I attended my first Fall In convention this past November and it was a pretty good time. I only attended for eight hours total, but that was sufficient. I enjoyed sightseeing as well, including trips to the Monacacy Civil War Battlefield and the USS Constitution. The venue was the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium, Maryland. I arrived late Thursday night after a turbulent plane flight featuring many vomiting travelers (you just can't account for mother nature, can you?). I stayed at the convention hotel, the Holiday Inn Select. The hotel was great! They had a large open lobby with plenty of seating, a bar (YAYYYY!!), pool tables and video games. There appeared to be ample space at the Fairgrounds for gaming, but the hotel meeting rooms were used for quite a few of the games. The hotel was about a mile from the convention site, but there was a trolley providing frequent shuttle trips back and forth. Nevertheless, having some games in the hotel certainly made it less likely they would be seen and attended by the gamers, especially if they weren't staying in the hotel! The food at the convention was definitely a cut above that seen at our local conventions and it was cheaper as well. They even had beer! The dealer area was a sight to behold...too much lead, not enough time! The flea market was a major disappointment though. The space allocated for it was small and the hours allotted for the flea market were few. Too bad. There was a nice variety of games being played Friday and Saturday evening when I attended. The most attractive game, by far, was the 65 foot long Arnhem game in 20mm. The terrain was stunning and the models were well painted. This game always had lots of players. On Saturday night, the crowd at that game was so large that you could not see the table at all! I put a picture from that game on the front cover of this issue. I played in a chariot themed DBA tourney on Friday night. I finished in fourth place, but had a great time. The use of 32" boards seemed to make all of my games nail biters that went right to the wire! I played in a D-Day Airborne Assault game on Saturday night. That game went okay, but Frank Chadwick's nearby demo of Command Decision 4 sucked quite a few players from our table! Chadwick also ran a very large ancient skirmish game featuring hundreds of Romans and Barbarians in 25mm on a very large table. That game sure looked like fun, but I only caught glimpses of it. I hear that the rules are available for free on the internet, but I haven't seen them yet. GW made its evil presence felt with a large number of slickly produced games, but hey, it attracts the youngsters! Maybe the young fantasy players got a glimpse of something historical that they found interesting! Back to Table of Contents The Messenger November 2003 Back to The Messenger List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2003 by HMGS/PSW. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles covering military history and related topics are available at http://www.magweb.com