From: Allan Goodall <agoodall@a...>
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 16:21:31 GMT
Subject: GZG/Geo-Hex at GenCon: Another Review... (Long)
GZG at GenCon - A Review This a little on the late side, but what can I say, I was on vacation! Dean did an excellent review. I thought I'd send my thoughts, as the co-ordinator of the GZG/Geo-Hex events. I can also let you in on some of the behind the scenes mess ups... This is my second annual GenCon review with a slant towards GZG and Geo-Hex events in particular and miniatures events in general. Full disclosure: I organized the events for Geo-Hex this year... THE CONVENTION IN GENERAL I've been going to GenCon since 1995,and this was without a doubt the WORST run GenCon I've seen. The mess-up for me started months earlier. This year events could be submitted using their web site. I did this... and they were still wrong. It appears that they took the submitted forms, printed them, and had someone re-key them. We ended up with three events duplicated in the same time slot, one of which was actually in the wrong time slot. I tried contacting Andon to explain the problem, but nothing was done. I even e-mailed them with the changes but they did not change the events in time for the convention. When I got there, I found that they couldn't actually move events. What's more, the duplicated events were popular enough that both sessions were filled up. This wasn't the only thing messed up. The descriptions were wrong, they did NOT have all of the events listed under Geo-Hex, and they didn't have enough tables set aside for us. The pre-registration books were sent to Canada as 4th class bulk mail. The result: of the 14 people I knew who were going from Toronto, only 2 got their pre-reg books. Yes, the book was on the web, but you had to know to look there, and when. By the time our group looked and downloaded the book, almost all of the slots were already filled up. In protest, three of us (me, and my friends Sherry Moore and Chris Smith) came up with buttons that said, "My GenCon Includes Canada", a parody of the "My Canada Includes Quebec" slogan during the last Quebec separation referendum. These were popular with Canadians... Not pre-reging wouldn't have been THAT big a deal, except that events registration was an awful mess. Andon sold more ad space in the registration book. In order to make room, the shortened the number of pages used to describe the events. They did this by eliminating the event descriptions. That was bad enough, but the descriptions included the event locations! In order to find out where an event was being held (it was on the tickets) you had to go to event registration and look it up in one book that they had. New events were listed in a supplementary book, but they ran out of these early and had to get more printed. Even if you found the area with the event, chances are you would run into trouble finding the actual table. In our area, we had people with tickets told that our refs hadn't shown up yet, when we had already signed in with the Miniatures HQ people. I've heard far worse stories of people basically being bounced from one room to another without anyone apparently knowing where the event was located. Oh, and on Saturday the computer system crashed. It's a dBASE V application (DOS at that) and from what a friend heard, a memo field got corrupted and wrecked 3 database table indexes. The result was that you couldn't find an event if you only had a generic ticket, and couldn't buy any tickets that were handed in, and couldn't find out if an event was filled up. It was a horrible mess... The choice of events was lacking, too. There were few historical events. RAFM was running Charlie Company (Vietnam War) events and Baker Company (WWII) events, and Battleground WWII was being run, but there were few others. Even the sci fi and fantasy events weren't as prevalent as in previous years. I watched Fantasy Rules! being played, but unfortunately I couldn't find anyone selling the rules in the dealer's room. There were a couple of beautiful set ups, though. There was a huge amphibious landing layout for a WH40K game that could easily be used for Normandy. There was another set up with a crashed spaceship (Jupiter 2 from the "Lost in Space" movie). There were the usual Battletech and Silent Death games, but in all there was a real dearth of miniatures. THE DEALERS ROOM The dealer's room was as big as last year, although the WOTC castle was bigger than in previous years... did this "hide" some unsold booths? I don't know. The choice in the dealer's room was about the same as usual. Miniatures availability was pretty good, but it was mostly of the sci fi/fantasy type. I found only 4 booths selling historical minis. Terrain was well represented. Geo-Hex released a large 25mm "star fort", an affordable fortification that could be used for historical minis, sci fi, or fantasy. Armourcast is less of a WH40K accessories company now as a generic terrain company. Their feudal Japan terrain (ostensibly for Clan War) is definitely welcome. Battleground WWII folk were there selling minis and vehicles. Curiously, they said they didn't bring any scenario packs due to a lack of space. I found their booth to be attractively laid out with military looking crates, but decidedly poor on space management. Since I don't intend to use their official figures, but wanted a couple of their scenario packs, I was decidedly disappointed (and think this may have been a tactical error on their part...).The lack of historicals doesn't bode well for historical minis at future GenCons. It does, though, give us the opportunity to run a couple of "historical" Dirtside II and Stargrunt II scenarios next year. THE GZG/GEO-HEX EVENTS In general, our events were well attended. In fact, if you take into account the double booked events, we actually had too many people show up. Here are some comments and observations. So called "media" sci fi was very popular. Dean Gundberg's sci fi crossover event was so popular that most of the players agreed to continue playing past the time limit. This game involved Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars, Space: Above and Beyond and Battlestar Galactica games. Mark Siefert's Babylon 5 scenarios were full... in fact, we DID have enough people for a third, double booked session. In a smiliar vein, Bryan Miller's Dirtside II games, involving Hammer's Slammers, Falconberg's Legion, and (in another scenario) Warhammer and Battletech were all filled. Talking to players there, these other backgrounds do pull in new players, most of which do eventually swing into the "official" miniatures at some point. On the other hand, my friend Chris ran a basic FT game using "official" miniatures, and got very positive comments. The players said that they liked the fact that they were shooting at things a turn into the game. A couple played in another game (not sure if it was ours, or one of the other "independent" FT games) and found a lot of the pre-game manoeuvring to be dull. My SG2 games were well attended. So were most of Tom's, though his last game only had a couple of people. Tom stuck to a strictly "official" universe series of games, using my NSL troopers and Geo-Hex's FSE Legionaires or my Japanese Corporate Mercenaries. My games were all one-offs. The least effective, funny enough, was Ork Hill, the game using WH40K figures which I ran last year. The winning side loved the scenario, while the losing Orks found it unbalanced (funny enough, last year, the losing side were the Marines...). Even though it was full up, I will probably retire the scenario and stick with "official" figures. My other games were far better received. Plasma Ambush, in 15mm, was seen as both sides as being tough but balanced. Errors were made on both sides, the defeated team being the ones to make the last mistake. Enemy Mine, in spite of being somewhat unbalanced, turned out to be a lot of fun for all involved. It used Geo-Hex's Cavernscape, proving that a relatively simple game can be very effective. One thing for Jon and KR. The guys playing the 15mm scenario all agreed that 15mm is THE way to play SG2 when vehicles are in abundance. That is, in a full platoon scenario with support vehicles 15mm is the way to go. They find the 25mm resin vehicles (particularly the tanks) used with SG2 to be too large for the ground scale. I told them that GZG does sell 15mm figures. Someone else in the dealer's room was also selling old Denizen(?) 15mm sci-fi. The market for 15mm figures may be small, but it's there. How small, I'm not sure, but for those favouring 15mm Stargrunt 2 is definitely THE game to use with it. Once again, the FT tournament was well attended. This year we used the Fleet Book designs and all the fleet book rules except for vector movement. We did have ONE problem with the fleet designs. One of the fleets was discovered to be unbalanced during the game and will be retired. We also think a noon time start for the tournament would be a good thing for next year. The tournament runs 8 hours, which is why we started it at 8 am, but we think we may get more attendees if we start it later. This convention also saw the running of several vector movement games. They were simple affairs with three or four ships a side. The vector movement did add time to the game, but the smaller number of ships made the games run about the same as a typical FT introduction game. I don't know if people preferred vector games or if they were just curious to see how the rules worked. My personal feeling is that I will use vector rules when needed but otherwise will stick to cinematic movement. So, what was it like to run the events? Once the con started, things mostly ran on autopilot. The only real piece of work that I had to do was make sure the terrain, figures and drop cloths were picked up at the end of the night. If I run the events next year, I would do a better job of deligating this responsibility as it got tiring showing up at 1 am every night. A number of people I've seen in past conventions came up to us and offered their services as referees. This was a welcome sign. A number of us suggested that we need one or two sets of Geo-Hex terrain for our SG2 and DS2 demos. We had a couple of small sets owned by players, but my own games, for instance, were run using very little Geo-Hex terrain. We feel that we'd like all of next year's SG2 and DS2 games run on Geo-Hex terrain. Optimally, the refs would bring dice, rulers, figures, and vehicles and all the rest would be there for him at the convention. I'm not sure how practical this is... I did get a kick out of seeing my Valiant Federation ships, B5-like fighters, jump gate, NSL stormtroopers and Japanese Corporate Mercenaries in action, even if it was mostly with other people using them! I will have pics on my web site Real Soon Now! In spite of Andon and some awful convention organizing, a fun time was had by all. I was thinking of attending a different convention next year (Origins or Historicon) but since my wife might get a gig working for one of the dealers, we may be back in Milwaukee next year. I wouldn't mind that, as I have made a number of friends at GenCon and would like to meet them again next year... inspite of whatever mess Andon may make of the convention.