We began this year's gaming experience with a game called "Interaction", which was on the lists as AD&D 2nd Edition but turned out to be more of a round-the-table freeform. That sort of thing can work well with the right group, and this group wasn't at all bad; we were invited to decide on characters with a reason for coming to the abandoned Temple Of The Ten Thousand Eyes Of God, and winged it from there on in.
A brief round of the trade hall found us plenty of stuff to come back and look at more thoroughly, and we also ran into
The US Open is run a little differently from the UK Open. The UK Open is an individual event (or was, when I last played or DMed it, now some years ago) where everyone round the table scores the other players. The US Open is a team event which does tend to make for a slower start as they try to marshal those people who don't have pre-existing groups of six into such groups. Our team didn't quite finish the scenario, partly because we started quite late and partly, I have to say, because the GM himself wasn't the fastest; quite good, but he had to look some stuff up from time to time and that tended to make things drag a bit. Not surprisingly, we didn't progress to the next round, though it is my impression that far fewer teams did than was the case in previous years; I think there were four teams progressing and four alternates from our slot, out of a total of perhaps 25 - 30 teams playing (rough guess).
The theory was that we would then get some food and go off to the event we'd booked for which started at 8pm. In practice,