Navarre Beach, Florida
October 12 – 15, 2000
Well, Gulf Games 6 (Back to the Beach) has come and gone. [Of course, theming it Back to the Beach implies that I actually went out on the beach, which isn’t true, as I spent most of my waking hours gaming.] As always, this is one of the highlights of my year, both gaming-wise and friendship-wise!
Highlights:
路 9 year old Ariel Douds beating me at Golf Masters by 5 strokes (and that makes it sound a whole lot closer than it was!)
路 Talking with Ralph Anderson about theater and games and other stuff (note: it was NOT a highlight having Ralph beat in me in every two player game he taught me!) 馃檪
路 The tightest game of Adel Verpflichtet I’ve ever played… congratulations to Ben Baldanza on a hard-fought win…
路 Frank Branham’s Elephant Polo and Day of the Dead.
路 Frank attempting to destroy my brain with the evil dexterity game, Everest
路 My first play (and win!) of The Really Nasty Horse Racing Game, which was only made more enjoyable by playing with Sheldon, Tim, Magnus, Sus and Craig “I can’t win a game to save my life” Berg.
路 The costume contest (I’m looking forward to the pictures)… Tim Watson IS El Presidente!
路My first play of DTM Hock-a-spiel (or whatever it is)… where I blew a 1/2 lap lead to be passed by Stven at the finish
路 My first play of Fast Food Franchise (does anyone have a copy for trade!?) in which I got blown out by Magnus Lundgren, the Swedish Donut King
路Playing Sid Sackson’s Shanghai with Ted, Craig, Greg, Eric & Lenny… Ted explaing rules with a broken Chinese accent is only slightly less intelligible than Ted explaining rules in English (and I won!)
路 Discovering Exxtra on Sunday morning… a nice variant on the whole Can’t Stop/Fill or Bust/5000 kind of genre
路 Placing third in overall wins (first & last time that will happen) and third in the Friendliest Gamer contest (playing with the most other players)
Of course, I’ll be writing my “Letter from Navarre” later this week… but I’m just sad I won’t see most of these folks for another six months. Hats off to Greg & Tim & Vicki for running one of the coolest and most enjoyable events (gaming or otherwise) I have the privilege of attending.