text: I've just gone to my first board game convention: PAX Unplugged, hosted here in Philadelphia. Greg and I attended one day; there was way too much to see in just one day. Mostly we tried out a lot of games, foregoing spending much time in the Expo Hall. If you have to prioritize, playing games is the most important thing, right?
  This was the Free Play area at PAX. It was a much bigger room and then suddenly this wall appeared, as the Expo Hall portion was closing much earlier than everything else (which we didn't know).
  Over the last year I've gotten increasingly interested in board games. I always enjoyed board games as a kid but its an easy thing to fall off of your radar. I only started thinking about board games again as a result of my ceramics lessons. I thought: if we made a board game, it would be one project, one idea, and so many bits to make. The first game - a huge project - is shown on my lessons page. The plan sort of backfired as I spent way more time working on the rules of the game than I would have in coming up with new lesson projects, but I had fun.
  I became obsessed with seeking out new games, reading about them and watching videos. Thinking of games to make in lessons, and hopefully games to make on my own. We've been building up a collection of games and hosting pretty regular game nights at our house.
  Our current collection. (There's a couple in here that I'd like to get rid of.) We're running out of room!
  This year Philadelphia got its first board game cafe, Thirsty Dice. Leading up to their opening, they had a regular promotional night at a bar a couple of blocks from us where they brought tons of games we could play for free. At the cafe we have to pay to play, but we try to still go at least once a month. We found out at PAX that a second board game cafe is already in the works so its an exciting time to have just gotten into board games.
  That's me! We played Photosynthesis and I really liked it but also found out later that we did it very wrong. Our friends recently bought a copy and I'm very eager to try it again!