Party Fun

A report of the 24 Hour Trax Party, 13 November

We were up and out of bed by 8am on Saturday morning. Donald went and got the groceries and I got the food ready. A big midday meal, a talk over some of the details and Donald was off to work to spend (at least) 24 hours at the computer, while I went online at home. Donald had an interesting time telling some of the security people at work that he was going to be there for 24 hours! The party was due to start at Friday 6pm US Pacific Time which is Saturday 3pm NZDT. However we were starting right into a tournament so we were both well set up by 5pm PT to advertise and say hi to everyone.

There were eleven people at the Warmup Tournament, a single elimination tournament. The second tournament was the Night Owl Tournament. Hehe it proved to be only for the night owls and the Australian (where it was still evening). We had a grand total of four players, including me.

The party success turned out to be the Speed Trax Tournament. This format has several advantages; late comers could play, there is a clear time limit, players get to play several games, people could even leave early if they had to, and bootings for longer than 5 mins are allowable. This tournament was fast and furious - both for players and the two hosts - and two hosts were needed!!! Donald was madly reassigning players to their next game as fast as they reported their results, and I was kept busy recording the scores. It was especially funny when all 4 games finished within seconds of each other (we ended up with 8 players).

On the other hand the Novice Tournament was not such a success. This was a tournament for those who had not placed in the top three in a previous Trax tournament. It's hard to tell why we had so few players - individual tournaments were not widely advertised until the hour before (except on the website) so it's quite likely that our target players were relatively unaware of this opportunity.

There were also a couple of demonstration games, with three of the better players, 2 playing and one commentating. As I was doing other things during these games I haven't much to offer in the way of comments. These seem to have been attended more by regulars than new players. One person said that comments in the lobby made it hard to follow.

"The World vs Donald game was also interesting. Maybe because world won it :o). But I have to say that it was very late for Donald, something like 5am so... " (Carole_Plante). Yes Carole, you were quite right, it did start at 5am for us; Donald did tell me later that the tiles were doing strange things ..... LOL.

There was a "Chat with the inventor of TRAX". This turned out to be a fascinating talk from David in the lobby, which led nicely into the Grande Finale - a double elimination tournament. We had reasonable numbers, but a certain unmentioned person didn't do too well because of excessive lack of sleep!

Finally, at 6 pm, just as we were about to pack up, several players turned up for the start of the party. Sorry guys - 24 hours too late. We weren't going to hang around for another 24. It was already long past our bedtime.

Overall, the party was a great success - in the words of McVerne:

We want to thank all of you who came and played and taught duing this party. I particularly want to thank PuppetMan_1 who supported us through the small wee hours of the night. It was great to have you there to keep us awake and help with the few who came in to see what Trax was all about. I have been asked when the next one will be ... we might be mad, but not mad enough to be considering another one ... yet ;-).

(For the record we went offline about 3:30 pm our time (so we were on for closer to 26 hours than 24) and were in bed by 6:30 8-).