It's a multiplayer game. You're supposed to play it with three other humans. We never really tested it in the complete absence of any kind of network connection, because it doesn't really make any sense to use it totally offline.
...Unless you're demo-ing it on a laptop in the middle of a hotel ballroom at a conference poster session, where there will be no network.
So I was a bit frantic last night, and fairly stressed this morning until determined that the hacks I tried did, in fact, work, and I was able to make it work but just commenting out big chunks of the startup sequence. *whew!* It's an older laptop, so it runs kinda slow, and I have to start it up from the command line with special flags or it'll run out of memory, but it works! It's all okay now.
(What made it even worse was that at first, I was also fighting with the idiotic behavior Windows displays relating to our samba synchronization at work, and I didn't know it was our code, I thought it was just that the laptop had gone mad and was being stupid on more than one front. Once I figured out it was something I maybe had control over, it was a lot better.)
We had a special G&C for
Anyway, we hung out and played Munchkin and had a fine time. Then we came home and I finished the laundry and now I am packing.
Tomorrow I'm off to DC for the Serious Games Summit, and I'm really looking forward to it. Plus, I get an extra hour to sleep tonight. It'd be nice if we could have the "fall back" without the "spring forward" later on.