From: "Ted Kim (Random Dude)" Subject: FOXCON 2 FOXCON2 was held over the 1997 Veteran's day weekend at the Chase Suites hotel in Fullerton, CA. I was only able to attend Saturday 8 November. Before I forget too much of what happened, I thought I should write some kind of report. Last FOXCON, Alan Bell just happened to be around for the con. This time another overseas gamer/CONSIM member, Markus Stumptner, just happened to in LA at the same time. Many of the usual suspects were there as well, including Danny Holte, Perry Andrus, Joe Youst, Alan Emrich, Richard Hazlett, Joe Miranda and the whole Cummins family. Bill Alderman came down from the SF Bay Area to participate also. I saw about 20 people there. The small con was setup in two rooms. One conference room was the playing area. The other room had a moderately small selection of titles of new and used titles. This was not quite the previously announced wide selection of 500 titles. Of course, there was plenty of Decision Games stuff, since they were the organizers of the con. The small selection allowed me to restrict myself to just purchase one item: a new (AH) Hundred Days Battles. Adjacent to the hotel were various reasonably priced food establishments. Despite the variety available, a group of us ended up eating at Spoons for both lunch and dinner. Danny and Perry played DAK for most of the day. Other games being played included: PanzerGruppe Guderian, Krieg!, SPQR and (SPI) Sicily. Maps of various Decision products were on display including Risorgimento and parts of the Army Group South reissue. The two Joes (Youst and Miranda) demoed First Arab-Israeli War. Alan Emrich showed off the upcoming Royal House game, which Alan and Kos are working on. My own saga started with a game of Ring of Fire with Markus. My unbroken streak of Soviet losses continued unabated. However, I console myself with the idea that each time I am learning something, though I am not quite sure what that is. We played the short Breakthough scenario. Despite maximum application of maximum effort, no actual breakthrough really occurred. My initial attacks from the Vorononezh Front to the north used Katyusha barrages to breach the fort line near Shapino and at 3 positions just to the west of Stavgorodok. This forced Markus to abandon the first fort line. Another barrage helped the Steppe Front wade acrosss the Donets southeast of Kharkov. However, Markus retreated in good order and put humpty-dumpty back together on the second fort line. At one point, I managed to storm across the Donets at Belgorod. However, I could not capture the second hex of city without letting Germans through my lines and thus giving up too many VPs. On the last turn, a series of desperate attacks failed to yield enough VPs to even draw. After the Ring of Fire game, we tried to raise play Lords of the Sierra Madre. However since Danny was still busy with DAK, we could not offer the prospect of burning down Danny's ranch to potential players. As a result, interest in the game fizzled. Instead, Markus, a fellow named Nathan and I played Settlers of Catan. My strategy became one of urbanization. Nathan became the freeway king. But Markus beat us both by buying cards that gave him hidden VPs and the largest army. Later, Bill Alderman introduced Danny, Perry, myself and Markus to Titan: The Arena. At first, this game confused us. Ignorance freed me from trying any flawed strategy and allowed me to tie for the win with Bill Alderman. However, in the second game my showing was not nearly as good. Despite my attempts to convince others to "flush" other creatures, my open AND secret bid on the Ranger doomed me when the Ranger was killed early on. This game is quite a lot of fun. I look forward to getting 3 or 4 other together and trying again. Overall, this small con was a lot of fun, though I went to sleep much too late that night. -ted Ted H. Kim WWW: http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/tek UCLA Computer Science Dept. Phone: (310) 825-7307 Email: tek@ficus.cs.ucla.edu FAX: (310) 825-2273