Saturday

Jeff Ball and Peter Hess were running continuous Renaissance Warfare games all day Saturday. Bruce and I had an Ancients Warfare demo scheduled for 2:00, so we had the morning free. We decided to check out some of the other games and saw Duke Siefried's massive 15mm pirate game. He used large cylinders to lift the ships up to 5' high off the floor. The players walked around in the imaginary 'seas'. Quite a spectacle with Spanish, British and pirate ports as well as islands to fight over.

Next, we saw the RW game. This looked terrific, with hundreds of 25mm Foundry figures beautifully painted. I got the impression that there were quite a few less games being put on this year as all the ones listed were virtually all booked and there were empty tables at Distlefink on Saturday afternoon, unusual in the past.

As time for our game arrived, we had to scramble to find an area to set up where we were scheduled to play. There were two RW games going on and we didn't want to tear one of them down, so settled for a shorter area then we planned on. This meant scrapping several units per side and crowding the remaining units together. It worked, but barely.

The game was hard fought. We used the same scenario from two years ago, the Battle of Tunes, Carthaginian 1st Punic War vrs. Regulus' Romans. The Romans managed to squeak out a marginal win as the legions dealt with the Celtic warbands. The Carthaginian elephants and chariots never were utilized, leaving the fighting to the unarmoured Celts. Still, the Carthaginian cavalry pushed ahead with vigor, but paid for their valour by riding into the midst of the Roman army and being flanked.

The evening MW demo game saw two young gamers (pre-teens) with their dads' coaching them. They each handled a division. This demo featured WoR English against (who else) my Scots. Again, it was a hard-fought battle with the Scots coming off the worse for wear as the English managed to smash the Scots right while holding in the center and left. That evening we reviewed the previous two day's and Bruce and I determined that our role in running AW and MW demo games had come to an end. Other players were putting on the AW, MW and RW games and we could direct our energies into the tournaments (AW in 25mm and MW in both scales on Saturday at Fall In).

Sunday

Apparently, we had spent much of the previous evening commiserating and stayed up much too late. I dragged myself through the dealer's area one last time and bid goodbye to Historicon 2000. It was a lot of fun, but exhausting. Still, we talked on the way home of Fall In only four months away. I can't wait….

Historicon 2000 Thursday and Friday