Hey, just want to remind you that we’d love to see your photos from this year’s Go Play NW (or even from past years if you’ve got some).
If you’re on Flickr, we have a Flickr group for Go Play NW! Please add your photos to this group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/goplaynw/
And if you could tag them something like “Go Play NW 2011” (or “GPNW2011”, “goplaynw2011”), everyone can find them on a search and distinguish from previous years. That’d be nice, but it’s not necessary to do that in order to add your photos to the group.
If you’re on Facebook, you can add a link to your photos on the official Go Play NW Page.
And wherever you’re posting your photos (maybe on that newfangled Google+), we’d really love for you to tell us by posting in the Photos topic in the Afterglow: The Good, The Bad & The Awesome forum right here on our site.
Thanks much! Looking forward to seeing them!

On behalf of this year’s Go Play NW team—Tony Dowler, John Powell, and myself—I just want to say thank you to everyone for another fantastic year! Thanks to Brandon Amancio, this year’s catering czar, for stepping up to choose a caterer and make all the arrangements for the Friday Night Feast. Thanks to John Harper for once again providing an awesome t-shirt design and managing the production. Thanks to Ben Robbins for being our webmaster and offering some good planning advice. Thanks to everyone who stepped forward to offer help whenever it was needed.
And thanks to all of you who came out this weekend, whether across town or across the nation, whether for the first time or the fifth (or in-between), to play games and have fun. You bring the awesome; we just facilitate it. We hope to see all of you again next year!

I’m just going to flat-out steal Ben’s post from last year, because it works. But updating the links, of course. We’ve put up two new forums for post-GPNW basking:
Afterglow: What We Played—Talk about what you played, and reconnect with everyone you played with. Making separate threads for each game is good, even if there’s very little in them. That way other people in the same game can come along and add their two cents, and folks who want to learn more about your game can jump in and ask questions.
Afterglow: The Good, The Bad & The Awesome—Did you have fun? This is the place for all your post-event reflections and feedback. Tell us what we did right and what we did wrong, so future events can be even better, or just come bask in the afterglow…
There’s Go Play NW 2011 talk all over the intersphere. We can’t keep track of it all! If you are posting elsewhere (other forums, blogs, whatever), drop a link in the forums so other Go Play Nor’westers can find it. If you wrote game summaries, you can copy-paste into threads here, link to those discussions, whatever you want. Oh, and post links to your photos too, so everyone can see.

John kindly took the few extra minutes I did not to make a modified Seattle Center map highlighting where the Northwest Rooms are.

Northwest Rooms at Seattle Center

Where exactly is this happening?

We’ll be in the Northwest Rooms at Seattle Center. They’re up in the northwest corner of the campus, naturally, adjacent to Key Arena, at the corner of 1st Ave N and Republican Street. See the campus map here.

How do I get into the venue? Where’s the entrance?

The entrance to the Northwest Rooms is in the courtyard area between the building and Key Arena; there is no entrance from the street side. There’s an archway off Republican Street leading to the courtyard, as well as stairs on the south side of the building leading from 1st Ave N up to the courtyard.

Where do I park?

The closest parking is the First Avenue North garage with entrances on 1st Ave N and on Warren Ave, between Thomas and John Streets. (It’s on the south side of Key Arena; the Northwest Rooms are on the north side.) The Mercer Street garage is the second-closest, with its entrance on 3rd Ave N between Mercer and Roy Streets. More information on parking at Seattle Center is available at this page on their site. Rates vary from $9 to $20. You may be able to find on-street metered parking as well, though I wouldn’t count on it.

What’s the general schedule? When do things start?

Friday registration opens at 5 PM, the Friday Night Feast begins around 6 PM, and gaming starts at 8 PM.
Saturday and Sunday, doors open at 8:30 AM, gaming starts at 9 AM. Lunch on both days is from noon to 1 PM. Dinner on Saturday is from 6:30 to 8 PM. The event ends around 8:30 PM on Sunday.

Where do I eat (the rest of the weekend)?

The Center House at Seattle Center has a big food court. Seattle Center is in the Lower Queen Anne neighborhood, and there are plenty of options around for lunch and dinner.

Is it true that the Space Needle is a giant weather-controlling apparatus?

We can neither confirm nor deny this claim.

That’s all she wrote! We will have a few tickets available at the door for walk-ins.
Also, if you’re running something, make sure your forum post has a list of your players in it! That makes life a lot easier for the organizers.

That’s right, Go Play NW 2011 is a mere seven days away. A week from now, we’ll be in the midst of setting things up for the weekend. But some of that setup has to be done sooner, and that includes finalizing the online registrations and, more importantly, giving a final headcount to the caterers for the Friday Night Feast. We can’t accommodate walk-ins for the feast, as the caterers only prepare enough for the number of attendees that we give them in advance. So I’m going to put this in large letters:

You must register for the Friday Night Feast by July 5!

And while we’re at it:

Online registration in general will also end on July 5.

We’ve got badges and lists and things to prepare in advance, too. So don’t wait, sign up soon! And see you in seven days!

Go Play NW is almost upon us! Early next week, we’ll be printing out game lists to post at the con. This means that we need all you game masters to go back to the game scheduling thread and make a post listing who is in your game by the end of Tuesday July 5. People can still join your game if there’s room! However, the list you post in your forum will be the list we print.
People signing up – don’t panic, there will be lots of pickup gaming at the con as well as blank game sign-up sheets for GMs to add games as we go. See you in 7 days!

Good news! The technical difficulties with our registration provider have been resolved.