The entire Workshop crew packed up and went to Ann Arbor last July to attend the Origins 78 convention.

At the warehouse: Rich Banner (front) and Darryl Hany pack Crusaders.

The weekend trip started on Thursday with a levee en masse for the grand packaging session at the warehouse. We took five new games to the convention, and didn't have a single game packed on Wednesday.

Rich Banner spent part of the morning making final arrangements with the printers; the rest of us sat and assembled hundreds of games.

By mid-afternoon, all the cars were loaded, and we started down the highway. This year the trip seemed over before it started, lasting a mere 6 hours as compared to the interminable 19 hours to Baltimore or New York. Once in Ann Arbor, we sent delegates to the exhibitors meeting, and settled down for the only decent night's sleep we would get for the weekend.

Top: Some of the Workshop crew at the game booth.
Bottom: Greg Novak takes a deserved rest from pushing games.

This year's convention was held at the University of Michigan. The campus was a good choice for a convention site, although there were a few problems. One of these problems was the fact that the exhibit hall was not air-conditioned; fortunately, the weather was not too oppressive. The exhibit hall was situated at the top of this huge hill, and it seemed as though the main events alternated between the buildings at the top and the bottom of the hill.

One man complained that the convention was really for mountaineers, not wargamers. To me, the most distressing problem was the absence of the restaurants that usually surround a college campus (the food served at the cafeterias, not surprisingly, was pretty bad).

Much of the action centered around the exhibit hall, where hundreds of gamers and a whole bunch of dealers exchanged money for games at a furious pace. Most of the dealers did pretty well. SPI moved into the convention hall at the last minute, and sold out of their two new games in a matter of hours. Avalon Hill brought a new supplement to Squad Leader which sold out just as quickly (and continued to be sold throughout the con, often at wildly inflated prices, by enterprising gamers).

There was much more emphasis on computer games than at earlier conventions, although the games displayed were much simpler than any boardgame. Surprisingly, Parker Brothers ran a booth at the convention where they gave away copies of Black Box, one of their newer games.

There were plenty of other things happening at the convention: seminars, game demonstrations, contests, and lots of game playing. The convention schedule contained an amazing number of planned events; when I first saw a convention program, I was sure that the sponsors could never make it work. I was wrong: the convention was very well run and everything went smoothly. All things considered, I have to rate Origins '78 as the best convention I have attended. If you were there, I think you probably agree.

Top: Overview of exhibition hall
Bottom: SPI moves in with Mark Herman (right).