ConQuest has come and gone this past Labor Day. In its 2nd year, (replacing the now defunct Pacificon), ConQuest is greatly improved over last year. Held at the Clarion Hotel just south of SFO Airport, there were a wide variety of gaming to satisfy just about any diversion one could come up with. Being a miniatures fanatic, I have to say that Dave Partak (miniatures coordinator) put together an excellent selection of miniature games over the 4 days. I never noticed any problems with tables or scheduling conflicts and I know this was due to all his efforts over the past few months. THANKS DAVE!

Even with the air-conditioning not working in the miniatures room on one of the hottest days of the year, everyone was in good spirits and enjoying themselves. Quite a few neat miniature games going on during the day. Some of the coolest were Wooden Ships & Iron Men, Assault on Hoth, Pirates!, Chicago Breakdown (KegWars - 20's gangland fighting in HO scale), Mein Panzer demos and of course Circus Maximus (from Friday night).

I played Aerodrome (Stan Kubiak) on Saturday morning and our table was continually surrounded with onlookers watching the small WWI biplanes maneuver around the table. This is a very fun game to play, visually pleasing and entertaining for spectators. I don't know how far Stan has traveled with his set-up, but if you ever get the chance to try Aerodrome, I'd highly recommend it.

After Aerodrome, we hit some boardgames - Cosmic Encounter and Avalon Hill's Starship Troopers (the new one) and Monster's Ravage America. All three are fun, simple and easy to learn - good, as none of us had played MRA and only I had played ST.

There were also quite a lot of other boardgaming events going on and the room always seemed to be quite busy no matter when you looked up. There was Victory in the Pacific, Hannibal, Age of Renaissance, Axis and Allies, Diplomacy, (LOTS of Avalon Hill stuff going on!), Rail Baron, A selection of Cheapass games, Formula De', Settlers....the list was varied and much longer - and this was just Saturday!

Got some great stuff at the Flea Market too: 1st edition Roborally for $10.00 (4 new robot miniatures!) Battle Cry (American Heritage) $20.00 (no missing pieces!) Some AH games to fill the gaps in my collection: Gunslinger, Advanced Civilization, Advanced 3rd Reich, Chancellorsville and Midway. Back issues of the General I'm missing (only 2 to go and I'll be complete back to volume 15)

After a few games more it was time to turn in...but there was Sunday still. 9:00 am. Man O' War. Great game. Played till 2PM. Then more naval miniatures as we hit Pirates!. I had a blast as I tied for highest points (kill the giant shark, sink a couple of ships - and a rowboat!,cause much destruction). We then checked out the Flea Market again and had some food. Then it was some Titan - The Arena, before another really cool miniature AH game conversion - Kingmaker. The guys at the Gauntlet in Modesto (who run the Circus Maximum game as well) did a great job in converting this to a miniatures game. The board was 8' square! A really great game to play or just watch. I left around 9pm as I was suffering from sleep deprivation! There had been just as much going on on Sunday as there had been on Saturday All in all, an excellent time was had by all in our group. One of the really cool things from the weekend:

Seeing two guys playing a Star Wars CCG game at around 11pm on Saturday night. Not unusual you say? They each had over 500 cards in the Force pile. They were at a long table and the planet and site cards spread out about 10 feet. Unbelievable. I loved it.