The best late plans

“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” — Robert Burns’ To a Mouse

Here I am writing a blog post while riding a public transit bus in Kansas City, two days after the Ignite (Extra Life) event ended.

It’ll be at least another two days until we’re home but on the plus side, there’s extra time for reflection.

We had some amazing moments at Ignite. There were a handful of champion families there, and on the first day Samantha made friends with Ella, a remarkable girl from St. Louis who has cerebral palsy. Before long she was practically adopted by their family, cheering Ella on in all of her official duties: they ask a lot from these families to help inspire attendees.

On the second night, Children’s Miracle Network CEO Aimee Daily had her flight home delayed, so she came around to introduce Ella to our Yellow team (they split the attendees into four groups for some fun team building and assigned each team a champion child). We approached Aimee and gave her a special token we had made up for this conference: A yellow, wooden meeple in the shape of a thumb with #Dominicstrong etched onto it.

We told his story hundreds of times this week. Every person we played in a game or interacted with got one of those meeples. And Aimee… she was inspired by Dominic to the point she got up on stage and told the crowd of more than 800 people about him, totally unscripted.

Then she invited us on stage. But we hadn’t told her about Dom’s sister. Sam comes up ahead of us, crying, and says into Aimee’s microphone “I miss my brother because he’s dead!” or something along those lines. And Aimee pivots marvellously into supportive mom mode, helps Sam, and the entire crowd is in tears as we take a selfie with everyone giving the thumbs up.

Sam finished the night dancing with a new set of friends, the college-aged attendees with Dance Marathon. They became her second adoptive family of the week, hanging out and playing while mom and dad competed. The idea behind having these two groups at the same event is to share best practices and maybe convert some graduating college kids to continue fundraising for hospitals, just using Extra Life instead.

CMN wound up including us in the official wrap-up video of the weekend, using an interview that Trish gave after I was unable to because I was busy playing a tournament game.

This brings us to the original reason we signed up for Ignite/Extra Life United. They have US$150,000 to give away to member hospitals, and of course we play for the Alberta Children’s Hospital where Dom spent most of two years.

Both Trish and I signed up for three board games plus a mystery game, and practised as best we could for the past couple months. I’d played the deck building game Star Realms at a prior ELU, but Trish despised it, so didn’t really practice. We’d both enjoyed Love Letter at ELU 2016. Shifting Stones was brand new but we liked it. Most importantly, all the games had a significant luck factor which I think was meant to keep competition friendly.

Trish’s theory was that she’d bow out early and I’d win some money. Well, she did in Love Letter but not the other two! I advanced in all three and even made it to the top eight of Shifting Stones, so I at least won some money. But organizers had to make tough decisions as the games went far beyond the allotted time, and by the time ELU was slated to finish Trish was still alive in, you guessed it, Star Realms! First the top 24, where Trish and two others had to play a full tiebreaking round after beating each other in their initial round robin. Then she won two intense head-to-head matchups. Hotel staff were taking down the event when she won and earned a spot in the final against Kori Joyce, a gamer from Vermont who as it turns out liked Star Realms as much as she did and offered to split first ($3,000) and second ($1,500) prize without playing. The relief on Trish’s face when offered that first place split ($2,250) was iconic.

In the ensuing delirium we celebrated and hugged so many friends old and new goodbye as many had flights out that evening. We checked in for our Monday morning flight and even got our boarding passes printed out before going to bed.

And then we got a rude shock. On the way to the airport we discovered our flight had been cancelled and we’d been rebooked onto a Thursday flight home instead.

Our late plans may have taken some crazy turns but we’re so glad we came. Hopefully it’s not another five years before we get to see our Extra Life family again.