When the sesssion ended I was surprised to discover that Dave and Dave had attended and were standing in the back of the room. Last time I had seen them they were sleeping and I didn't expect them to follow me here. It was a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately, I don't have too many notes for the rest of the day. I think we walked through the dealer room. No wait, I was by myself when I did that.

The exhibition floor at Gen Con looks much the same as the exhibition floor at any other sort of convention. And I've been to other conventions and walked through the dealer room and not been impressed. But not here. This was actually a convention with products that I was interested in, so walking around with the crowd was much more fun than at other conventions.

Wizards of the Coast had the biggest pavilion, of course. They had the whole center of the room, a good 2-4 rows wide was each side of their inflatable castle. I didn't actually go in though, since I'm not interested in WotC games. Thinking back now I don't remember much. The autograph area was in back of the room and boy was there a long line to get autographs.

One company had these really nice wargames. Big wooden boards that would barely fit on my dining room table. Old-style hand drawn maps reminiscent of 18th century maps. Metal painted figures to represent armies. Very impressive and probably muy expensive, so I didn't even ask what the price was. I did buy Imperium 2000 and a bunch of Traveller supplements from some British publisher. The supplements are printed on 3/5-sized paper with glossy light cardboard covers and laser printed inside. The actual material is not that great, but the presentation is nice.

British Isles Traveller Support, that was the group. Most of the supplements are "101 xxx", like "101 Encounters" or "101 Patrons". Rather uninspiring. A couple of adventures. "At Close Quarters", a combat supplement. What really grabbed me were two supplements: a complete bibliography of Traveller products and another for Traveller articles published in various magazines. For that I bought one of everything, which made the two booth attendants happy.

Hey, I found the wargame company too. Very lucky since I didn't know the name of the company or their games. Looked up strategic Civil War games on Web Grognard and for some reason the name Eagle Games caught my attention and what do you know, that was right. Ok, plastic figures, not metal. 46" x 36" gameboards. Not as expensive as I thought either. $50 for the Civil War game, which is quite cheap considering what I pay for some wargames today. I'm very tempted to place an order now.

We had lunch at Hooter's, the first time I've been to one (for some reason, I haven't seen any in the Bay Area). You hear about it on television and you get these preconceptions, but still I didn't exactly know what to expect. What it reminded me of is a sports bar/restaurant, except the waitresses wear short-sleeved t-shirts and orange shorts. They're not all necessarily well-endowed. Our waitress, Tara, was quite friendly, sitting down at our table to talk to us and take our order. I can see the appeal.

As for the food, it was pretty average. Sweet raved about the buffalo wings, but even the hottest seemed not so hot as just really tangy. Very loud, lots of people. Even though you'd think it wouldn't be appropriate, there were families there eating. The requisite televisions showing various sporting events. Not that I was really looking, but it was kind of funny that there was this metal wire for sliding down the orders to the kitchen. Naturally the wire is up high so that people don't run into it, but it means that when a waitress tacks an order and shoves it down the wire, she has to reach up and stretch. Ok, if you can't picture it you're hopeless. The waitresses also tended to congregate around the cash register and dance around. Very surreal and of course we went back there the next day.