I met up with Jackson at noon to begin our journey to GDEX.
On the drive to Columbus, we talked about AI dungeon, and the interesting stuff you could do with it. We even tried it out, though it seemed to struggle with the prompts I tried with it.
We parked at the north garage, since it was the only one we could find an entrance to. It was the furthest possible garage from the hotel, but walking is good for you!
We got ourselves checked in under the watchful stare of the creepy digital face statue, and then wandered the show floor for awhile.
This year, GDEX had partnered with Origins, which was a board game expo, and as a result the event was way bigger than it was last year. It now occupies the entirety of the Columbus Convention Center.
Lots of interesting board game sets and props, for stuff like DnD, warhammer, and other game systems.
We headed back to the car to get our stuff and checked into the room. Apparently Jackson was only able to get a room with a single queen bed, but we also got a roll away, so it’s fine. There’s also a couch, which could also be slept on.
We went back to the expo to wander a bit more, and ended up in a room where they were testing home made board games still in development. We played a board game that was about setting up a campsite, and then cleaning it up leaving as little behind as possible. It was very abstract, and involved taking turns placing colored tokens on a board in the first stage, then removing them in the second, with strict rules about what groupings of tokens could be removed. It was interesting, because every player was responsible for 2 sets of token types, which were shared with your neighbors, so you had to remove as many of your tokens as you could, without removing so many of your neighbors that they won instead.
Afterwards, we stopped at the hotel bar to grab some late night food. I just had some cinnamon apple cheesecake, since I wasn’t feeling too hungry.
Afterwards, however- disaster struck!
When we returned to the room, Jackson realized that he could not find his car keys, and began to suspect they had been missing since shortly after we arrived at GDEX.
We spent several hours searching through the entire expo, retracing our steps, and asking at security and lost and found. We also went back to his car to check if they were locked inside, and ended up getting locked out of the expo hall entirely, since the doors were locked after 8pm. We got lucky, and someone let us back in, but Jackson was pretty shaken up by this point.
Ultimately, we didn’t find them, and had to go to bed hoping they would turn up the next day. Jackson and I had a pretty heartfelt late night talk about our emotional baggage and how much our childhood traumas and insecurities still affected us to this day.