I had the recent good luck of attending Millennium in Austin. The convention was sponsored and run by the Lone Star Historical Miniatures club. While it was not an HMGS convention, it did feature a large number of historical games (as well as Magic, cards, fantasy role playing, and science fiction gaming). The organizers, Rob Smith and Scott McKinlay, did an excellent job of setting up and running this convention, and there are many lessons to be learned from their success.
Event registration on-line: Like the HMGS East conventions, the Millennium PEL was posted in advance on the convention's web page. Rob Smith incorporated some nice CGI scripts into his web pages so that you could register for events on-line as well. The script registered you for an event and generated an Email confirmation. This confirmation Email also informed the user whether he had gotten a space in his desired event, how much he owed (since some tournaments incurred costs in addition to convention admission), and the address to which to send his check. This was very nice and very convenient.
Confirmation cards in the mail: About a week and half before the convention, I received two post cards in the mail. Since I was scheduled to run two events and play in one I received one card as a game master and one as a convention attendee. The game master card confirmed the events I was supposed to run and the times of those events. The attendee card confirmed the games that I was signed up for and the times of those games. In my case there were no surprises, but if there had been a messed up communication somewhere, we could have fixed the problem before people started showing up at the convention. I think that this was a nice effort for both the convention staff and the gainers.
Convention packet upon arrival: When I arrived at the convention, they handed me an envelope. In it was a nice letter thanking me for running events at their convention. It also provided a nicely worded reminder that I should start my game at the scheduled time, finished at the scheduled time, and clear my table for the next game master as quickly as possible. (Who has not been standing around for 45 minutes waiting for their event to start?) The program booklet, while not of the size of the Cold Wars or Historicon programs, was of the same high quality.
This was a small convention. It probably had 300 attendees. One might argue that these niceties are not scalable to the larger conventions. I disagree.
Since this was an all-genre convention, only about half the games were historical (which seemed to be a high percentage of historical games for a non-HMGS convention). The organizers made a specific attempt to make sure that historical games were interspersed with non-historical games throughout the convention area. I think this was a nice opportunity for the non-historical garners to see what historical gaming is like. From Some of the discussions I had with other people, I think there may have been a couple of converts.
As far as historical games, there was a really nice Gettysburg game using Fire and Fury. The scratch built buildings were excellent. The gate to the cemetery and the Lutheran Seminary were clearly distinguishable. A group of Austin garners ran a couple of really nice WWII games using very modified Command Decision II. Their boccage game was really nice. There was a Battles for Empire game on Friday evening (Russian 1807) and another Sunday morning (France 1814). Friday night Mike Gomez ran an impressive Circus Maximus game. The large 1:900 scale Napoleonic sail game was really a visual treat. I ran my Stalingrad factory fight game, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves (except the SS squad leader who got attacked by Russians with grenades from one direction and Russians with flame throwers from another in the same turn). The 2mm Napoleonic, mini campaign game Saturday morning was also quite nice. The Stirling Bridge skirmish game was really interesting. The Scotts defeated the English by killing both Army commanders and demoralizing the Army. I guess that's what happens when you use the Army commander to lead an assault across a bridge at Scotts waiting in the swamp. It was part of a three-part series of games (Stirling Bridge, Falkirk, and Bannockburn) using modified Warlord rules. And finally, the 24-foot long Battle of Fuentes d'Orono with Napoelon's Battles was really neat. The table size and scale of the game allowed the players to do some very interesting maneuvering during the battle.
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