"Thursday" March 16th, 2006

Sponsored by Looney Labs

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We're back from the GAMA Trade Show and we had an awesome time there. To celebrate and promote the release of our new game Treehouse, we built an actual treehouse!

Instead of the traditional trade show booth, this year we went all out and rented a SkyBox overlooking the Exhibit Hall. Then Alison got busy, designing an incredible faux tree made of huge panels of tie-dyed cloth. This hung down from the balcony of our SkyBox, as shown here, thus visually turning our elevated gaming lounge into a Treehouse!

Up inside, we had a lovely gaming space set up, where we taught many hundreds of retailers how to play Treehouse and sent 'em away with sample copies. And the reactions were wonderful! Those who'd never yet seen the pyramids loved the new game, and those who'd been trying to sell the pyramids the old way were thrilled about the changes we're making to the system.

To help coax people up to our admittedly-remote location, we were handing little invites out to people, urging them to visit us in the Treehouse. Also, even though we didn't have our own booth down on the floor, we did have an official information kiosk. Our friends at Paizo Publishing (who'll be selling our products for us in their booth at this year's summer trade shows) gave us some space in their booth to showcase our games and hand out flyers encouraging buyers to visit our nearby Treehouse. As you can see from this view of the Paizo booth as seen from the balcony of our Treehouse, our booth-within-a-booth was conveniently located at the base of our tree, from which point we could easily direct retailers up the Secret Staircase to our special spot.

Here you see the whole Treehouse team: Alvaro, me, Kristin, Alison, Josh, and Robin. This was the first trip to GTS for Alvaro, Josh, and Robin, and of course the other 3 of us REALLY appreciated having their help. (Thanks you guys!)

For more photos of our Treehouse, check out Robin's FLICKR album!

Vegas Attractions Report: As usual, it was hard to take in many attractions during the trip, since business tasks take up most of our time, but we did manage to have a lovely meal at Quark's Official Star Trek Themed restaurant and saw shows at the Wynn and Circus Circus casinos. At the latter, Alison & Robin watched assorted short Circus acts (for free!) and at the former, Kristin & Alison (and Retailer Rabbit Danielle Brown) went to see Le Reve, a surreal water show created by some of the Cirque du Soleil people. I myself really enjoyed walking around inside the Wynn (where the cool ceiling hangings shown here are located), but I chose to skip the shows in order to play Poker instead.

Poker Report: I only managed to squeeze in a few hours of Hold'em in the Riviera's Poker Room, but it was fun, and I came out ahead. In my first game, I went on Tilt after I lost a big pot to an older gentlemen who called my raises all the way down to the river IN THE DARK (that is, without ever looking at his hidden pair of cards) and ended up getting a straight! But I did better in my second game, more than doubling up with a couple of good hands, and cashing out with enough to cover my earlier losses and still have $25 profit. (Meanwhile, Alvaro's luck wasn't so good; he lost a monster pot when his Full House beat 2 Straights but lost to 4 of a Kind...)

	Flying Buffalo's classic card game Nuclear War now includes a nicely updated version of the Anti-Missile Capabilities Chart I created (which we printed ourselves on a promo card a few years ago). It's pretty cool for me, as someone who's been a fan of this game since High School (and who was inspired to become a game designer partly by this game) seeing something I created actually get incorporated into their newest edition. Wow!
	"Why Canada: National health insurance, legal gay marriage, no death penalty, full abortion rights, less crime, less poverty. Canada didn't support the invasion of Iraq, and they don't keep a huge military with which to bully the rest of the world. Religious fanatics do not control the government. It's not a socialist utopia, but it all adds up to a very different attitude about government, society and a nation's place in the world. In short, it's a country with values more similar to my own. The US has moved so far to the right. It's not just the W Regime, even though they've made it so much worse. It's been going this way for almost 25 years. Relative to the norm in this country, I used to be a liberal. Now I'm a radical leftist - and I haven't changed at all!" -- Laura K's blog, WeMoveToCanada
	"Bad week for: Straight-laced jihadists, after Dutch authorities started requiring all would-be immigrants to watch footage of a topless woman bathing and two men kissing as a test of their social tolerance." -- The Week magazine, March 24th, 2006 [I love the Dutch!]