Vacation summary: Penny Arcade Expo (PAX)

The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) was September 4 - 6. It is a convention which combines video games and board games. They go together surprisingly well. :-)

The prince from Katamari Damacy.











The PC Freeplay room. PAX provides all of these computers for people to play PC games! It may be hard to see all the rows of computers, but there were probably 256 computers available. And this was just one half. Another ~256 spaces were reserved to "Bring Your Own Computer" (BYOC), for mostly hardcore gamers.

The Peregrine gaming glove. That's the black glove that each person is wearing. They can use that as an input device to the computer, while still being able to type with both hands. It certainly looks cool/geeky.

"The Emissary" dining and gaming table. It is expensive ($2000 - $3000), but it's also a cool idea: if you don't finish a board game, you can just cover it up and save it for later! IKEA should make one of these.

A shop had these cute Super Mario Pepsi caps. Isn't it cool how the characters are all pixelated? Presumably, these caps were available in Japan on Pepsi bottles, for free! (And even $5 for just the cap seems reasonable.)

The guy in the foreground is Reggie Fils-Aime, President and Chief Operating Officer of Nintendo of America! He was playing Wii Sports Resort, and he asked me if I wanted to play him! We played table tennis.






A normal match is to 6 points, but we went into multiple tiebreakers. I finally won, something like 11 - 9. Reggie plays with intensity!




Setting the Guiness World Record for most people playing the Nintendo DS in one room. I played Puzzle Quest. (Thank-you to Joel G. for letting me borrow it!) I think there were less than 1000 people, so there is a lot of room to grow.

From PAX, day 1

An artist was paid to make this "Bioshock 2" mural on the floor of the convention center! You could watch him work on it each day of the convention.

From PAX, day 2

The board-game checkout room. Hundreds of board games. Best of all, there were thousands of people available to play with!






The chalk artist has made a lot of progress on the mural. Very beautiful.






Giant Connect Four. This was part of the Omegathon, which is sort of a wacky/epic elimination tournament.

From PAX, day 3

Joe Cochran and I had an epic game of Dominion. I think the final score was 78 - 77.







Of course, the best part of PAX was hanging out with old friends and making new ones . . . even if one turned out to be a Cylon! (From the board game for Battlestar Galactica.)