Convention Report - Cold Wars 2010

HMGS East's spring convention, Cold Wars 2010, was held in Lancaster Pennsylvania (USA) beginning Thursday and ending today (Sunday). The most glaring thing that struck me, having been attending these shows faithfully for well over ten years, is that attendance was way off this year. There were less people in general, the dealer area was not crowded, some of the people I always see weren't there, and from a game mastering perspective, there were many less games being run and therefore less for attendees to do. Wandering through the main ballroom gaming area, I have never seen so many empty tables with nothing going on. The same was true of all the smaller side rooms, where around half the tables were inactive at any point in time. It was sad and disturbing.

The reasons for the lack of attendance are hard to pin down, but are probably a combination of the economy, a very rainy forecast for the weekend (Saturday was an all day downpour), and possibly some dissatisfaction with HMGS over their repeatedly botched handling of the moving of the upcoming Historicon flagship summer con away from Lancaster to another location. But that's a whole different story.

What did I do? Not too much I suppose, when I think back on it. I live about an hour away from Lancaster, a little more with traffic, so I drove up and back Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I played in a couple medieval games, bought a bunch of stuff (more on that in a moment), met and caught up with a bunch of friends that I only see occasionally, and did a lot of wandering and watching. More wandering and watching than anything, really.

As for the spending, I certainly did my part to revive the economy this time around. Having had the bug to get out of the medieval period(s) for a while, my next project will be Seven Years War in 25mm, and to that end I added 10 more bags of Old Glory figs to the small pile of SYW that I already have. The short term plan is that most of the infantry will be packed off to Sri Lanka in short order, and I will begin working on some guns and cavalry, with a few other odds and ends like Prussian grenadiers mixed in.

Other purchases included 3 rules sets: LaSalle, Impetus and Saga's Lace Warfare. Eight feet of JR Miniatures one-inch streams to expand my two-inch river set. A few bags of bases of various sizes from the nice folks at Litko. A few 25mm Ottoman flags from Rick O'Brien (the Flag Dude). Three Conflix brand painted buildings good for anything from early medieval through 1800's. And last but not least, in the effort to get back into playing Napoleonics, enough painted 15mm figs from Gajo to make a small Spanish division and a Portugese brigade. Adding these figures to the French and Brits I already have gives me enough to run a modest sized game on a 6 x 8 table with some troop variability.

Wow, I bought more than I thought...

While talking to Chris Parker (Day of Battle author) I committed to running some 25mm Day of Battle games at Historicon. King of Prussia PA is even closer than Lancaster, and I have been lazy about running games over the last couple of years. So I will sign up for a few games to run. Games that require little or no work beyond what I already have completed, which is the nice thing about being virtually done a few periods. Really the only thing I need is to mail order a few specific flags from the Flag Dude, and then I am done.

As always, going to these shows gets the fire burning again, so I expect that this will trigger a burst of activity on my part. Let's hope. At the very least, I expect to be able to post pictures of the new painted figs that I bought from GAJO, as well as some of the other Napoleonics that I am re-basing.