Historicon 2010 Part Two: Uncle Duke's Diamond Jubilee

The high point of Historicon for me was Duke Seifried's Diamond Jubilee. At 75, "Uncle Duke" has decided to retire from his "extravaganzas" and used Historicon as his last hurrah. He and his crew brought a dozen of his fantastic games to run all weekend:

This is the British Colonial Khyber Pass game using The Sword and the Flame I played Friday afternoon. British and Sikh troops had order to clear the Pass of tribesman. Our plans went horribly wrong. Despite dispatching the tribesman in the village at the far end of the board early on, they regrouped and pinned my left flank in their starting position. The center had small groups of tribesmen harassing the center's artillery positions. Only the right flank move into the mountains and routed the tribesman.

The Zulu! game I played Saturday afternoon. The near end is Rorke's Drift and the far end is Isandlwana. I teamed up with my British Commander at Khyber Pass, Scott Salvatore, and we ran the Zulus as vicious and savage as we could, running roughshod over two young boys in their early teens playing the British. Despite claiming they had played in a few other Zulu War games, they failed to keep the lines tight and fall back when needed, so I'm pretty certain, unlike the movie Zulu, Michael Caine died this time.

The Medieval Siege Game

Aztecs vs. Conquistadors

ONE HALF of the Ancients Game

My wife toured the "Duke Room" which had a few other games as well, and commented, "Did this guy do anything else or have a job? This is way too time consuming."

Well my memory might be shaky, but he has been a wargamer since he was a young boy, a writer of rules, a sculptor of thousands of figures, which have sold in the tens of thousands from the '60s and '70s and later. He was EVP of TSR and was instrumental in the mass market distribution of the red and blue box D&D sets in Waldenbooks, etc.

From ArmchairGeneral.com:

"Apart from his life in lead—the material miniature soldiers used to be molded from—he graduated from Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, in 1957 with a degree in Speech/Radio-Television and later participated in an oral history of that school. He talks about his work as a director in children’s television in Ohio when TV was black and white. Later, he got into advertising and wrote jingles for Frigidaire. A talented guitarist, he was part of The Cool Jazz Trio with Connie Austin and Wayne Wiley in Madison, Wisconsin."

Uncle Duke was one of the men who got me into Historical Wargaming. Orgins '95 was in Philadelphia that year, and my buddy Wooly and I came down to demo Legions of Steel. The miniatures section of the con was dominated by Duke's Norwest Frontier game, with his wraparound backdrop and lighting (every four foot had a lamp attaced to it about seven foot high, hot as hell, but awesome for photography.) I didn't know who that dude was, but dammit I wanted to be like him and his... professional way of promoting a silly hobby.

Oh yeah, all the boards pictured here are for sale, in fact nearly everythings for sale. Here's the link:

http://www.historicon.org/HIST2010/files/TheUncleDukeCollection.pdf

I will just note that, through a credible source, the Northwest Frontier game I was playing in Friday had already sold.... for $20,000!