My schedule was as follows:
I arrived Saturday morning at 940am, signed in, and did the following:
Saturday 10am: Lena Brenk's discussion "Speaking in Tongues"
Saturday 11am - noon: watched over people's shoulders as they played BE so I could get a perspective. A Firaxian by the name of Corey (and I'm sorry I forget his last name) was absolutely GREAT about answering my questions about the game, as well as giving me tips about touring Gettysburg. Corey even pulled over David McDonough to answer a question for me!
Corey also signed my Civ 4 BTS cover for my son, and then he also took the BTS cover around and had other people sign it as well. Pretty friggin' awesome!
Saturday noon - 1230pm: my turn to play! Unfortunately power dropped out at 1230pm, so they issued me another ticket to come back later after they fixed the power glitches.
1pm -230pm: watched others play BE.
230pm - 3pm: Firaxis Studios tour. Seeing some of the old games they had (like Deadlock and Empire Deluxe) was a nostalgic trip down Memory Lane for me.
3pm - 4pm: back to playing BE. Went with the following options:
People's African Union
Artists
Tectonic Scanner
Machinery
Sputnik difficulty
Based on my discussions with people who had already played or who were camped out like me and observing others play I decided to beeline in the Virtue Tree for the free Settler so I could expand quicker. Had fun playing, but the hour was up waaay too quickly.
4pm-5pm: hung out watching people play BE some more, and picked Corey's brains some more.
5pm-6pm. Another Firaxian named Carl said there was a free station and would I like to jump on it and play. Oh Yeah!
6pm - 7pm: autograph signing. Was at the back of the line so chatted with a guy named Marcus who is at the other end of the child-rearing spectrum from me (I'm pretty much done with that phase of my life, whereas Marcus had just had his third child two months previous). By the time we finally got to the signing station they were giving out two posters - sweet!
7pm - 9pm: dinner. Got to sit with Pete Murray and David McDonough. Took the opportunity to pick David's brains a little bit more on my BE gambit (as outlined above).
9pm-10pm: Trivia night. Got to be the Secretary for our team. To sum up Trivia Night from a Marketing perspective, I can say that my table was very proud that we were never once told to put our cell phones away.
Sunday
430am - 830am: when I showed up at 430am Corey was still there. Doesn't that guy ever sleep!?!
I played about 190 turns over the next four hours with the same settings outlined above. Took out what I thought were all he Franco-Iberian cities, however I didn't get the animated pop-up of the defeated leader, so I'm guessing there was one more Franco-Iberian city somewhere.
So overall I got to play about 6 hours with BE, and had a good time doing it. Looking forward to the game coming out!
Monday
Ran into donald23 and was able to sit with him for about 10 minutes before I had to leave. Hopefully he can put to good use the info I gave him for touring the monuments in DC.
Here's some pics from my Firaxicon experience: