Knifey's PAX blog-a-thon: Thursday!

by knifeyspoony

Hello everyone, I had fun writing about last year's PAX so I thought I would do the same for this past year, giving insight on what I did and saw. However, unlike last year, I was in Seattle for a full day on Thursday. So what the heck did I do with all the free time there? Well, I met up with fellow giantbomb enthusiast and broski jim_dandy who was kind enough to take my friends and I on a tou...

Dillyin' & Dallyin' at the Experience Music| Science Fiction Museum!

This was something I heard about well before PAX and it sounded freaking awesome. Basically, you get two museums for the price of one. We started off with the music part, which was much more fleshed out than I was expecting. There was an entire corridor devoted to Jimi Hendrix, which I thought was freaking awesom e. It went through his history with different bands and time periods, along with different equipment from those eras. Being Seattle, there was also a whole section on the grunge scene with tons of memorabilia and albums and photos from Soundgarden, Nirvana, etc. There was also a section to teach people how to play various instruments. It reminded me of the exploratorium we have in the Bay Area, the entire area was hands on. My favorite moment was when a tourist group had a drum circle going using these cool touch sensitive pads, each one had a different kind of drum. My second favorite thing from this section was jim_dandy and I breaking one of the computers that was supposed to teach us the keyboard.

After musical shenanigans we moved onto the Science Fiction part building. Hot damn was this area awesome. It was the perfect nerdy thing to go see before PAX the next day. All of the things they had were donations, such as props used in the movies and costumes. They had an entire wall dedicated to Sci-Fi weapons, with the actual guns used there to see. They had a couple terminators, and one of the dudes who works at PA's storm trooper was on display. The place is freaking cool! If you ever get the chance to go I highly recommend it. It's also right next to the space needle, so there's that novelty too.

Dinner at Honeyhole/Penny Arcade Board Game night!

After being shown around the city some more we decided to get dinner at a place called Honeyhole on Capitol Hill. It's primarily a sandwich place that I've been looking forward to eating at for over a year. Happily, it did not disappoint as it was the most satisfying meal I had the entire weekend. Another fellow user, Driadon joined us as well. I'm glad he was able to find the place as this was his first time in Seattle and he couldn't use his cell phone to call us. Once we were finished gorging on delicious sammies jim_dandy, Driadon and I walked over to the Sheraton for a board game night put together by a Penny Arcade forum member. Not being a huge board game player myself, this turned out to be a whole lot of fun. There was an insane amount of people who were there, but luckily we were able to get ourselves a place to sit and played Citadels. It was the first time playing the game for any of us (it was suggested by the dude who organized the get together) and it turned out being a whole lot of fun!

If you haven't played it, the general goal is to build structures and the first to build 8 ends the game. However, each round of turns you all have a character card (you reshuffle/draw after each round) that have certain abilities, such as gaining more gold, drawing extra cards, destroying other player's structures and so on. Once someone builds eight you all count of your point totals, which are essentially the amount of gold (you can either get more gold or draw a card each turn) spent on your structures. Basically you aren't guaranteed to win the game if you get to 8 first.

Citadels + Magic
It was a great experience to see so many enthusiastic board game players, let alone in a classy hotel lobby. It made me want to pursue finding more people who I could play with in my area.

After it got to be around 11:30 I called it quits for the night. Despite it not even being PAX yet, we already managed to have a full day with a nice preview of what was to come.

Stay tuned, I'll keep blogging about my days, what I saw and impressions (with pictures!). I'm trying to get these up as soon as possible, but with the semester up it's going to be tough, hopefully I'll get through all of them by week's end.

Take care everyone, hopefully you enjoyed it. I promise you will like Friday's. :)

p.s. I'm going to upgrade my flickr account and just upload a mass amount of pictures (I took ~620) on there soon!