Pax Unpluged

If it were totally up to me, I'd offer to let you stay at my place. But I'd have to ask my girlfriend, and I'll be honest, it'll likely be a hard sell given that we don't know eachother personally.

I can also ask a few ppl in the area if anyone has an extra room or couch space for a few days. I don't know how successfull I'll be, but I sure can ask for you.

Driving into center city philly every day to get to the convention center will be a real problem for you, I wont lie. Lived there all my life. Street parking is very rare around that area. And if you do get lucky with a space, the parking authority in the city is a racketeering business that will nail you every chance it can with most streets having low park times even on the weekends (and certainly will limit them further with a large convention). Finding the good side streets with free parking within few blocks walking distance can be very tedious, and parrellel parking on super narrow streets is hard if you are not used to it. There are parking garages around for sure, but expect NYC type rates (we are talking 30-45 bucks a day)

Luckily though, the main subway/train station runs right through the convention center. Some good advice would be to stay somewhere just outside of the city and use the SEPTA lines to get to and from the convention center. You have lower hotel costs outside of the city, and 5 bucks to ride the train to the convention center isn't terrible (better than the cab or uber fair you'd pay). I just moved right outside of the city last year, and I certainly will be taking the train in.

If anyone has questions about the area or the public trans options, feel free to ask them here or PM me. 

I am also going to Unplugged and am looking for a place to rest my head. Im looking at AirBnB's in the area and would be willing to split something with someone if thats something anyone is interested in. Biggest problem I see currently is that anything close to the convention center looks like it will be a bit expensive or doesn't have parking. At least as far as I can tell.

That's pretty much correct. Parking near the convention center will be difficult. Not impossible, but it will take more time and effort than you might feel worth it.

Look into places to stay close to the 2 subway lines in my opinion. I feel that will be an easy and cheaper option and cheaper than ubering to and from each day.

Philadelphia has a subway?!

You have the Broad Street line wich runs North/South down the middle of the city (broad street).

You also have the Market-Frankfort line which runs West/East(ish).

They intersect at City Hall in the center of the city.

Broad Street Line is a true subway. Market-Frankfort does run above ground though when traveling on the eastern part of the route.

There is also the PATCO line which runs into a few stops in Center City from New Jersy.

I am trying to work out coming, would need to get in on somewhere to sleep as well.

Well, do we want to get a small group together and discuss options, perhaps on a more quick and direct line of communication like Skype or Discord? Foote can give us some advise on city locations as we look at options, if they are willing to. Hopefully we can get something nice and not wallet busting.

Hey, y'all. I've just found out I can go to PAX Unplugged! I'll be staying with my brother.

Soooooo jealous... Just can't afford it this year.   

FWIW, it's mostly good timing/location that allows me to go. I was able to reroute the return flight of a work trip such that I not only needed just one additional leg of flying, but the overall cost of adding that leg was $53. And I'll only need to use one vacation day. And my brother lives walking distance away.

Ironically I can technically afford go to these things, it's more that:

1. I don't have a driver's license at all, and cons often are held in places where it's not feasible to get to and fro a hotel without a car in a place you're unfamiliar with.

2. I would feel extremely weird and awkward walking around a con all by myself.

I'll speak for two cities I've been to professional conferences, and that are locations for major cons:

1. My general understanding is that many Indianapolis hotels have shuttles that can run to and from the convention center. When my son and I were at Gen Con 2016 for that Saturday, we saw several as we were walking from where we parked (it was a day trip).

2. Philadelphia had a decent series of airport shuttle services that would take one from the airport to one's residence. The last time I was there, I stayed at the youth hostel, and just walked to the convention center from there.

3. Chicago and Washington DC both have pretty tourist-friendly public transit systems that can get you from your airport of choice to whereever you're staying, and thence to the con location.

As for walking around alone - let's make a deal: Assuming I don't end up between jobs again next summer, we both volunter for GtG for Gen Con or Origins next year (contingent on the schedule for some PD workshops I want to attend over the summer)? That'll put us both in town basically solo, but still knowing people - and therefore having folks to walk around with on downtime.

If you volunteer for GtG and show up for the meet up dinner you will know people pretty quick.

But I totally get the walking around solo sucks part.

It's a Catch-22; volunteering to help would solve the social problem but then not leave a chance to look at the actual convention. X3 It's still a thought, though, since it would at least be a reason to go by my lonesome, and I sort of half-remember my days in retail. :P

Not trying to convince you, just to make sure you know: When you work the con for GtG, it's only for half the con -- you get the remainder of the time to do with as you wish. If there are specific events you want to participate in, they'll try to work with you to make that happen, and/or you can trade shifts with other folks. 

And! "Half of the con" is often only for "half of the time the con floor is open" which is often closer to 1/3 of the time that other things are going on(at least this has been my experience).

+1 for >G working with volunteers to get to things we need/want to do. I volunteered at two Gen cons, and two PAX Easts, and I have always asked for a special consideration(for various reasons), and they've always found a way to meet their needs and mine.

I don't get to play very many board games that aren't the Uno or Parcheesi category of games where I live, so my motive for going to any tabletop con would amount to "get to actually play board games with people".

What types of tasks does volunteering involve?

Teaching people to play games.  You run demos mostly.  There are a few other tasks, but most volunteers are just showing off games.

Nice! Excited to see you again!

I guess that nixes the idea then; I'm not familiar/good enough with any board games to teach them to people. Oh well, maybe someday I'll meet someone offline who actually wants to go to geek cons with me. X3

I will say, for you and anyone who may be on the fence: I walked in to PAX East two years ago knowing SotM. That was pretty much it. Craig and all of the other volunteers were very patient and understanding when trying to teach me other games. I think I learned Bottom of the 9th in a half-hour, and ran that more or less all weekend. >G wants people who are willing to chat with people who walk up to the booth, and being able to teach *any* game is just fine. There is generally a large enough pool of volunteers that the "heavier" games (Fate, Spirit Island, Exoplanets, etc.) get covered by the people who really know it, and the "lighter" games (Bot9, Lazer Ryderz, Isle of Trains, Time Management, etc.) are able to be run by people who have smiles and welcoming personalities, who learned the game themselves within the last 24 hours.

Also, I am pretty sure I spent an entire shift forgetting a fairly significant rule in Isle of Trains this past PAX East, and it turned out to be just fine! People still walked away with a big smile, some liked it enough to buy, and I read through the rule sheet the next day when someone asked about that rule, and modified my demo to include that rule. Not a big deal.

The most fun I have running demos is that people want to play games. They approach the booth wanting to see what's new, and that takes a lot of my hesitation(I don't like feeling pushy), as they ask to play a game, and we can just sit and play a genuinely good game together.

@Jeysie

I want to echo what RySmith6 said and let you know that you'd be more than welcome to join us at a Citizen at a show! Craig sets up an evening before the show starts to teach people games on an as-needed basis, and if you know even one of our games already you'll be ahead of some people we've had help out in the past!

Actually, I might not have come to completely love Bot9 if I hadn't run the demo. Seeing the range of stuff that happened to people, and egging on players as they stared each other down, completely made the game for me.

All this is to say, Jeysie: don't worry if you don't know the rules. Volunteering for >G entails playing one game a lot, getting plenty of time to walk the con, and having fun. If you're really on the fence, they also sometimes need volunteers to do other things in the booth than run demos.

Quoting for truth!

• Invest in knowing one game (rather than playing hundreds once or twice) to enjoy it and its nuances deeply
• Run the same demo over and over again to free yourself to enjoy the experience of others discovering the game for the first time.

I am the exact opposite. I try not too play games too much, especially 2 player games. The worst for me is when the skill level of the players is so drastic that the game becomes unfun. Unless I can find someone with the same experience, I will purposely not overplay some games. Especially ones I like.

Keep in mind that running demos doesn't mean playing a lot of games. ;-) I ran (some arbitrarily large number) Spirit Island games at Gen Con 2017, but I only played once: the night before while we were all training on the games. :-)

I just love seeing folks discover how much fun it is...

Yeah, I feel your pain Pydro; I tend to be The Scrub (in PvP) or The Load (in co-op) in any game I play.

I don't think I ever actually played in any demo I've ran during a convention

Pretty sure I'm going to PAX unplugged with my family so yay for that. It's my first convention, wish me luck.

I'm going! Woohoo!!! :-D

Day -1: I  travel from Denver to Philadelphia tomorrow. I arrive late, so there will be little to say about PAXU until two days from now, but I'm getting pretty excited.

Yesterday I met up with friends who happened to have a copy of Brewmasters they'd been gifted but never played. Since I'll be helping manage the GtG room which will have games of Brewmasters, it was an opportune chance to learn the game. We had a good time. Worker placement, economic engine games aren't exactly my cup of tea, but this seems like a very good one.

Also, I won! I got 58 rep in a four player game. Second place was 56, so it was very close. I focused on brewing the 7 rep each Imperial Stout. I had a brewpub and brewmaster Chris Kirkman, plug a combination of other workers and  partnerships and advancdement along the first research track that made it relatively easy to get lots of basic ingredients and turn those into the coffee and spices I needed.

Andy! Sent you a PM.

If'n anybody who was a participant in the Discord Sentinels RPG happens to be there and wants to take a crack at sitting down with Dave Chalker to try out the updated character building rules on either Lacuna or the Goalie, I'm all ears as to the results.

Day 0: Successful travel from Denver to Indianapolis, but Russ' flight got canceled. On the plus side, room to myself tonight. Getting the key card to work only required going back down to the lobby once. Hotel wifi is ... acceptable? Walked past three people sleeping rough on the sidewalk, next to the street (13th street) that goes underneath the Pennsylvania Convention Center. And why is it the Pennsylvania Convention Center instead of the Philadelphia Convention Center? Philly people forgetting about the rest of the state? It's not like this is the state capital.

Transit was pleasant. Bus to Union station in Denver than train to the airport. Train from the airport to Jefferson Station here in Philadelphia. I used the flight to catch up a bit on The Letters Page. I'm way behind. Listened to KNYFE, Seargent Steel, and Naturalist episodes. Hard to pay attention to details, though. I kept getting lulled to sleep by the pleasant sound of Christopher and Adam bantering.

Glad you made it! :-)

Hopefully I won't wake you up when I get in...

Currently in phili right now. For PAX obviously. Otherwise I would go post in a thread titled in Philadelphia for no reason.

Day 1: Setup day. Russ made it early this morning. Turns out he can get from the airport to the hotel faster than I can get from the hotel room to the lobby. Philadelphia is a proper city, for better or worse --- crowded, tall buildings, lots of shops downtown, lots of traffic. We walked just a couple of blocks to the convention center, checked out the wonderful Reading Terminal Market, picked up some things at CVS, and made our way back to the convention center to meet up with Craig, get badges, say hello to other GtG folks and Sidekicks, and start helping out.

There had been drama the day before with the initial setup. There's always some contention with union employees and rules about doing the setup. GtG staff want to jump right in and get everything set up, but union rules require union employees to do various things. Philadelphia has  four different unions working the convention center and I guess ... well I didn't follow the details but I guess relations with some of them and GtG weren't perfect.

But it's all been sorted out now. I did things like setting up games in the GtG room, cleaning the display cases, and hanging lanyards. It was a fairly low key day, at least for me. All I had to do was some grunt work. Others have a lot more responsibility, so I imagine it wasn't quite as care free. Had a fun, if somewhat frenetic trip to Reading Terminal for lunch. Found a really good dim sum place for dinner. Had a tasty if expensive set of drinks and late night food at another restaurant.

In the evening Citizens showed up to get badges and t-shirts and to practice games. The Envoy program is lending about five people to GtG to run games. I don't know a lot about this program yet, but it seems to be a way for people to volunteer to run games, possibly in exchange for some sort of product or other credit. I helped teach some people Spirit Island and sat in on an Exoplanets explanation. I need to get a reminder about how Lazer Ryderz plays, too. Adam, Paul, Christopher, and Nolan were playing some sort of demo at one of the tables. My guess is it was a pitch from a game designer. Having the room open late meant that more than a few people wandering around came in to see what was going on. We were happy to talk to them about the games and try to get them excited to come back during the show itself to try them out.

We're going to be running full sessions of the games in the room and demos in the booth. Have to be careful, then, to set up things a little differently in each place. Spirit Island, for instance, will be using the power progression in the booth, but not in the room. Russ and I are middle management for the room, with Jodie having overall responsibility. The room will be open from 9:30 (or maybe 10? Well, probably whenever it's properly staffed) to something like 10pm. Or, I suppose, whenever we're able to keep it going -- we'll see if that's earlier or later. That appears to be one of the big benefits of the side room. We can keep running games long after the exhibit hall closes. This convention being brand new, GtG doesn't know as much about what to expect, so a lot of the plans are more up in the air/figure it out as things progress.

A friend has asked me to check on whether an expansion for a game they like is available, so at some point I'll need to get to the Stronghold Games' booth, but aside from that I don't have any agenda besides helping GtG. For my own sanity, though, I'll need to take some breaks and check out what's going on elsewhere. The scope of the convention is maybe a quarter or third the size of GenCon. There's plenty of booths and it's a lot bigger than what I remember the board game parts of PAX from 2012/2013 being, but it's sort of cute-sized compared to what's at GenCon. Still, considering BGG.con is the same weekend, there's a LOT of vendors here. PAX Unplugged doesn't seem to have ticketed events like GenCon does, so all the games we run in the side room will be first come, first served and at whatever time people happen to show up. There are six tables in the room -- round tables, annoyingly -- with Spirit Island, Lazer Ryderz, Fate of the Elder Gods, OblivAeon, and SotM RPG at five of them, and then the sixth alternately being used for Exoplanets and Sleepy Hollow.

Alright, that's all the time I've got for a brain dump. Gotta go get ready for today.

Almost forgot! I got a chance to observe Christopher and Adam playing OblivAeon. Adam's apparently only played  OblivAeon a few times. I didn't see the whole game, and, indeed, I think they may have had to stop playing before they finished. From what I'd seen things were going poorly for the heroes. Adam and Christopher were each playing two heroes, and they each had at least one incap. In the first round I think all the heroes took more than ten points of damage and a couple of them may have been reduced to single digits that quickly. Och, I wish I'd payed closer attention, but I was only half following what was going on in their game. 

Day 2: Russ and I are Sidekicks for the GtG room (as opposed to the booth), so that's pretty much all I saw of the convention. I gather there were various tournaments, panels, and performers around the conventions, but I know little of what it's really like.

With the hall not open yet when the room opened, we had a bunch of people. Soon after ten the room had quieted down as most people headed to the dealer hall. The six tables were almost always fully in use, with a few people occassionally waiting to play a game or buying something. Our volunteers are great! Everyone is willing to pitch in and help out where needed. We have a group of five volunteers from the Envoy program who showed up the shift before theirs to make sure they learned some of the games they didn't yet know, and many volunteers showed up early or stayed late. Our thanks to Maggie, Carlo, Sam, Codie, Ryan, Dan, Doug, Adam, Joe, and Travis who helped out in the room. If I am leaving anyone out, I am so, so sorry.

PAX Unplugged has 'Enforcers' volunteers who work for PAX and are there to help out the various vendors and organizers with whatever came up. Our enforcers were always available, coming by several times to check in and see if we needed anything. After a while I started to fear they were getting bored and wondered if I could come up with something for them to do, but they assured me that wasn't necessary.

Christopher led off the SotM RPG sessions and that was the only table that we were taking reservations for. They filled up so fast that GtG figured out how to run some more so they could open up some more slots. We've snuck in a seventh table for tomorrow.

The room is set up with tables in most of it, starting from the front, with a counter in the back center and right made up of road cases with sheets over them and a GtG logo, plus a display case with merch in the back left, with Mr. Chompses on top. Behind the display case there's a small table and a few chairs so GtG can hold meetings with customers/collaboraters.

We saw a few costumers! NightMist, Baron Blade, and Citizen Dawn. And, perhaps most impressive, someone (one of our Citizens?) had a tatoo of the Sentinel Comics logo on his inner bicep. He took a picture with Adam and Christopher, who were pretty stoked.

Jodie and Ray were working the register. Mara and Paul and Christopher and Adam were all in and out. I saw Chris Kirkman and Darrel Louder plus Nicole and Anthony (Lazer Ryderz). Russ was running Spirit Island for a while and I was running OblivAeon for a bit, but usually we were greeting people and telling them about the games. Lots of people wondered in just kind of wondering what the room was about. Most of the PAX rooms have a schedule and or description on them, but the GtG room is different. There's a huge banner in the hallway, but no real description of what's going on inside.

I heard that sales in the exhibit hall, both fot GtG and generally have been modest, but steady. I hear PAX Unplugged has 12,000 attendees, a fifth the size of GenCon, but it's also physically smaller. Still, it's a lower density (not that that's hard -- GenCon is often a _CRUSH_), though it can still have its bottlenecks.

The Reading Terminal is right next door. Although SUPER crowded, it's got an awesome variety of food in a cool farmers market atmosphere. I ducked over there for a reasonably quick Indiana lunch. Russ said he was able to get in and out  in 7 minutes.

I'd arranged dinner with my sister-in-law about a mile away, so ducked out of a lot of the evening, but came back around 9pm to see the room winding down. When most other people headed home around 10 I ended up with some time to kill before meeting some other folks at 11 and wandered the halls a bit. Not a lot going on at that point. I hear PAX Unplugged closes the convention at midnight, unlike GenCon which is 24 hours. I poked my nose in a few areas where some gaming I didn't know much about was occurring, and ended up in a free play area with old school board games. Me and a stranger played Master Mind! He wasn't able to guess my four peg code in 12 guess, ending up with one Red and three Whites.

... anyway, it was a good day, if long and tiring. Time to get some sleep  so I can do it all again tomorrow.

So, I was super bummed when I heard that the Sentinels RPG was filled up for the entire weekend. It was at the top of my list of things that I was excited for but I was under the impression that there'd be sign ups for each day, each morning so I guess I missed out. Is there any chance that with that additional table, there are slots available again?

Sounds like things are going well there, that's good! :D

I can't recall how far it is from the convention center (it's been at least 10 years since I was there for an ACS meeting), but I remember really liking the pub-meal I had at a place called Eulogy. If you're lucky, you can even snag an actual coffin for a table.

Noted: Written on day 3 but I didn't have Internet access because the hotel changed the code, so references to 'today' may seem a bit odd below ...
 
Day 3: The Longest Day
 
I'm not sure there was an advertised gathering of costumed heroes, but we got a sizable collection of them today. Great stuff. Always lots of fun to see people dressed as Sentinels characters.
 
I didn't hear any word about how sales went today. The SotM starter kit is sold out. Nothing else is, I think.
 
We were busy all day on every table in the room. I hear the same was true or close to true in the booth. We added a seventh table and had two, sometimes three SotM RPG sessions running simultaneously in the room, plus some 20 minute intros running sometimes in the booth.
 
The Envoy team were in the room for the morning and the evening shifts giving us plenty of people to run games so we could send some Citizens over to the booth, but in the afternoon we were scrambling a bit. I ran a few Fate games, and an attendee dressed as Baron Blade took an impromptu OblivAeon game (and got all the punches on his punchcard he wanted as partial thank you).
 
I didn't actually properly learn Lazer Ryderz until late in the evening tonight. I'd played in two  GenCons ago, but hadn't refreshed myself on the rules. I'm really thankful for the sessions running Spirit Island and Fate of the Elder Gods at Whos Yer Con. Without those I would have been nearly useless in helping to run games.
 
We actually had nine demos going at once in the room at one point -- one on each table, plus I was using a nook at the front of the room to demo standard SotM and Chris Kirkman had claimed part of the counter in the back to show Sleepy Hollow.
 
Fate of the Elder Gods seemed to be a big hit with everyone I saw play it. Spirit Island and Lazer Ryderz continued to be nearly universally not just liked, but loved. People seemed to really like OblivAeon, too, despite the long play times.
 
Oh! Excited to share this. That demo of standard SotM we played? We lost! It was Haka, Ra, and Fanatic vs. Blade in Insula Primalis. My teammates enjoyed pushing their luck (like letting the Volcano burn everyone), so we were focusing on hitting Blade rather than worrying about HP. Fanatic was getting ready to use Wrathful Retribution to win the game when a Primordial Plant Life knocked her out. Even so, Ra and Haka got Blade down to mid single digits and nearly had the game won when Blade pulled out Consider the Price of Victory and took them both down. Despite that the players were very excited to get the game. And they hadn't even come over to the room. In a rare moment of a game not being full of players, I'd gone out into the hall to try to flag down passerbys to fill the game. By the time I'd encouraged this couple to come into the game, the game only had one spot, but I showed them around and encouraged them to at least try SotM. Reminds me of the olden times when we SotM was new. I get the sense that there's still a large market of attendees who could be tapped for SotM.
 
It's been interesting searching for the right way to interact with people who wander into the  room. It's often people who are just curious what's going on in the room because unlike the rest of PAX, there's no signage explaining it. Unlike GenCon, where lots of companies have siderooms, GtG seems to be the only ones who have a sideroom.. Jodie explained that it was easiest to just reuse the GenCon setup so they asked PAX for the same size booth and a side room, but most other exhibitors seemed to have settled for a smaller presence. That means not only that GtG is the biggest booth at the show, but has this side room that doesn't fit the rest of the  PAX signage.
 
ANYWAY, I evolved my approach to focus more on striking up a rapport with people rather than diving right in to see what questions about the game they had. Their first question, really, was what is this room for? Usually a bit of chatting about what they're wearing or how the rest of the con has been going was enough to get them comfortable and interested in what might be happening in the room. Then a little bit of description of the games could feel them out about which one they might be more interested in than others. Unfortunately, with full games going, there was rarely a chance for them to sit down and actually play a game, so the majority of these people probably just left the room and never came back, but a lot were interested enough to check in later and look for open spots.
 
Reading Terminal was even more packed on the weekend than during the week. I gave up at lunch time and walked a third of a mile to an inexpensive, highly rated Indian restaurant. I snuck in at 5:45, right before closing, and was the second to last person to get food at a Mexican place. Man, that Mexican food may have been the worst I've ever been served. It was cold.
 
I passed on some invitations to go socialize after the room closed in order to go to the Unpub room and meet up with Peter Hayward, who invited me to join him in a playtest of another designer's game and to playtest one of his games. Both were great experiences. Hearing these knowledgeable designers providing feedback about the games was a great lesson in and of itself. Peter's game (I failed to catch the name!) felt finished or close to it to me. He mentioned a Kickstarter coming up fairly early next year. He asked three of us to  play the game with no instructions from him -- just learning it from the rules. We had no trouble and it didn't take an excessive amount of time (though it wasn't super fast to learn, either, as I read through all of the  three pages of rules at a slow pace.
 
I've also enjoyed running into a few other people I know. It's been a bit annoying that I don't have enough time to go hang out with them each a whole bunch, but on the  other hand I've really enjoyed being a part of the GtG crew. I've stopped bothering to correct people who assume I work for GtG unless it seems critical to what they're asking me. If someone asks, "When will you be shipping/doing/Kickstarting X", I just tell them what I do or don't know w/out bothering to first say that I'm not actually a GtG employee. I mean, what does it really matter if I am or not? I'm representing GtG and I either can or can't help with what they've asked. Still feels a little weird, but I think that's the right call.
 

The people need to know what really happened here. Was it Indian food or Mexican food?