The second day of Gamex began a bit later than usual. I decided to give the Power Grid tournament a try. I'd only ever played one other game of it in the past, but it is rather fun. I ended up making it to the final table, but came in third place. Unfortunately, that carries no dealer dollars, but does come with a ribbon.

My next game was Phase 10. I haven't actually played the game in about a decade, and I was mainly only playing to fill a small gap in my schedule. I got lousy cards and played poorly and was thus out in the first round.

After a late lunch, I played in the Dominion (all expansion) tournament. I did surprisingly well in the tournament, making it through two rounds to be at the final table, but ended up coming in third again (to the same person who got first against me in Power Grid). Honestly, I got fairly lucky in the first round by playing against newbie players and in the second round managed to completely destroy the other players decks very early by filling them with curses.


My final event for the day was a Call of Cthulhu game. The premise of the game was that we were a set of federal investigatory agents from various agents. An agency was set up to investigate fringe cases and all of us had been assigned to it (probably due to the fact that we were troublemakers of some kind). We were sent from our base office in Virginia to Fresnoa, CA to investigate a sudden rash of strange reports from the city: someone had reported that the cats had become intelligent, there were alien sightings, crop circles had appeared, an artificial intelligence was supposedly trying to take over the internet, time travellers were apparently showing up, and someone might have rebuild Tesla's earthquake machine.

The players decided, for whatever reason, that we were going to layover for an evening in Las Vegas. During that time, one of the players ran into an old lady visiting from Fresno. After talking with her for a bit, the old lady pulled the pin out of a grenade and dropped it at her feet as a test of her "luck". The player managed to get around a corner before the grenade went off, but the little old lady did not and neither did a large number of other people in the room.

After the requisite terrorism investigation was begun by people from agencies which weren't filled with rejects, our little group continued on to Fresno with our own investigation. Once we got there, we began to slowly go about investigation each of the various individual leads from the incidents that had been investigated.

We began by investigating the crop circles, then moved to the intelligent cats, the time travellers, and the tesla machine. Over the course of the investigation, we found that people were beginning to come into amazing luck--some due to their cats telling them what to do and some due to the time travellers facilitating insider trading. We also found an incredible surge in gun purchasing over the course of the previous few week to the tune of the this period having higher firearm sales than the entirety of the previous year. We found cats who seemed to say (via their owners and the creative use of calendars) that "something" was going to happen on the 6th of June, just after midnight. Lastly, we found that the tesla machine was actually a recreation of a wireless power transmission system that had apparently been stolen from its creator some time earlier.

Our last investigation was into the AI. Once there, we discovered that the AI had instructed a person to go out and fetch the Tesla device (someone else apparently did the stealing and left it for the one we were interviewing) and leave it in a field. It had apparently been configured to run on nuclear power and was "reflecting" the time travellers, preventing them frorm coming to our time to destroy it. This same "reflecting" was causing the crop circle patterns to appear as a side effect. The AI asked us what we intended to do, and, given the parameters that we'd been given by our superiors, I told it that we were supposed to investigate the occurances in Fresno and write a report on our findings. The machine happily dumped out a 400+ page report through the nearby laser printer which provided a coherent story, but coincidentally left out anything about the AI itself.

Our party then began a discussion about possible courses of action. I advocated the following strategy: go to Vegas for the rest of the week, mail the report out on the 5th (the current day was the 2nd), let whatever comes, come. The remainder of the party decided to instead go destory the Tesla device so that the AI didn't take over the world and enslave humanity. After finding it and hitting it with a car, the sky darkened by the appearance of the time travellers who set off a world-wide EMP (presumably to kill the AI), leaving the world set back by several decades at least.

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