser and Seth Cohen. It was a big, complex game with a variety of resources, buildings, transactions, card, tokens … I had to make sure that "Le Havre" wasn't French for "Die Macher", one of the games I played last year. It was fun and I was doing well (not by any means fated to win, mind you; that was reserved for one of the two people who had played before), but I was unable to see it through to the end. After about 2½ hours, I had to leave for another event for which I'd signed up previously – a murder mystery. About twenty people were given identities (I was Katie Jones, a girl from West Virginia who'd been turned into a vampire while debauching in New Orleans), background information, and clues which they had to pass around and share so that we could determine who the murderer was. (Aurienne was playing a character, but not competing; she's been through it before and knew who the guilty party was.) I didn't figure out who the culprit was; few people did. (One of the people who did figure it out was the culprit. You would hope that they'd know.)

After that, I went back home and picked up Richard. I thought he'd enjoy seeing the Chaos Machine that was set up in one of the rooms (and I was right). It had a framework with various tracks, tubes, trampolines, and other things beginning with "T" through with balls rolled and bounced from the top to the bottom, and then were brought back up to the top again via vertical conveyor belts on each end. (Seth took the above picture with his cell phone, as I still haven't replaced my lost camera.) While he was watching the Chaos Machine and/or distracted by snack food (carrots, cheese, bread, grapes; I kept him from noticing the M&Ms and other junk food), I played a couple more games nearby: Qwirkle Cubes with Stevemb and Starmalachite (the second of only two games I won all weekend – you don't go to an event like this unless you play for fun, not because you need to win) and then another round of Nuclear War (not only did we all lose, by losing all of our people, but I managed to destroy the Earth itself by rolling a critical whilst detonating the huge 100 megaton warhead as my doomsday device). After that, I brought Richard home and nabbed some real food before returning.

Finally, the night was ended by a couple of longer games, Civilization: the Card Game (based upon the Sid Meier computer games) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in which I had a rare turn playing on the Scooby team – I was Xander and Oz). Civilization was good, and I came pretty close to winning (I was ahead for a good chunk of the game); it's made me want to play the computer game again (I've only played the original version). It this point, it was approaching 2 AM and too late to start another game, so I went home and collapsed.

( Addendum )

I recently introduced Allison to Orgazmo; and I don't want to sound like a queer or nothing, but that movie is still hilarious.

It's too late for me to have reported this on Sunday's "National Go Topless Day", but apparently there was an off-Broadway play called Boobs! The Musical. The only parts online seem to be an MP3 of The Finale and one YouTube video called "The Dingy Song" below. (Lyrics may be NSFW.)

Do not confuse your Hello Kitty TASER with your Hello Kitty VIBRATOR. It would be bad.

 ≠ 

I ganked this one from LarryV, since I've got friends who are both into advanced/unique technology and/or cooking. Click on the image to see the details – such as "200 PPH."