I was able to go to my first mini-mace this weekend, and it was a heck of a lot of fun!

I'm not going to go into detail right now about the games I played (which I'll do a little more later), but I just wanted to take a few minutes and talk about my general impressions of the game-day and how it worked out. 

First of all, Chris Ingersoll and I carpooled for the drive to Winston-Salem, which made it seem to go a lot faster and was a heck of a lot more interesting.  In all, it was about a 75-90 minute drive for me, and I just swung by Elon to pick up Chris on the way.  It's pretty much 65 mph Interstate driving the whole way, though, which was not bad at all.

Anyway, if you have no clue what mini-mace is, it's a games day that takes place at a Golden Corral.  You can play and eat and eat and play, then grab a handful of stuff to eat, play a game, then eat a meal and try not to get beef juice or your sweet tea spilled all over the game board, which you're trying to play and finish so you can get another little bite to eat.  Like "real" MACE, there was a mix of RPG's (mainly D&D 4e, GURPS, and some d20 stuff this time) and board games (3-4 tables running all the time).  Attendance this time was around 35 or so, which is down from the 40+ they've had at the regular mini-mace events that happen in January.

Overall, I had a great time.  Instead of signing up for any particular scheduled game, I (and pretty much all the boardgamers there) treated it like an open-play event.  I got in 6 different games throughout the day, including Race for the Galaxy, Shadows Over Camelot (with the Merlin's Company expansion), Agricola, Tier auf Tier, RoboRally, and the game I really wanted to try out, a pre-release copy of Battlestar Galactica that Ron (the gaming coordinator) picked up at GenCon.  Other games I recognized being played included: St. Petersburg, Last Night on Earth, World of Warcraft: The Board Game, Dilbert: Corporate Shuffle, Filthy Rich, Hamburgum, Settlers of Catan, and I'm sure a few others that I can't remember. 
 
We were in a little private side room in the Golden Corral, which worked pretty well both for our privacy and our access to all the food.  GC is, by most anyone's opinion, a human feeding trough, but that still didn't detract from the overall experience too much for me, mainly because we didn't have to interact with the rest of the patrons there unless we wanted to.  All the food I ate tasted good, but it didn't set too well on my stomach when I got home later in the evening.  The "worst" part was that we were right next to the dessert section of the bar, so many of us were continually grabbing cookies and handsful of candy corn and jellybeans all day long.  We also had to go looking for wait-staff at times when we wanted a refill of our drinks, but that wasn't too big a deal.

As far as the gaming itself, it was just great.  Everyone that I talked to or played games with was really friendly and personable.  It was also nice to be able to spend some time interacting with Jeff and Ron, the guys that are ultimately responsible for MACE and the mini-mace events.  The only problem that bothered me somewhat was that with the limited number of people in attendance, you tended to get locked into a track with the people you played your first game with.  Since games rarely end at the same time, you'd either have to sit around for a while waiting, or just play another game with the same people.  Like I said, I really liked who I was playing games with, but I'd have liked to meet and interact more with some of the others that were there as well.  I'm also sure that if I'd have tried a little harder, I could have used a meal break to jump in with another group, but my introverted nature kept that from happening.

Still, like I said, I had a great time.  With only brief breaks for meals and snacks, we played games for 13+ hours, which, to me, makes a pretty good day.  I'll definitely be trying to attend more mini-maces in the future!    

 
Part 2 of the mini-mace report
Battlestar Galactica first impressions