Another July, another Historicon missed. After suffering through late night Saturday traffic on I-95 between Washington and Fredericksburg on our return trip to Florida, coupled with a flurry of domestic reasons not to go, I skipped Historicon yet again.
But that doesn't mean I can't make some keyboard commander comments.
I could do a pro/con review of the reviews but it's the same list of complaints and praise I've heard at every HMGS I've actually attended since 1997. Okay, no one found mold at the FCC and if someone ate the hall pig at the con this year and had stomach issues, they were hallucinating (but not off the truck exhaust in the dealer area) but most of the issues have been mentioned ad nausem.
My intrepid
Gaming with the Gnomies on-the-scene reporter Mike Lung has sent me reports and pictures since the con moved to Virginia. This year he was a bit more focused on the dealer hall, the flea market, the gnome games, and a Great Northern game, so he only managed to send me gnome pics.
To offset this, I've pooled together the best pics from Historicon posted on other blogs (if it's good enough for those clickbait sites, it's good enough for me!). Unlike the clickbait sites, everything is linked and documented to ensure the appropriate blog gets credit (and hopefully lots of hits).
The blogs have been slow to add AARs, so that means either many bloggers didn't attend, or they're needing an extra day or three to recover from the weekend. I may add additional pics and links as they seem fit.
The Sound of Music - The Wargame! sounded dreadful, but coming from the folks who did Les Mis and Spamalot!, the results are fun, zany, and simply breathtaking? Did this count as a WW2 game? Inter-War? Or was it the dreaded "Non-Historical?"
I'm never in the typical demographic guys, but the pics like the Kashmiri Gate one above get me excited about games much more than another full-board pic of someone's 10mm Napoleonic/WW2/ACW table taken from 20 foot away.
THIS is THE picture of the con. The HAWKS Armies for Kids Giveaway is a great program that needs more support. We are all still welcome to sit around a table full of oversized, graying gentlemen and debate epaulets colors on uniforms and tread sizes on vehicles, but making this a family experience that's fun and educational is what I prefer all the HMGS cons to be, nationwide. I read one of the AARs from a member on TMP who had "Grandpa Time" with his grandkids the entire weekend, and despite straying off in to non-historical land, the whole group had a blast. I got a little "End of Field-of-Dreams-y" after reading it, but that is the type of response I want from my kids and hopefully grandkids one day. (My eldest, Maja, is only 6, so I have a loooong time to wait. She won't make her official HMGS debut for another year or three.)
Again, guys, this Battlegroup Kursk picture makes me interested in playing the game. and I'm not interested in WW2.
The posts from
O My Ruritania! (above) are sporadic, but boy are they worth the wait.
I just went on a mini-rant on TMP about how non-historical games are usually eye-popping and that Naps/ACW/WW2 all look the same from 15 feet. If this was the first Napoleonic game I ever witnessed many moons ago, I would have dove in head first and never looked back.
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