What we did at Games Day

First of all, let me say I haven’t counted up our I-Spy totals yet, though I plan on doing that tonight, so feel free to add your scores here. Who knows, there may be a prize involved (unless we win!). And you can read Games Day as it happened on the bookofgrudges twitter.  If you read the Games Day entries, you’ll get a feel for our coach journeys etc, ie. the boring stuff!

So once we got to Games Day we met up with Ardua from Echoes of Nonsense. He was easy to spot, luckily and he was already chatting to Paul. We exchanged Cherry Coke for chocolate (the blogger’s contract), and I said hi to Paul too just briefly while he was sitting at a little desk in front of a monitor continuously playing the trailer. He had to go to an interview with Eurogamer, and we wanted to check out some of the Warhammer stuff, so we went for coffee in the main room of the event. (Spinks: I demanded coffee at this point because I was a wreck from the early morning and coach. They propped me up in front of the Rhino noted below for pictures and then … coffee!!)

After coffee we had a look at some of the tables in Hall One, where the Black Library, Forgeworld and Author signings were. Ardua wanted to get some books signed, and I wanted to go look at the new books, so we parted briefly for that. They didn’t have enough cool Games Workshop related T-shirts or jewellery and I realised I’ve ordered them for my work library, so we didn’t buy anything. Then we went to check out the sale area (mostly sold out by the time we got there) and then Spinks checked Forgeworld. We decided to head back to GOA quickly.

GOA and THQ were situated in what we referred to as ‘a corridor’, because it was a corridor. The promised Rhino tank was next to the Dawn of War II stand and their trailer was getting a lot of attention. Because GOA had 24 PCs set up where everyone could see them and an orderly queue, it looked like a few less people – but I’d hazard a guess they had just as many if not more. Me and Spinks joined the queue and watched some of the gameplay. The game looked fantastic on the computers and monitors they brought with them.  We quickly worked out which computers were linked to the two bigger screens that the queuing people were watching and I nabbed one. Ardua caught with us when we got to play and I made a Squig Herder and did the initial Greenskin quests until the flying bit. I wanted people to see how much fun it was, and a lot of people just picked up whatever char the previous person left.

We took a moment to go look at the Games Workshop stands, check out the art competition and also look at the Golden Demon entries. Our favourite was in the diorama category and included some colourful multi-coloured squigs with spots on. (Spinks: I liked the purple one with yellow spots. And the one jumping out of a bush to bite a slayer on the bum. It wasn’t a prize winning entry but it made us laugh. We think they should have a section for comedy dioramas.) But seriously, there are some scarily talented people out there and it was great to see their work. We also went to the Arena and checked out the gaming tables and some of the amazing models and landscapes that were on show.

As we returned to GOA, Paul returned and asked if we were ready for an ‘interview’.  Ardua, realising we’re complete wimps, had organised this for us! And we went through to the GOA area and stood chatting with Paul in-between him having to dash off and talk to other people. More on what we talked about in a separate post. But he was charming, polite and adorable with his daughter. He also rushed off to help someone in the dwarf starting area who ‘wanted to fire that cannon’ (Paul’s words, but the guy was trying to work out what to do).

In one of the in-between times a couple of the people we know from Freddyshouse spotted us and asked the GOA staff if it was us! Incredible! So they came through to stand and chat with us and we got to meet Dervish from Covenant of Zak and Flimgoblin from Humberton Blackguard. Paul came back and there was another round of chat, videoing (if my vidskills are weak, the guys got much better footage I think), signings and hilarity.

The GOA staff told us we’d been spotted by a couple more people so we all moved over to chat to them and they were really nice too. Gave them guild details and had a bit of a warm-glow moment in the realisation that real people read the blog. So thanks to everyone who waved or spoke to us, seriously, it was humbling and awesome and you were all so nice!

Paul was nabbed for more interviews at some point and we were getting knackered so we went to the Arena to go watch the Golden Demon awards and then find our coach home.

Took quite a few photos and I’ll set up a Games Day flickr and just add them all to it, with little editing! Also, my brother-in-law is going to attempt to help me with the video footage I took yesterday and see if he can get it off the camera and show me how to edit it into clips. When that’s done, I’ll put it in our Youtube account. Yes, we have one, but we’ve never had any clips to show until now. I won’t tell you what kinds of things I videoed in case it all went horribly wrong – except to say that there’s some fun stuff in there!

No skaven skin cloaks, no T-shirts – but you know what? The GOA staff were incredible, and helpful and friendly and a little nervous about wearing big shirts with GOA on their backs. But I think we all managed to express our thanks for the game and that we really really want the European community to be as good as it can be. The guys manning the stall were actual GMs, and I think I prefer that to booth babes.  Oh, and we all got texts to say the headstart servers were delayed a little and then up and running just fine – so well done on a pretty damn smooth start to everyone! Especially GOA and Mythic, of course. (Spinks: The GOA guys were also cute and Irish, just saying … My husband texted to say ‘servers fine. am almost RR3 already!’ so we passed that on.)