How is it mid-February already?!? Who is in charge of time, and can you please chill the F-out? It should still be the first week of January, by my watch. Right. The GAMA Expo! It’s happening again! TCG Machines will be there – our second time – and our team is keen to see some old faces, make some new connections, and see what the latest happenings are in the tabletop gaming industry. Sadly, I will not be part of our delegation this time around. My wife and my daughter share a birthday, and it just so happens to coincide with the expo this year. Oh well.

Regardless of my non-attendance, I have big hopes for this year’s GAMA Expo! For each of the past two years, one of our customers has been named the Power Retailer of the Year, with Red Claw Gaming receiving that title in 2023, and Red Raccoon Games being crowned in 2024. Can we make it a three-peat? Can we do what the Kansas City Chiefs could not!?! Too soon? Anywho, I think that would be pretty fun.

In addition to the GAMA Expo, this October TCG Machines will be putting boots on the ground for our first ever trade show in the EU: SPIEL Essen! Also known as the Essen Game Fair, due to its being hosted in Essen, Germany, this is the undisputed heavyweight when it comes to tabletop gaming conventions. Last year’s event had over 200,000 attendees over the four days of the fair. Unreal. Naturally, I am thrilled. “But why stop there,” you ask? “Why not also go to Belgium, the Netherlands, and perhaps Italy while you’re over there?” Touché, reader – OK, let’s do it! Indeed, we’ll be making a multi-week Euro-trip out of this.

And heck, why not run a marathon while we’re over there too, right? It’s the only logical thing to do. Sure, why not. Well, it just so happens that there is a marathon happening in Amsterdam the week before the Essen Game Fair. So, now I am signed up for the TCS Amsterdam Marathon, which I’m pretty sure stands for “Trading Card Sorting”; I imagine this gives me a massive advantage over the competition. I figure I had way too much time on my hands, and marathon training was the only way to adequately fill my schedule. Because it has routinely been below -20°C here in Calgary for the past month, I decided to start getting up at 5:00 AM and running on a treadmill in our basement. Because I would like to be able to speak German reasonably well for our upcoming Euro-trip, I decided to start listening to interactive German language learning recordings as I am running.

The first time I did this, admittedly in a very stupid way, I used a speaker instead of headphones or earbuds. This resulted in my wife and two kids coming down the stairs together, all looking rather tired and angry, and shouting at me for waking them up with the combination of my running and yelling loudly in German. Haters gonna hate, you know. Anyway, now I run after they’re up (anywhere between 5:30 AM and 6:30 AM), and I use Bluetooth earbuds. How is this all going to play out? Well, stay tuned!