Oh, you're British. Maths.

A mini-SHUX-trip roundup!

• Vancouver remains incredibly pretty in the Autumn, with red and orange trees lining the streets, the sea down at the port, and the forests visible in the distance. And the weather was so nice!
• The centre is so damn walkable. Unlike any of the other¹ visits to cities I’ve made in the last couple of years - no Lyft/Uber trips required, and a pleasant mix of your usual (and Canadian) chains plus local shops. Just really lovely sitting out in a pedestrianized area on a sunny Autumn morning eating an almond croissant next to a city bike stand. Plus, knowing that getting to and from the airport is just nipping around the corner from the hotel and getting on a regularly-scheduled train takes away so much stress.
• Yes, I was indeed the whitest and tallest person in Jollibee.
• And now to the actual convention itself! I think we did fewer panels this year, but the two game design ones we went to were both really good, with one being the view from big names, and the other from a more indie perspective, which made them both feel quite different but complementary.
• Though the common theme in both panels was “learn InDesign’s data merge facility”, which makes me think there’s probably a bit of a gap in the market for something like the equivalent of Clip Studio Paint, but for boardgames. Or knocking something up in Python…
• The complete insanity of “Quinns’ Courtroom” panel, which went off the rails from the first few minutes, included an amazing indictment of Tom on the subject of dinosaur-based drafting games, an actual lawyer on stage, Quinns forgetting everybody’s name, and Pip channelling Phoenix Wright with some wonderfully impassioned speeches. Which sometimes even worked!
• I thought the team also got through the awkward questions on the Late Night panel pretty well…though I think they probably regretted all the call-and-response systems they set up as we would not stop doing them. I think we missed this panel last time around, so it was great to see everybody in tired loopiness.
• One again, we met up with mippy and liquidindian! The precious ginger cake is now safe and sound in a biscuit tin in the kitchen…until I devour it over the next few days. And it was good fun to play Irish Gauge with them, as well as a round of Quacks of Quedlinburg!
• I did feel a little disconnected from the main SHUX event this year. Not entirely sure why. Maybe because we missed the opening ceremony, skipped the signing bit, and had to dash off first thing on Sunday morning. And Tammy sadly didn’t get to reprise her astonishing betrayal in Blood on the Clocktower due to us not getting there early enough for signing up to the sessions. I don’t think we missed out on anything, though - we had good reasons to skip what we did, and I don’t think it would have changed that feeling if, say, we’d got something signed.
• Wrong city, but I had Stars in my head all weekend.
• It seems like Cadbury Canada sells Mini Eggs all year round, which would make it the promised land, except for…
• Canada’s weird attitude towards Diet Coke. At almost every restaurant, when we asked for Diet Coke, they only had Coke Zero, or they just silently gave us Coke Zero. This is heresy.
• Somehow, despite donating four boardgames to the SHUX library, I still came home with two more? Plus, I had a good enough time with Fantastic Factories that I might want a copy of my own at some point…and there’s an expansion…ooooh.
• After all that positivity, wow, Canadian airports, man. Somehow we managed to have such a bad time yesterday. When we got to Vancouver on Sunday morning, we ended up scouring not just the gate, but the general post-security area in order to try and find something to eat. With very limited success. At Toronto, we had to run a gauntlet of security checks, seemingly walking the length of the terminal twice, and being taken aback at the rudeness of employees towards one woman that was concerned that she’d miss her flight, only to be told that “you still have 20 minutes until the door closes” when she was in the middle of a slow-moving customs line, and from experience afterwards, still had a five minute walk at least to get to her gate. As for us, we got to the gate, starving, only to be confronted by gate area having one sit-down restaurant, and us with 20 minutes until boarding was supposed to occur. We remained starving (I did manage to find a terrible sandwich, but it was basically the only real food I had yesterday).
• We remain terrible at taking pictures.

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