Three of us, John Shirey, Fred Haub and I, went to the NOVAG convention in Northern Virginia. This NOVAG was a one day affair... other NOVAG conventions are usually held for two days. The NOVAG people had leased one ballroom, approximately 60 feet by 60 feet (say 400 square feet) at the local RAMADA. There were some 20 gaming tables set up, and around the periphery of the room, dealers and flea-marketeers were set up. I have no idea of the cost of renting a flea market table, but the admission fee, for me, was five dollars, fairly reasonable. We arrived about 11 AM, and in truth, after wandering around the room for an hour, I had seen everything and was ready to go home. I realize that this is not really a fair assessment, for the convention booklet listed 21 games, starting at 9 AM and ending up at 6 PM. It's just that I'm not a 'gamer' at conventions... I stroll from table to table, humming and hawing, looking for things new and innovative. On a table some 15 feet long by 5 feet wide, a huge, huge, huge WARHAMMER game was set up. The battle was fought along the narrow width, the 5 foot dimension, which meant that only a small portion of all the troops on the table could ever make contact at any one time. But the kiddies at the table seemed to be enjoying the proceedings. Fred Haub left early, and John Shirey got himself involved in a racing game, hosted by Brian Dewitt. There were 12 cars (each about 3 inches long) in the grand prix race, and to this observer, it seemed to proceed as slow as molasses... it was impossible to pry John away from his race, and he was determined to continue as long as his tires had any rubber on them. I think that 'tire longevity' was indicated by a series of chits, and John was down to his last two chitties, when he finally gave up. While John was racing, I cornered a fella named Dave Rey, who had laid out on the table an 'area game' of the mid-east. The game took place around 900 AD, when all the Arabic tribes were bashing each other for supremacy in the region. Dave's rule book was rather large, and he said that it was, in effect, his Master's thesis, written to portray and game the sociological, religious and military interactions between the tribes of that era. I spent an hour or so with Dave, trying to understand how he had modeled his gaming structure. There were a couple of micro-armor games; in each one, each tank fired individually, making for long, involved fire phases. They didn't look interesting. Cleo and Bob Liebl, PW members, had set up a large FIRE AND FURY encounter, using their nicely painted collection of 25mm figures, plus a set of their 2-feet by 2-feet terrain boards. And after they had hosted the ACW game, they sat down to play a 15mm game of NAPOLEON'S BATTLES. I watched 'em for a while, and then asked why the casualty cap box contained so many different colored caps. The colors represented disordered units, and broken units, and fleeing units, and unhappy units, and sad units, and direct casualties, and cavalry in a 'reaction' mode, and so on. The use of casualty caps are not my cup o' tea. There were about 150 attendees present. Back to PW Review April 1998 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 Wally Simon 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