This was the year of the 20th International Icehouse Tournament, and as usual, Eeyore created a special set of stash pads for the occassion. Here's his "20 years ago" design:

I donned my 20-year-old t-shirt from the First IIT for the occassion, but as you can see, I wasn't alone in doing this. Everyone said Kat Dutton looked better in hers than I did in mine. Of course, I had to agree. (Kat was at that first tournament, but only technically -- she was born a couple of months later!)

Unfortunately, our magic t-shirts didn't help us, as Kat and I both failed to make it into the finals. Oh well, maybe next year!

Here's referee Eric Zuckermann posing with the finalists (Marc Hartstein, Jacob Davenport, Joshua Kronengold, and Ryan McGuire) and this year's Cooler Than Ice winner (Timothy Eller):

And here's last year's winner, Tucker Taylor, passing the coveted Icehouse Scepter along to this year's winner, Jacob "The Shotgun" Davenport. (This is at least the fourth time Jake's had that scepter... I've lost track.)

...and lastly, here's Tucker awarding the Fluxx Championship Medallion to Ivan!

Of course, we also run tourneys for the other flavors of Fluxx. To the right we see Justin Clothier presenting the Monty Python Fluxx award to Marissa Wills, and below we see Kat Robertson congratulating Mort Meyers for his EcoFluxx victory, and Seth Chupp for his Stoner Fluxx win.

As the game inventor, I was always happy to offer a hearty congratulations to a tourney winner, like Chrono-champ Lisa Stassun here...

...but if I'd actually been player in that game, and thus had personally lost to the tourney winner, I'd also give them an official "Stodgy Harumph-Harumph," as I'm doing here with Derek Croxton, winner of the first World War 5 tourney.

Here you see the five Finalists in the NanoFictionary Tournament:

The scoring system used in NanoFictionary allows a crowd to listen in as jurors and cast votes that are worth points in the final score, so we paused our Homeworld game to go hear the stories being told by the group above.

Gabriel (on the far left) told a very entertaining tale about Scientists & Hobos, which featured the strangely memorable line, "Hobo, Help us!" But the competition was fierce, and previous champ Lee Butler got the medallion, seen being awarded here by Eeyore.

The referees in the Zendo tournament take their jobs very seriously.

They also enjoy getting dressed up for the ocassion!

Inspired by the who goes first rule in Aquarius, we always have a "who has the longest hair?" contest we call the Aquarius HairDown. Kat Dutton took top honors again this year, with Beth Dillon very narrowly defeating Emily Frawley for the women's runner-up award. The Men's runner-up was taken by Tim Eller.

As for the actual Aquarius tournament, it was won by Stephen Blanzaco, who was so happy about it, he went home and changed his Twitter icon to be a photo of his Medallion...

Speaking of Aquarius, version 2.0 is about to debut! We actually received the cardsheet and box proofs from our printer at the show, and signed off on them and returned them before the covention was even over. We also found a couple of problems we were able to fix, which you can actually see in this image of the proof:

Firstly, one card had gotten swapped out by a redundant copy of another card. (You can see the doubled card in the upper right hand corner -- it's one of the new diagonal element cards, the one with Fire and Space.)

Secondly, since the number of cards increased from 60 to 80, we added both a new Action and an extra copy of each Action. This proved to be a mistake, since this changed the ratio of Actions to Element cards too much. We concluded this after playtesting it at the convention, and changed it back to being 3 of each Action just before it printed. (We replaced those cards with another copy of each of the single-panel element cards.)

Speaking of playtesting, I had a lot of new game prototypes I was showing around and letting people try. In particular, we were doing final testing on the design of Martian Fluxx, which is next up with our printer after Aquarius is done.

I also have several new pyramid games in the works, which I talked about at length in my What's Next? talk and even played with people, but which I'm not going to talk about more online just yet.

Lastly, I've once again been experimenting with the rules for Just Desserts, and was letting folks test the new Version 5 rules during the weekend.

To keep everthing running smoothly, the Lab has a whole chain of command. Ultimately, Kristin is in charge, but the main person calling the shots at any given moment is the Top Rabbit (TR), who can easily be identified by the special Purple Labcoat. The TR is stationed at the front desk, ready to greet everyone as they come into the Lab.

Each tournament has a specific Referee, and the refs all report to the Tournament Director (TD) who wears the Teal Labcoat and reports to the Top Rabbit.

The three people who took turns being the Top Rabbit this year were Nathan Dilday, Beth Dillon, and Lee Butler. The TDs shown here with them are Marc Hartstein, Eric Zuckerman, and Johnpaul Adams.

Thank you to all the TRs and TDs for all your excellent work!

Sometimes people give us nifty things they've made, and this year was no exception. Jim Steiner made this really cool Martian Chess chessboard, which is lit from underneath:

...and the Barney family gave us these giant pyramids which are even bigger than our regular giant pyramids, and which have a wonderful fuzzy texture!

Thank you to all the Rabbits who worked so hard to make another Big Experiment another huge success! You-all rock!