From: David Ferris Subject: CON: PicaFight: A Survivor's Story The short version: I had a great time at PicaFight, thought it was one of the best small cons I've been to, and was pleasantly surprised at the turnout. For a first-time con, it was very well run, and attendance was healthy enough that the con actually turned a small profit (a pleasant surprise). The long version: I should know better than to sign up to run too many events. I volunteered to run two rather large games (Shipbase III and Generic Legions) and in addition to that, my wife was going to run two games as well (a big game of Legio Genericus and a "retro" fantasy role-playing session using an old edition of the Tunnels & Trolls game). So, Nicole and I had been spending practically all our free time for the past bunch of months painting miniatures, building terrain, and getting rules ready for prime time. After a brief swing by McDonald's for breakfast-like substances (with longing glances at the Indian restaurant which is closed on Saturday mornings) we pulled into the Picatinny Arsenal Officers' Club car park at a little after 9:00 am and started to unload the Van der Tann. We performed the usual game setup incantations and were ready to start playing by the scheduled times. Unfortunately, by 10:00 it was still early and people were still trickling in to the O Club, nobody had signed up for either of our games, and a brief glance around revealed only puttering game masters and no players. A few minutes after I finished laying out the 1:6000 ship miniatures for the naval game, 6 players appeared from nowhere and we began. Unfortunately, only one person showed interest in Nicole's 25mm fantasy miniatures game, the young son of a local gamer. Kyle, a very well-behaved and obviously sharp kid (he must be smart; he likes my games) and Nicole spent the next couple of hours duking it out over a tablefull of lead and seemed to be having a good time. Meanwhile, the Shipbase III game got pretty intense. The scenario (a hypothetical French vs. Italian bloodfest set in 1941) proved to be very balanced, with the victory anvil swinging back and forth like a bad analogy throughout the game. We checked the victory level at the end of every turn, and it was right on the knife-edge all the way through. At one point the Italians were 0.6% ahead of the French. Many ships blew up, with over half of the 20 or so Italian ships going to the bottom. For the longest time, damage to the French was distributed pretty evenly across the fleet, with only the Clemenceau actually being sunk, but in the last turn 5 more French ships bit the big one, one right after the other. Three Italian cruisers went up with quite spectacular magazine explosions. In the end, I gave a minor victory to the French, simply because they limped home with more hulls. Interestingly, this group of players had no trouble pronouncing the French and Italian ship names, so the game went much quicker than it had when my own game group had played this scenario. The SB3 game ran rather late as the players were having a good time and wanted to continue to the bitter end, and nobody had signed up for Generic Legions anyway. A bit of a shame that, as I had spent the better part of the last three months painting sci fi microarmour and infantry, but I'll get to use 'em in Connecticut at Crusades '98 in January. Nobody signed up for Nicole's T&T game either, which didn't bother her at all since that allowed her to run off and play in the Star Wars RPG. I finished the evening with a rousing game of Robo Rally, played with 7 other players who pretended to not be programmers in real life. I got slaughtered, but it was great fun. We had brought along four cartons of Chart Wars to give away to convention attendees. (I had originally thought of forcing everyone who walked in the door to take a copy, but then I realized that is probably considered a form of assault in some states.) The ladies manning the front desk thought it wasn't quite right to just give the games away, so they put a price tag on the cartons: $1 per game. Instantly, copies of Chart Wars started flying out of the boxes. (Can't give the bloody things away, but sell 'em for a dollar and they get snarfed up... mutter mutter mutter...) I was highly amused to note that nearly every woman who walked through the O Club, glancing through the con, was clutching a copy of Chart Wars tightly. Some sort of genetic trait for finding a bargain? You decide. Many thanks and kudos go to John Thomasovich (a Consim-L list member, by the way) and his crew for an excellent job of organizing and running the convention. I highly recommend it when it rolls around again, next year about this time. _____________________________________________________________________ David Ferris Technical Account Manager dferris@research.att.com CGS Computer Associates/AT&T Labs Research Room B221, 973-360-8664 http://www.research.att.com/info/dferris