I can't believe you went to Strategicon! That's a blast from the past. I honestly don't know if I could go to that again, it would be really weird. We started going to those 18 years ago or so. Probably the last one I went to was in 2000 or 2001, then the the era of KublaCon began. I randomly met the new owner earlier this year when he bought a game I sold on eBay -- seemed like a nice guy. I remember the dealer room was good about the first three years we went there and after the mid-90s it just went downhill. Hopefully the event has hit a good parity level though.

Did Exilis look fun, Ja-El? Matt mentioned it a while ago and I checked out the website. I couldn't get my head around the multimedia aspects of the game (I love rolling dice, so I was dubious about having the computer resolve stuff for you) but I definitely could be talked into giving it a try.

I looked up Thunderstone. I keep seeing it at the game store so your mention made me curious to check it out. It looks very similar mechanically to Dominion (I'm not sure if you've played that one) with a strong fantasy hero building theme, which could be really cool. Buy it dude!

I picked up Tales of the Arabian Nights to play with the wifey. This is a pretty neat game that basically is a board game combined with choose-your-own adventure. You go around the board having semi-randomly determined encounters out of this enormous book. All kinds of crazy stuff can happen to your character like you can get sex-changed, married, become a sultan or vizier, etc. It's fun to follow along with the crazy crap that happens to your adventurer so it's a very fun casual experience.