Note: I wrote this last week and failed to realize it never posted. Now it is.

When you get that much geek in one spot, trying to get online anywhere is difficult and why one reason this post is so late. The other reason was that I was afflicted with a minor case of the “Pax Pox” or “Pax Flu”, the general illness we all know we’re walking into when you pile 75 thousand or so people into one space. Worth it though, it was really worth it.

With day 2, our first mission of getting a Jonathan Coulton autograph for our son was more simple than we thought. In the ever popular “Bandland”, he was already seated and greeting fans. My husband bought a “Skullcrusher Mountain” shirt and asked if he would sign the starry-eyed 9 year old’s Pax badge. He nearly fainted and spent a good hour later excited about this, and making the evening’s concert even more exciting for him. “See that, that’s JoCo. I met him and he signed my badge.” The autograph thing joined another level of excitement for both my boys, when in the expo hall we saw Tycho himself! I’m not sure who was more excited about the signature, it was a proud moment on my son’s badge.

Day 2 was the big concert for our son, he was so excited. Despite many attempts to fall asleep, he made it the entire time. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend going to YouTube and checking out the Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton parts of the concert. Especially the Paul and Storm part, you’ll never look at Game of Thrones or those ASPCA commercials the same way again.

Day 3 was less eventful, we did a last tour of the expo hall and demoed some more games. For all people who want to attend for the first time next year, my advice is simple: demoing games and the lines are better on Sundays. Our son’s favorite game was Primal Carnage, a multiplayer game where you play a dinosaur and eat people. What about that game isn’t for a boy to love?

My closing thoughts were that personally, it wasn’t as good as it has been. I blame that on the general interest of my taste in games, only 3 video games caught my eye and the remake of the Game of Thrones board game wasn’t as thrilling as I’d hoped. I did see an interesting board game called “Zpocalypse” that I’m sure will end up in our board game arsenal. The Secret World looks like a really fun mmo, which is another game worth mentioning. I will note that I didn’t mention Borderlands too, as with a 9-year-old, demoing it wouldn’t have happened, however the game play looked fantastic and I can’t wait for that either. As for something new, our family has found a new hobby that interests us and we can’t wait to start: painting figurines for board games and the idea of making our own little adventure set.