Martians, Marshmallows, and Music

Saturday started off with one of my favorite events of the year, International Table Top Day.  

For those of you not familiar, Table Top Day, promoted by Geek and Sundry and their show Table Top, is a day for people to get together to celebrate and play board games.

As in previous years, I celebrated Table Top Day at AllThings Fun in Berlin NJ.  This was the first year that Shannon joined me.

The turn-out for Table Top Day was great. The place was jumping.

Lots of people were playing games.

We started out by playing a round of Martian Dice. 

Martian Dice is a slightly more complex version of Zombie Dice.  It was a quick, fun, easy game, made all the better by the fact that I ended up the winner.

Speaking of quick, fun, and easy games, next we played a few rounds of Tsuro.  We own Tsuro and love that it’s easy to explain and play.

We use Tsuro as a warm up game to give everyone a chance to turn on their board game brains before moving on to something more challenging.

We were excited to run into our game board enthusiast friends, Josh and Len, at the Table Top Day event.  They invited us to play a card game called Guillotine with them.

Guillotine was yet another easy to pick up, entertaining game. 

It was so fun, we ordered a copy for our ever growing game collection.  

Lastly, we played Batman Love Letters. 

I played original Love Letters before  and liked the game. Using Batman characters made the game extra special.  A shout out to Pete who was really nice and talked us through the game as we played. 

We probably would have stayed longer, but we had to jet to ensure a punctual arrival to our dinner reservation. Before leaving we placed the tickets we earned playing games into the red cups of winning.

During dinner we found out that I won a preview copy of a game called Dark Seas, and an exclusive Table Top Day set of Dix-it cards (I love Dix-it).  

Shannon also ended up winning the Dix-it cards too.We both put tickets in the cup with the hopes that one of us would win them. It was a terrific event, as always.

For dinner that evening, we made a reservation at Jamonera. 

We adore tapas and have wanted to try Jamonera for at least a year. We had-

Bizet

Complimentary Olives

Meat and Cheese Plate

Stuffed Dates wrapped in Bacon

Radish and Fava Bean toasts

Scallops and homemade Sausage

Meatballs

Sundae topped with a toasted marshmallow

White Peach Sangria sorbet with rosemary shortbread cookies 

Everything was wonderful.  We love stuffed dates and declared Jamonera’s stuffed dates the best we have had so far.  We look forward to going back in the future to sample more of the menu.

After dinner we made our way to Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.  

This was actually our second night in a row visiting the Academy of music. We were there the previous evening to hear the fantastic Sufjan Stevens.

We were back, this time to jazz geek out over Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea.  It’s hard to describe the amazingness that was seeing these two jazz legends playing together on stage.

Between songs they bantered, chatted with the crowd, and during their last song they encouraged audience participation.

It felt less like a formal concert and more like two friends hanging out, jamming together.  It was the kind of music event that made you feel like music is, and was, and always will be. That music isn’t something that was invented, but it is something that is inside everyone like blood and guts. 

It was a marvelous day.

The encore. The image is terrible, but the music is good.