HISTORICON '93 took place over a four day span at the end of July in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A very successful affair ...many games, many attendees, many tables, many dealers, many everythings...
I noted only two small problems throughout the whole affair. One was the lack of general cleanup by the hotel staff in the playing areas. At prior conventions, I had been impressed by the efficient way the areas had been rapidly and quickly policed. This time, however, the garbage was allowed to accumulate... lots of paper plates, soda cans, potato chip bags...
The other problem centered on the lack of an HMGS floor manager. Perhaps there is a floor manager, but he wasn't around when needed. In one instance, Fred Haub was scheduled to put on a game Saturday night, and he discovered that his tables had been taken over by other parties. Mr. Haub was somewhat embarrassed; the erstwhile Haub participants placed the blame on Fred, of course, and he had no one else at whom to point the finger. This wasn't the first time this had occurred.
HMGS Meeting
At the HMGS meeting, it turned out the "old guard" was re-elected to the Board of Directors, and in addition to the old timers, Tod Fisher, of THE EMPEROR'S HEADQUARTERS located in Chicago, found himself on the Board. I simply cannot fathom why a man who lives in Chicago wants to be on the Board of HMGS-East. I have to give credit where credit is due... thus far, none of our HMGS-East Board members has expressed a desire to run for the Chicago HMGS organization.
Pat Condray, after a brief absence, was also back on the Board. The night before the elections, I had a talk with Pat about what HMGS should do and should not do concerning improving or enlarging the scope of the HMGS conventions. For the most part, the Condray philosophy is (a) the format of the conventions seem to attract wargaming hobbyists from all over the country (attendance increases each year), (b) the conventions are profitable, money-making institutions, therefore (c) why mess with a working system?
I have to admit I voted for Mr. Condray... I did not vote for Mr. Fisher.
Pat was awarded the HMGS Scruby Something-Something award; the plaque was presented by Don Featherstone. Recipients of this award form a fairly select group... the membership is solely comprised of Don Featherstone, Dick Bryant and Pat. At the award dinner, as one of several speakers, I stood on the podium and tried to think of nice things to say about Pat.
I reminisced about the "old days", when HMGS was run by the triumvirate of Condray, Coggins and Simon, and what was most interesting to me was that I completely forgot about the fact that it was Pat that ran the conventions way back then.
'Twas Condray that first acted as coordinator and program manager, and as a one-man-band, he organized everything from soup to nuts. The only memories I conjured up for my brief presentation at the award ceremony concerned Pat's activities as HMGS Treasurer, a role to which he easily adapted in keeping HMGS on the straight and narrow as far as expenditures were concerned.
Wanderings
For some three days, I wandered the halls of HISTORICON, sitting and taking notes of "clever" presentations. One game that stood out above the others - if only for loudness - was the Tod Fisher Tuileries game... an assemblage of 2-foot-tall buildings, the Swiss Guard, the Royal Family, the Sans Culots... in 25mm... the whole schmear, all of which was supposed to end with the beheading of the King. Mr. Fisher had imported, not only his buildings, but a fullscale, life-size guillotine.
Tod had also imported a loudspeaker and a tape player; he presented a couple of games, and at each, he insisted that the entire assembled throng in the crowded gaming area listen to his loudly played music. I turned down the volume once, and he evidently thought me exceedingly discourteous; the volume was immediately turned up again.
As for the Tuileries, it kept some 20? 30? gamers busy, with the King's supporters shouting "Vive le Roi!" and the peasants shouting "Less filling and nutritious!" All very historic.
Through it all, Tod stood there, outfitted in what I believe is a jet black Marshal of France's costume, complete with a huge feathered (but hairy looking) bicorne; Tod is not a small person, and he resembled a huge, black, hairy Bigfoot.
Another notable presentation was that of Duke Sifried's... he, too, has the habit of using a loudspeaker so that all may note his presence. But his terrain made up for his lapse. He had an absolutely beautiful table, some 7-feet-wide and 20-feet-long, for his British colonial game: hills, crags, rocks, roads, rivers, bridges... awe-inspiring.
There were some 10 people on each side of the table, and while I watched, all were sitting, sitting, sitting... not a muscle was moved. Then Duke announced "Three units move." Which meant that out of the 20 players, 3 actually did something while the 17 others remained immobile. And people sign up for these games... ?
After many, many conventions, I actually attended a lecture: one by Professor Christopher Duffy on the battle of Borodino. The lecture lasted an hour and a half, and Fred Haub had to awaken me only once, stating that I was snoring and disturbing our neighbors.
I sat down to watch a game using PANZERSTURM rules... a WWII presentation in 6mm resembling Marketgarden. The very beginning of the game consisted of a parachute and glider drop of Allied troops.
The host took out a model of a C-47 transport, and asked the Allied commander: "Where do you want it?" He then plunked the model down, and began dicing... first for anti-aircraft fire, then for dispersion of the parachute troops, then for casualties taken by the troops, then for their reaction.
After all this, the gliders landed; "Where do you want it?" and the gliders were plunked down. More dicing.
I was disappointed at the non-use of the aircraft. They didn't "fly"; they merely "appeared" at a given point. There were a couple of other WWII games which had a similar procedure... one wonders why they even used the models.
The only published game, with which I'm familiar, and which actually moves aircraft around the field in interesting fashion, is HARPOON. In fact, Simon's WWII rules use a couple of procedures I borrowed from HARPOON. Here, the aircraft actually move across the field in historically accurate fashion.
Another misuse of models was noted in a game involving ACW ironclads. The terrain was exceptionally well done; river bends, forts, etc., and 3-inch long models. The problem was that when a ship was sunk, it was tipped over on its side! Bad! Bad!
Tom Elsworth and I watched a 25mm Franco-Prussian game hosted by Dick Bryant. The figures are colorful, impressive and large... Tom noted that because of the size of the figures, the battlefield appeared to be too crowded for the era; the presentation more resembled that of a Napoleonic game. If 15mm figures had been used, the field would have seemed emptier, akin to the late 1800 era.
We did a quick calculation. The table measured approximately 6' by 10', 60 square feet in all. There were about 38 units (battalions?) on the field, and each occupied about 15 square inches, so that all the figures (both sides) took up some 4 square feet.
A total of 4 square feet out of 60 is only 6 percent, hence the battle field was definitely not crowded; it was only the size of the figures that made it appear so.
Under Fire WWII Skirmish
In one room, a modern WWII skirmish was presented. The rules were called UNDER FIRE! and they looked awfully familiar. The host had about a dozen 54mm troops on each side, and each man in the skirmish was represented by 3 poses: prone, kneeling and standing. When a man fired his weapon, he added, to a base percentage for the weapon, 3% for every round fired. And if "blind fire" occurred, i.e., the target wasn't initially visible and the man had to move to see it, the probability-of-hit was multiplied by 1/4. And the firing procedures consisted of 2 phases... first, was the target hit?, and second, what was the injury?
By George!... but these rules looked awfully familiar... perhaps, I thought, the man had done his research in the PW REVIEW.
About the only thing with which I could quibble were the firing modifiers. After the basic probability-of-hit was obtained, it still had to be multiplied by various cumulative factors. Multiply by 0.7 if the man was in cover, by 0.7 if the target was prone, by 0.5 if the target was running, etc. The calculations slowed down what was otherwise a fast moving game.
The table had some 19 54mm-size houses on it, an impressive set-up. I asked the host how he had developed his game. All his own ideas, he said. I asked if he had ever read WARGAMER'S DIGEST in the mid seventies. "WARGAMER'S DIGEST?", he said, "What's that?"
I didn't ask if he read the PW REVIEW. I know when to quit. "Nice game." I said, which, indeed, it was, and wandered on.
ECW
In one room, a 10-foot wide table was covered from edge-to-edge with 15mm ECW figures. Many, many stands... a cavalry unit, for example, appeared to have 16 stands, arranged in 2 ranks of 8 stands each.
This was a DBM game, the WRG successor to DBA. There were lots of DBM presentations at the convention; this ECW set-up seemed most interesting.
Due to the number of stands, the ECW game went rather slowly. DBM employs a stand-on-stand combat resolution procedure, and because of the huge number of stands on the field, the resultant crowded battlefield, and the fact that a stand couldn't move without bumping into its neighbor, there were more than the ordinary number of typical DBA/DBM questions concerning pivoting and flanking and fall backs, etc.
One of DBM's more favorable aspects is that it is a fast moving game. Not so here. In an effort to accommodate a huge crowd at tableside, the host nulled the quick-play factor; too many stands, too many players.
Alamo
Jim Petrie set up a large 54mm Alamo game... 185 Muricans against an infinite number of Mexicans. This was supposedly oriented toward the kiddies, but I saw several 6-foot, 250-pound, bearded kiddies hiding amongst the smaller participants.
The walls of the Alamo were each about 10 feet long, hence the 185 Muricans had to man 40 feet of wall. The Mexican attackers started their charge about 5 feet from the walls. A "stand" of Mexican soldiers contained 50 figures; about 12 stands surged forward on the first attack.
Every 10 Mexicans fired (a stand had 5 shots), while every Murican on the wall could fire. The defenders seemed "cannon heavy" and the Murican cannons were devastating... on each shot, a cannon rolled three 6-sided dice and the total was the number of downed Mexicans. On the side near me, 2 Murican fire phases wiped out 30 of the 50 on an attacking stand, and the stand was still some 2 feet from the wall. Not to worry; Santa Anna had more stands in the wings.
Airplanes
Craig Taylor presented a series of airplane-on-airplane games. The first was a WWI effort, the second pitted WWII prop-driven planes against each other, and the third had jet aircraft flying around. The planes were mounted on a vertical dowel; they were all at the same elevation. Actual height was denoted by a little chitty placed at the base of the stand. In the WWI game, although the individual planes in a squadron could each go to different heights (there were 6 aircraft in a squadron) they all had to assemble at the same height to fire.
There were 72 planes in the WWI encounter; 2 hits knocked a plane down. About 2 hours into the game, one-third of the aircraft had been destroyed.
My thought was that since all the aircraft were mounted at the same level, remained at the same height, and performed all maneuvers in the horizontal plane, this completely killed the 3-D aspect. The game could have been presented on the table-top.
Back in the Simon toy-soldier-laboratory-cum-basement, there is a number of WWI aircraft, each with several stands of varying heights. The planes are mounted via magnets set into the bottom, top and sides of the fuselage, hence when a turning maneuver takes place, the plane is canted to one side at a 90 degree tilt. I haven't toyed with these aircraft for a decade... the Taylor game awakened my interest in the models.
1812
For some 5 minutes, I watched a game presented by Bob Marshal... an 1812 epic featuring Muricans, Brits and Indians. This game, too, had a sequence, inherently slow in nature, in which a card was picked to ascertain which brigade could move. There were 4 players per side; only one of the eight did anything at any given time.
Bob indicated the "casualty rates" were low... a unit tossed from 8 to 10 dice, and only a "1" was a hit.
Five minutes after I sat down to watch, the Indians on the field reached a town... a toss of "4,5 or 6" and they found the liquor barrels and started drinking and becoming obstreperous. Obviously, he who wrote the rules does not subscribe to the current trend of political correctitude and Native American folklore.
Given the slowness of the sequence and the low casualty rates, I decided that this was not a spectator's game, and I moved on.
Micro-armor
In the center of the gaming area, I noted a set-up which completely fooled me as to its content.
There was a large, green table, about 8-feet by 8-feet, and on the table there appeared to be two islands, complete with little houses and roads, etc. In one corner of the field, I noted some little tokens... Aha! I said, these tokens were obviously the invading fleet, come to conquer the islands.
Then I approached the table and looked closely. The little tokens were not ships, they were microarmor tanks! The islands were not islands, they were cities. This was a 6mm microarmor game... and I ran off as fast as my feet could carry me.
ECW
Vic Schmidt put on a fairly extensive battle between two elven forces. In truth, with pikes and archers and musketeers and cavalry, the game was an ECW affair, and I watched while Vic set it up. He had some 5 gamers per side, and it took the participants some 20 minutes to choose the units they commanded.
"I'll take the archers." "No, I'll take the musketeers." 'No, you take the pikes." "No, he wants the archers." "But I've got the pikes." And so on, and so on, and so on.
After this agonizing delay (agonizing to me, since I wanted to see how the rules worked), Vic commenced to give his introductory spiel.
Alas! Vic spoke and spoke and spoke. I gave up. About the only thing I discovered about the game is that each officer figure had a number - 1 or 2 - which entitled him to that many dice rerolls. Any dice throw could be rerolled: morale, melee, firing, etc.
Yes, I gave up. 'Twas a shame, since the presentation on the field was impressive. A colorful array of 12-inch hexes, whereon movement was from hex to hex.
Full Thrust Sci-Fi
And in my wanderings, I actually played a game! Fred Haub and I came across a very unhappy fella, tears running down his cheeks, sitting all alone beside a 6x6 table. No one, he said, no one wanted to play with him. I felt a great empathy for the man... many times, no one wants to play with me either.
And so Fred and I sat down tableside. The rules: FULL THRUST, a futuristic game of spaceships and beam weapons. Fred and I each had a battlecruiser and assorted support ships. Like Craig Taylor's airplane presentation, the game was played in a single horizontal plane... no 3-D at all... so that, in effect, what emerged was no more than a shin-to-shin encounter on the high seas.
Each ship had "maneuverability points", with each point enabling it to turn 30 degrees. My little frigate, the Jetsam, with 6 points, could fly rings around Fred's huge cruiser, the dreaded Fluffy, which had only 2 points.
For about five turns, the Jetsam circled the Fluffy, knocking off hull boxes, while the Fluffy remained powerless to strike back, since the Imperial Galactic Spaceship Design Section had failed to mount any rearward-facing weapons on the craft. An obvious oversight... for which heads will roll at Imperial headquarters.
Then I made a fatal error... I miscalculated the turning rate of the Jetsam and ended my move in front of the Fluffy. The ship's commander immediately brought all 3,000 guns to bear on the Jetsam. FOOMP! and she was no more.
Fred and I battled away for about an hour before I had to wave the white flag of surrender from the bridge of my own dreaded dreadnought, the Rugcutter.
We then shook hands with our host, who had regained his faith in humanity, and left.
Knights
Bruce McFarlane, down from Alberta, Canada, put on games demonstrating HABITANTS AND HIGHLANDERS (HAH), and an effort on feudalism/knighthood/chivalry, both publications of the Canadian Wargamers Association. The HAH effort was a scenario of the attack on Fort Ticonderoga, which looked interesting. It was obvious that there were great prospects in store for these rules, if only because of one factor... each side, each turn, dices for the number of actions given to its units.
I watched the feudalism/knighthood/chivalry affair, and here I noted that the commanding officers (knights) of each side were mounted on a stand pierced with several holes in which a peg could be placed to denote the officer's status. There was another chitty, which, I think, had to do with the officer's outlook: belligerent, cautious, etc. Although not a chitty lover, it was a pleasure to see a game in which the officers actually had some effect on the battle.
Cog Wars
COG WARS was next... a sea battle between ships loaded with crossbowmen and boarders, a la LIMEYS & SLIMEYS. This affair was notable for only one thing... the absolute inability of the players to use a simple right triangle to determine how to orient the ship in making a 45 degree turn. The gaming host displayed an infinite amount of patience, continually circling the table, helping all and sundry in moving their ships.
The ships were about 3 inches wide, 6 inches long, and were equipped with cannon, 5 crossbowmen, and a dozen other 15mm people armed with swords and spears. The game was not exciting.
Then there were the Silly Hat Games (SHG). Every convention, someone has to put on an SHG. Here, there were two. Tod Fisher did it in his Tuileries game... the revolting French peasants all had on their red cloth -hats. And another SHG concerned itself with microarmor. The helmeted players (Germans) versus the brown and purple berets (British). The terrain was composed of what looked like a million 5-inch hexes. Very nicely done.
I make no secret of the way I feel about microarmor games. And the silly hats did nothing to change my mind.
I was drawn to another nicely presented affair... lots of colorful knights and pennants. There were many, many single mounted figures... knights, footkniqhts, peasants, etc., coupled with a goodlooking castle.
I approached tableside, and sat down to observe. There were 8 participants and they, plus the umpire, stared at the table, and stared at the table, and stared at the table... no movement. Another game of immobility.
So help me, I waited a full five minutes, detecting no motion at all in either the players, the figures, or the umpire. What they were staring at, or why, escaped me. I wandered off.
Flea Market
The HISTORICON flea market was as busy as ever. Bob Coggins, the Program Manager, who has as much love for flea markets as I have for microarmor, had set the flea market up, as usual, in a dark, unlit part of the convention area. Then, after everyone's eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he said: "Get thee into the sunlight!" and all the flea-marketeers moved their tables onto the patio, in 100 degree weather, flooded by some 20 million candlepower of direct sunlight, so that all were appropriately blinded.
Speaking of lights, the main convention floor area was not that well lit. The ceiling is a low one, and the spotlights mounted therein leave some corners unlit. Several people, who were hosting games, had evidently noted this in the past, and they came equipped with their own bank of floodlights to ensure the participants could see the tables.
Lead figures were still being sold in the dealers' area... no one seemed to push the pewter issue. MINIFIG, however, had a huge sale, attempting to divest itself of its 15mm lead inventory. MINIFIG has already switched to pewter, anticipating an eventual government mandate to do so.
Tod Fisher, at the HMGS meeting, presented an optimistic view of the goings-on in New York State. He indicated that Governor Cuomo was a figure collector and apparently was interested in giving the hobby special dispensation, and that the New York State legislature was on the verge of enacting a law favorable toward us.
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