Thursday Happily, I have the latter half of summer off, having finished teaching the first half of the semester, and I promised myself that late July and August would be my "Summer of Wargaming." So like a Hajji to Mecca, I set off early Thursday morning to arrive in Lancaster in time for a 12:00 Noon game. Alas, the two games for which I'd pre-registered are non-existent. They haven't been canceled; they just no longer exist, and nobody seems to know where they went. So I add two new ones, and of these, one is canceled an hour later, and the other has a scheduling SNAFU, and is delayed two hours. I finally get into a modern naval game. Something I noticed this H-con was the rather large number of games that were set in a sort of campaign. Under normal circumstances, a game is ready to go on the table, and players just show up, take their roles, and go. But this time there were several campaigns and mini-campaigns, in which the game was not set up until the players on opposing teams had made various decisions that would affect that set-up. This is a risky proposition for a convention, I think. And it's usually self-defeating. If you allow the players to spend a lot of time "campaigning," then you've cut into whatever time you've got remaining for a game (and the set-up you'll need for that game.) And if you try to rush the campaign aspect, then it's fairly pointless; the players will arrive at the battlefield in much the same shape and deployment as they would have, if you'd just set the thing up yourself. (And you'd have saved a couple of hours.) After about 90 minutes, we get to the battle table, and begin shooting off our missiles. At the moment of crisis, an attractive woman arrives at the table. She's wearing an amused and puzzled expression. She turns out to be the wife of one of the players. "Are you winning?" she asks her husband. He replies that he'll know in about two minutes. It all came down to a handful of dice rolls as the missiles struck their targets and destroyed the enemy. Game over: we won. "Why couldn't you have just made those die rolls?" she asks. "Why go through all this... other... um, stuff?" He stares at her as if she'd just spoken in a rare dialect of Zulu. I've been wanting to check out a new game system by Famous Author X. He's doing several demos. X's previous designs are generally well-regarded, despite being very complex and slow. I've never gotten through one of his games, but maybe this time, with the author himself there, things will be different. I show up an hour after the scheduled start-time. X is there, chatting happily as he sets up. Nothing is on the table except charts. I come back an hour later; there are some figures on the table now, and a huddle of guys staring at charts. There's still a modicum of optimism, but if something is happening, it's escaped me. I go have dinner. I come back a third time: amazingly, nothing has moved. Faces are growing long around the table. I overhear somebody saying something about moving. A player suddenly perks up at that: "We can move? Can we move now?" "No," someone else says, "He'll let us know." Maybe I lack patience, but to me this exemplifies one of the most common things that people make fun of our hobby: how men can sit at a table virtually motionless for hours, doing nothing, and yet imagine somehow that they're fighting a battle. Friday It's first thing in the morning, and Famous Author X is still there. His stamina is amazing. I can't say the same for some of the players, though. One of them is sound asleep, his head wobbling on his chest. Things have apparently moved after all (See - and where was I? In my bed, no doubt.) The armies are close enough to begin shooting at each other. By tomorrow we should be seeing some melees. Oh Lord, the media's here. A TV wagon is deployed, and a well-coiffed newswoman is chatting to her crew. I just hope that her interviewees are drawn from the "presentable" faction of the hobby: guys who shaved and bathed this morning, and whose vertical measurements are greater than their horizontal ones. I must say, though, that Historicon has changed in the twelve years since I first started coming. We're older now, and smell a lot better. We have wives, steady jobs, shirts with collars. People sometimes complain about "the graying of the hobby," but I'm looking at a convention hall absolutely full of teenagers. The next generation is coming up; many gamer-guys have brought their adolescent children, and there are quite a few girls playing, too, which is something you never would have seen a decade ago. I'm 36 and I actually feel a little elderly in this crowd. I've been thinking about what I call the "Nahh Factor." This always strikes me. I start out with big plans - half a dozen games I just can't miss, things I'm determined to take part in.... and of course I do maybe one-tenth of them. In the end I sleep in, or go get lunch, or just meander through the flea market instead. All of these games look so good in a one-paragraph description, but when you see them all laid out, only a few really grab you. There's a kind of creeping similarity, not to mention the fact that each game is its own little world and culture, and it's a real effort to get your brain into that world and stay there (at least it is for me; I keep wandering if things go slowly, and one thing about convention games is that they usually go slowly..) By dinnertime I'm realizing that real-world terrain is starting to remind me of wargame table terrain. This is very weird. I look out across Route 30 at a rolling hill with several picturesque trees and a farm in the distance, and I think, "Ah, those are Woodland Scenics trees: 14 for twenty bucks..." Life may imitate art, but the landscape imitates Geo-Hex. Another visit to Famous Author X. This started out as a learning experience for me (or at least that was my intent), but now it's become something more like a sit-com. He's lost some people and is trying to recruit more. Through it all, he's been indefatigably cheerful and energetic - a truly amazing performance. I've noticed that he does have a loyal following. Dave Waxtel calls this phenomenon the "Wargame Church," and each game system has it. I suppose this kind of intense arcana does have a certain appeal, like a religion: full of intricate rules, guided by a single prophet, and something that only a few believers can understand.  Saturday I've just had a horrible thought: it's been three days since I've eaten a vegetable. True, there was a tomato slice on my burger, and beer is full of barley, hops, and other vaguely veggie-like things. I did eat an apple yesterday, but that's only because I'd brought it with me, from home. I always do that. This region is not exactly known for diverse or nutritious cuisine. I think even the salads come from a can. But in all fairness, I can't blame it on the locale. There's something about playing wargames that makes people want to eat junk food. I'm as bad as the next guy. Even our game terminology is saturated with this motif: we talk about "beer and pretzel" games, after all. The Lancaster doesn't offer any fresh fruit or even any bread other than junk-white, but even if they did, I doubt many of us would eat it. (Although it would be kind of cute to do an Age of Reason game with red wine and various frilly hors d'oeuvres arranged prettily around the table. I once made a team of Russian players drink vodka before each turn of an Eylau game, and nobody seemed to mind.) Even though I love to tease and make fun of wargames and wargamers, I must admit that each convention reminds me of how genuinely nice most of these people truly are. One of the hobby's greatest pleasures is making friends around a game table of total strangers. You arrive, you shake hands and learn names, and then you spend a couple of hours together, playing. From that point on, at the very least, each time you see that guy in the hall, you smile and say Hello. You've got this little adventure that you shared. It can lead to life-long friendships. (My closest friend, who was best man at my wedding, and whose children I've watched growing up, I first met across a game table.) I think perhaps that men have trouble making friends unless we have a project. We're not as openly social as women, and there are fewer things we like to do in groups. Wargaming is one of those things that gives men an excuse to be little boys together, to go back to those days when making friends was indeed easy. (And of course it involves violence, or at least the simulation of violence, which is a must-have, if any of us boys is to have a good time!) Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I can go back to my normal sarcastic self. I've been wandering the dealer area, and there are no new rules that grab me this season. Usually I collect rules, and snatch up several at each convention; I'm fascinated by the ways people model reality. Although I haven't bought any new rules sets this time, I have noticed something odd about many of the thicker ones that are on sale. On the back covers, where the author is supposed to give a sales-y little pitch and summary of the game's good points, many of these rules are described as "playable." (As in: "Nappy's Big Day is a fun, playable set of Napoleonic rules that allows you to.... blah blah.") Am I alone in finding that a really strange thing to say? If games are not meant to be playable, then what are they meant for? This would be like advertising bananas as "edible," or doing an ad for a car, and calling it "drivable." The mere fact that you've described your rules as "playable" makes me immediately suspicious. Do you normally play un-playable games? I've run two games, and I'm exhausted. They went very well, but I've nearly lost my voice, and my head is swimming. My hat is off to guys like Famous Author X, who seem to run on Perpetual Wargame Energy from Thursday straight through to Sunday afternoon. I can't hang with the big boys, apparently. (It must be that apple I ate yesterday... if I'd stuck with the pizza slices and chips, I'd probably be fine.) Sunday Ah, the blessed return home. The hotel bill always comes as a shock. I give myself a budget, usually a couple hundred bucks, and inevitably I'm proud of myself for having stayed under that budget and not gone wild buying stuff. But then comes the hotel bill, which is usually more than all the purchases combined, and I realize that what I've really bought is time. So as I'm driving home I'm asking myself: was it worth it? Of course it was. It was a wonderful time. New friends and old, wins and losses on the game table, and even just wandering around taking in the spectacle of the entire hobby massed in one spot. It's easy to feel isolated as a wargamer. Much of what we do is private: painting, reading, and so on. Most colleagues or co-workers don't even know about our hobby, as if it's some dirty little secret. So it's always edifying to see it sprawling out like this, with more people and stuff than the eye can possibly take in at once. My wife asked me what we should make for dinner tonight. "Vegetables," I said. And then I pulled out my new 25mm Polish infantry and tugged open the bag.... Back to MWAN # 120 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2002 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com