Early on in last Sunday’s MouseAdventure event, one team gave us their opinion in a brief, elegant phrase. “You suck,” they said. We’ll leave it as an exercise for the individual teams to decide if this was heartfelt, or good-natured ribbing.

On the good news front, MouseAdventure continues to grow in popularity, with this being our biggest event so far. 71 teams registered for the event and over 220 players tackled our game. As always, a surprising number of those 220 played while pushing strollers or convincing young children that spending 15 minutes reading a sign in Fantasyland is indeed a fun way to spend a day in the park.

And, hopefully, it was a fun day at the park; despite the bad news of the day. One of the hardest parts of creating an event like this is accurately judging how difficult it will be. While it has always been our intent to create an event difficult enough that many teams will not be able to finish everything, we overshot the mark this time and created an event few teams were able to complete.

Otherwise, the game went off without a hitch (even if clog dancers did evict us from our normal home in Carnation Gardens) and for the first in MouseAdventure history we actually began the award ceremony on time. All our readers will be happy to know that you can, indeed, fit 250 people, some strollers, and random diners (who may have come to regret their selection of a turkey leg lunch) into Fantasia Gardens. Keep this in mind for your next family reunion. Finally, we for once succeeded in selecting a date for the event on which Anaheim was not blasted to about 176 degrees; a nice overcast persisted throughout the game and kept things cool.

Thank you to every MouseAdventure player and every child who put up with three hours of seeming insanity. This event couldn’t exist without all of you, and it is great to meet you all. After hearing all the feedback and kind words from the players (even when it’s negative), we end Sunday wishing we could do it again next week.

Despite the difficulty, there were still many amazing performances. One team, Main Street Monopoly (#58), went a perfect 10 out of 10 on the EyeSpy pictures (could you so easily identify the ashtray from the Fantasyland smoking area). and another team successfully answered over two-thirds of the trivia questions (Team #9) with several teams on their heels. Finally, I have to say that many of you are just way too good at tearing things into pretty shapes.