The initial plan was to do a post every day.
Clearly, this did not survive second contact with the enemy Gen Con, but I did keep notes, so here’s me turning them into something more readable.

Friday

Late on Thursday night, the idea of getting breakfast was suggested by Frank, when I passed by He & Steve & Moni (amd probably Mac) playing a game on a big touch-screen game table in the JW lobby.
This seemed like a fine plan, so we met in the lobby a bit after 8, waited a bit for a table, and had a lot of breakfast.
~urp~

My first game of the day was an Atomic Robo RPG, run by Mike Olson.
When I showed up, I thought I was the last one there, but it turns out that all of the other players were folks with generics who were hoping that there would be cancellations; I was the first actual ticket-holder to show.
(The way it works at Gen Con is that you can buy a ticket to a specific event at a specific time, or you can buy a Generic ticket, good for any event at any time. Specific trumps Generic, but if a player doesn’t turn up, or turns up too late, you can get in)
Me being the last to arrive gave the Generic-holders hope that maybe, somehow, four people with actual tickets weren’t going to show.
False hope, as it happens; They arrived as a group of four, and I saw the same group at later games, which makes me assume they were doing most of their games together. Don’t 100% understand that approach myself, though if they’re friends who don’t have a regular group and this is their chance to play together, maybe that makes sense?

Odin Ortega, of Majestic 12’s Paranormal Sensory Initiative

The game was a Majestic 12 game using ARRPG, so “Shadowy Government Agency Trying To Keep Weird Tesliana Under Wraps” was the order of the day.
I get the idea that there’s a sourcebook or expansion in the works, as there were some new systems in play at the start of the game, one of which utterly baffled me;
After the initial “here’s the problem”, there was a thing involving intel which had come to light which will complicate things, and for some reason I was just not getting the idea, so the GM was bouncing back all of my suggestions, which made me kind of concerned as to what the next 4 hours were going to be like. Fortunately, another player had a suggestion which did work (Guarded By Somali Pirates – One of the others was Lava Moat, which was interesting given that the target was a freighter), and things improved when we got to the requisitioning of special equipment, and how other people help to make that happen. (We ‘borrowed’ a wildly experimental mood destabiliser from Delphi, an offshoot of the Soviet Psychic Warfare programme, by posing as third parties willing to test & report back on the device)
Once in-game, things went fine. System worked, game was fun, mood destabiliser was used to attack the pilots of a remote-operated combat bot, who promptly got affected by insatiable greed, ignored us, and looted the freighter. (We’d been suggesting random emotions, but the GM wisely discarded many of them; “Lust” would have been entertainingly awful)

Next up was a QAGS game, run by the very entertaining Josh, of the Monkeys Took My Jetpack and Porcelain Llama Theatre podcasts, and indeed of Hex Games, who publish QAGS.
One player, sadly sitting right beside me, had no inside voice, and chose to portray his character by speaking even louder & dropping semi-random comments into the conversation/game. It got old fast, and I suspect it wasn’t just me who thought that, based on the number of times he’d say something over the top of everyone, there’d be a pause, and then folks would just carry on where they left off. He’d randomly rolled the character’s gender, got ‘female’, and then periodically proclaimed that he was androgynous for the rest of the game.

Aside from Ensign Shoutypants, and that only some of the time, it was a good fun game.
In grand 50’s Cold War Sci-Fi style, we travelled to the mysterious planet directly on the other side of the sun from Earth, to see what had happened to the first expedition, and crashed, just like they did. We battled strange creatures, rescued the disembodied still-alive head-in-a-jar which was all that was left of the previous mission’s scientist, infiltrated the citadel of newly-Communist War Apes,  and destroyed the strange Vril-powered device the Soviets were using to transport themselves here.
In a moment that I found amusing, the NZer was the one who spent a yum-yum to ensure that we’d saved the American flag from the crashed ship. Where Is Your Patriotism, American Gamers?!

I’d dragged along a bag of the Whittaker’s L&P chocolate, so offered it around, and people seemed to like it, including the GM; Got an extra yum-yum out of that, and gave him some for the road.

Post-gaming, I caught up with Tom, Stacy, & Tom’s friend Kevin, and we wandered out to a pizzeria/bar for dinner, followed by ambling back to the hotel to natter about things. Also, they tried strange New Zealand Chocolate;

Kevin, Tom, & Stacy try a crunchie bar

So far, NZ chocolate is going down well as an experience.
The pineapple lumps and L&P chocolate rated highest on the “what the hell is this?” scale; There are, it seems, things a bit similar to the crunchie bar out there.
Incidentally, does anyone know how they make the Hokey-Pokey stuff? I’m guessing it involves a mass of hot honey-based mixture, and something in the bicarbonate of soda line, or something similar, to foam it up.

And, because it’s an icon of … something … New Zealand Confection Advertising Nostalgia maybe? … Here’s a very grainy version of a classic NZ Advert; Crunchie Bar Train Robbery

Found a better version: Crunchie Bar Train Robbery