Nashcon 2009 After Action Report

Nashcon 2009 has come and gone. Overall it was a success with many very interesting games being run, a great turn out of vendors and few issues with the location. Turnout was adequate. I did not get a chance to see every game in play, but for the sessions I wasn't there, there were some great games I heard about.

From Nashcon 2009

I arrived on Friday at about lunch time and set up my Wings of War game. I had 10 aircraft on the table. I also had a German aerodome, trench lines, two observation balloons and 3 AAA batteries. The 6 Allied aircraft needed to attack everything in sight with their bombers first bombing the Aerodome and then taking damage assessment photos. The game got exciting when I, as the Germans, miscalculated my immelmen turns and ended up having most of my aircraft tailed! Oh the humanity. While I did manage to put the hurt on several allied aircraft, that initial mistake ensured that my planes would be shot down before any allied aircraft were. That left it up to the AAA batteries and the trenchlines... While several near hits were made by the AAA, no further damage was done. With the remaining time the Allies made a nearly clean sweep of the Germans.

Next to me was a beautiful Minas Tirith game put on by Keith Jordan using HOTT. I believe it was the Battle of Pellenor Fields which he ran again on Saturday.

That evening I played in another WWI air game put on by Richard Houston (of famous Houston's Guns, Houston's Ships and other ventures). This one was massive with 100 air craft models at 1/300 scale involved in giant bomber attacks and fighter furballs. The rules were fun with enough detail to give some interesting tactical problems!

I heard that the Battle for Hoth game on Saturday Morning was a lot of fun with the Rebels gaining a slight victory over the Empire. Way to go! Bob Moon ran several 40mm FIW games and they are remarkable. He came all the way up from Florida to run these and they are fun and inspiring. The terrain detail alone is amazing. The figures are just gorgeous.

I attended the DBx clinic held at the convention on Saturday afternoon and that was great fun. There they taught the rules to any DBx game you were interested in. I have already played some DBA and liked it so I thought I would give HOTT a try. David Crenshaw brought two incredible armies he had just recently painted up and they were phenomenal to look at. I played two games using each army once. I have to say I am hooked on HOTT. I have a ton of fantasy figures I've collected. Some really oddball stuff! Finally they have a use.

David Crenshaw wrote up a nice report with photos of the event. I suggest giving his blog a view to see the photos and read about the 2009 Open DBA Championship. Congratulations to David Cliffel for his overall win!

One can't help but mention David Raybin's Combat Captain game which ran on Saturday night. This massive game involved 28mm scale figures and depeicted a small part of Operation Sealion with many reports on the web already. The rules are fun - without a doubt. They have some great innovations and are a good set of convention rules as they are easy to pick up and produce decent results.

From Nashcon 2009

ON the business side of things we had a membership meeting and election. The new set of BOD officers consists of:

Voting board members:
Gerald Swick, president
Bryan Connolly
Al Gaiser
Mike Randall
Bryant Williams

Non-voting members:
Neel Woodall, secretary
Mike Peccolo, treasurer

General Counsel: David Raybin,
Hollins Wagster & Raybin

That concludes the Nashcon 2009 After Action Report.

Nashcon coming soon!

Memorial day weekend is nearly upon us and that means Nashcon! The HMGS-MidSouth web page has been updated to have the Preliminary Events List (PEL) and a complete list of vendors who will attend the show. We are all looking forward to Nashcon 2009 and hope you will join us.

May 22-24
Friday May 22 Doors Open at Noon
Sunday May 24 Doors Close at 1PM
If you have not done so book your room at:

Franklin-Cool Springs Marriott & Conference Center
700 Cool Springs Blvd.
Franklin, TN 37067
Phone (615) 261-6100

Combat Captain (Nashcon WWII)

Combat Captain (the RULES) Nashcon 2009

As the song goes: "Saturday Nights All Right For Fight'n." Well at Nashcon this year we will have the premier of Combat Captain. WWII tactical combat with as few charts as I could contrive. The game has been playtested and will involve a might-have-been invasion of Great Britain in 1942. You can download the rules HERE for free. Lower down on this page are some photos from the game. We hope you will join us this year at Nashcon and give this a go.


Designer's Notes: My earlier rules – Charge of the Light Brigade – were primarily devoted to the Crimean War with significant numbers of battalions roaming the battlefield. More recently I toyed with Pirates and even Ironclads when I was in my “water mood.” An impetuous acquisition of some early WWII British and German troops put me square in the need of some tactical rules for that period. I looked for some suitable rules and found most were vastly too complicated. Others compelled the use of assorted-sized dice which have never appealed to me. And so, like most of us, I rolled my own: rules that is.

The limitation of six-sided dice dictated a host of charts and variables which made my first attempts as complex as all the other tactical games on the market. In a dream I suppose I hit upon the full, even, odd dice convention that plays prominently in the range and movement rules. I then decided that dice could represent not only distance and fire combat but that dice could substitute for time itself. “Paying” so many dice to conduct an activity would permit a delay in movement for example while the unit engaged in some other event such as seeking cover. This took a long time to conceptualize but once I understood the relationship the various factors became more apparent. The incidental benefit was the elimination of as many charts as possible.

Hitting on “three” as the “magic number” of dice per turn was by default. Fewer dice made things too slow and more allowed a side to get too much of a jump on the other side.The fire rules are an evolution of my musket-era charts albeit with far more variables that seem to be required in modern era games. We can agree I suppose that “shooting”is what WWII games are all about. A single chart would be tolerated if it was devoted to the killing of enemy units from afar.
The morale rule is a variation of that used in my other games. It is gradual and if you want to run about with morale markers affixed to your troops so be it. Again there are no charts and anybody can subtract one pip from every die as a penalty.
The “cover” rules flowed naturally from the need to avoid complex terrain modifications. Instead of you going to the terrain, the terrain comes to you as a function of the time it takes to get into the several degrees of cover. At the end of the day the game is designed for fun at our wargame conventions or where some stalwart souls want to engage in a favored pastime of our hobby.

Operation Market Garden Video up on YouTube for a shot time

I finally found a copy of the film I made a few years ago. It is a home film of the Operation Market Garden mega game run at Fall In 2003. The video was intended as a home video only so there is a lot of copyright video in there. I also have lost all the interview permission slips, etc. So for those reasons I am only going to keep it up for a few weeks before the copyright police at Youtube catch wind of it.

The video takes about an hour, is unscripted and does the best it can to capture the entire game. The table was 60-70 feet long (20+ meters). There were thousands of miniatures, many dozens of buildings, all 11 bridges, etc. 70 gamers played in the game and were all playing the Germans. The 13 umpires pushed the Americans and British. It was run on Friday and Saturday and was grueling as hell for anyone who was there from first setup to final take down. It was rerun at Historicon 2005. I participated in that as well. The majority of the terrain boards were tossed in the dumpster as Marty didn't have room to store them. We saved the expensive bits as best we could.

This was one of my earliest films. I am an awful camera man and it shows. I didn't have great equipment but it came out reasonably good. Please spread the word about this video to anyone you know who games. The game was incredibly inspirational to my own efforts. So please blog about it, email and spread the word by mouth. Eventually I'll take it down or have it removed for me.

Enjoy!