From: Mark Johnson Subject: Report from the 1st SF Bay Area consim dinner Six of us managed to hook up last night at Buffalo Bill's brewpub in Hayward, though we quickly migrated down the street to The Bistro. BB's was tremendously popular--packed, and noisy, with hardly a place to sit down. Maybe a great place to watch the game or try some of their beers, but not the best for hearing what the other consimmers were saying. The Bistro, by comparison, was pleasantly low-key, and only half-full for most of the evening (a local funk/jazz band (Hip Bones) came on about 9:00 or so, whereupon we settled our bills and moved outside for a while). I hope we didn't miss anyone who showed up the Buffalo Bill's later than about 7:15. Besides myself there was Dave Kohr and Ray Freeman, with Steve Szymanski and Charles Ryder showing up shorly thereafter, and Bill Alderman brought up the rear. The SF Bay Area is a pretty large area, made worse by horrible Friday traffic. We'd chosen Hayward thinking it was semi-central, but as it happened 2/3 of those who showed had driven up from the south bay. I brought Down In Flames and a favorite non-consim, Bohnanza (German card game). Bill brought Down In Flames as well, his favorite non-consim wargame, The Great Dalmuti. (He brought Up Front and something else, too.) We played The Great Dalmuti and talked a little about consims (more about the list itself, including recent flamefests) over dinner. I brought up next month's small local con, Slug-a-thon, and Bill mentioned he'd be attending two southern California cons: Fox Con this year (in large part to play Krieg!), and Orccon next February. Charles had his Avaloncon shirt on, but we didn't really grill him for details about his time there. Rats, we should've. Well, after several rounds of The Great Dalmuti (perplexing our waitress with its chair-hopping), Ray was the clear winner despite grumbling about his cards 3/4 of the time! :-) When the band came on and we migrated outside (again, to hear our own conversations), the subject of local "game days" came up. Bill put on a 2.5 day event last summer to fill a void when two annual cons for the area failed to put something together. That's definitely given him the knowledge and encouragement to do so again. Seems like a well-placed schedule of four quarterly events could dovetail right into the local convention calendar (as well as the big out-of-state ones). We certainly don't want to detract from those events, some of which don't make much money as it is. Ideally, we'd have these single-Saturday boardgame events at different locations throughout the Bay Area. For example, one in the south bay, one in the east, one on the peninsula, and one in the north. For now, we are starting with the south bay, mostly because that's the area most of us were familiar with, and we have a good prospect. Match Play, the retail game "club" that charges a modest $2 admission, has Magic tournaments on weekends, but not *every* weekend. In fact, the non-tournament weekends are a ghost town at Match Play, so we're hopeful they'd be happy to host a bunch of local boardgamers some Saturday in early December. And at $2 a head to play boardgames all day (with ample free parking and decent eats nearby), it's a bargain for the gamers, too. Dave Kohr is going to contact Match Play to find out what might be a good day for this, and that's about where we left it at the end of our get-together. Another local consim dinner is a good idea, at another location that would bring in more or different people. Something right in San Francisco (Dave Bolt's offices?) is a distinct possibility. -Mark Johnson -Mark