The visit to Lancaster, PA was quite a bit different this year. First of all, my fiance Susie was along to experience her first HMGS East convention (she had gone with me to Bayou Wars where I was the guest of honor earlier this spring). Historicon is huge, drawing upwards of 4000 people each July. It could be overwhelming and in some ways it was, but we both had a wonderful time and got to enjoy the pool and various restaurants as well as meet literally dozens of wargamers from around the world. Oh, yeah…she is still with me and is planning on going to Fall In at Gettysburg in November if she can arrange to get time off from teaching.

Bruce Taylor accompanied us on the drive down from Rochester. Mitch Abrams and Jeff Ball had an adjoining room to mine, so Bruce roomed with them. We had a very nice first floor poolside room, where we could sit out on the veranda at night and enjoy the warm evenings.

This year, we had a full slate of 20 games on Thursday and Friday in the Paradise Room as well as the two tournaments on Saturday in Lampeter. This would keep the SAGA team very busy! Some last minute problems caused more than a little trouble for some of the game masters, a couple of whom decided not to go after all. For those that did attend, it was interesting!

Jeff Ball was putting on demo games of the WoR battle of Towton with over 2000 25mm figures. This was a very popular game filled with gamers on both days. Unfortunately, one of the games was double-booked, but Jeff managed to accommodate the extra players.

Bruce ran four demos and Mitch ran an incredible six games while Steve DeLucas and Keith Eshelman ran their popular MW 15mm demo.

During the course of the two days, I had a chance to talk briefly with Arty Conliffe of ARMATI fame as well as Rob Broom of WAB. It is always interesting to get different perspectives on the hobby from men of their caliber. Arty was there to support the new Armati II and Rob, of course, was over to check out and play in the WAB tournament.

I also had the opportunity to talk for a time with my old friends Herb Gundt of H.G. Walls and Phil Viverito designer of the Hack games. Russ Lockwood of MAGWEB is always a welcome face as is Howard Whitehouse who I didn't have the time to get together with at length, but still we got to touch base. As far as the convention itself, there were over 600 events scheduled over the four days and it was evident from the large numbers of happy gamers than any and all periods of military history were well represented. One strange thing with my VW game (discussed in another article later in this issue), was that the HMGS board had all the tickets still left…i.e. no one had signed up for my game! Yet, a half hour later, all the slots were filled and everyone had a ticket. Good! That had me worried for a bit.

On Saturday, we had our two tournaments; two rounds each with MW in 25mm and AW in 15mm. I played in the 25mm Medieval Warfare later period tournament (we had enough players to break the tournament into an early Medieval and a late Medieval section). My Teutonic Order (circa 1242) were first paired against Ed Bernhard's Japanese…drang nach Osten went a bit too far…. Ed attempted to assault my lines of crossbowmen and longbowmen protected by my long spear-armed heavy infantry and supported by my fully mailed cavalry.

I was happy to see two of his units break and rout from concentrated missile fire (in MW once you lose a stand of figures, you must take a morale check…the more stands you lose, the worse the result). But he paid me back the compliment, forcing me to lose two routing units as well. I causally told him that it was virtually impossible to rally routers, but we both were going to try (in our cases, we each had to roll a 10 on a d10 to do so. Ed rolled a 10 and I rolled two 10's! So much for hard to do….

At game's end, we had both managed to slaughter a large number of each other's troops without breaking either army! In fact, losses were so high that we ended with a 5-5 tie.

For the next round, I was matched against the Chief Umpire's (or Chump's) army…Rob Robertson's Swiss. I watched as Rob successfully rolled for his terrain picks (he had a charismatic commander in chief, giving him an advantage when rolling for terrain) while my own choices were either lost or ended up on Rob's side of the board. This was not good.

Rob had woods along his line and I tried to turn his left flank but was hit by ambushing fanatics who swarmed all over my crossbowmen as they (I) foolishly sent them within an inch of those woods…triggering the ambushers. My archery was no match for his long ranged artillery. I was totally outranged and had to pull my own troops back behind a hill to avoid further losses…but a longbow unit was forced to roll morale and routed.

Mercifully, the game ended with Rob having an 8-2 win. Live and learn….

Saturday night, we had our SAGA meeting in the bar and went over a few things for next year. Then as we were exhausted from the convention, we headed off to rest up for the long trip home on Sunday. All in all, a great time and we are looking forward to Fall IN!