On Saturday, there was a historical miniature wargaming event at Legions: Miniature Warfare. 

The organizers had about 5 games scheduled before the event, which were available for anyone to walk up and play. There were two or three Flames of War events, a Sharpe Practice scenario in the Napoleonic period, an American Civil War scenario using Brother Against Brother, and a Sword and the Flame game.  At the last minute they added Jim Naughton’s game, a Battles of Napoleon scenario; and a modern Disposable Heroes game.

Unfortunately the organization and publicity wasn’t ideal.  Many folks came out and played pick-up games, including the normal Saturday gaming crowd, but the scheduled games didn’t seem to have a lot of attendance; some weren’t even run due to lack of players.   

Steve, JM, and I got there before the event started, and started playing BBDBA (battle reports are forthcoming for the DBA/BBDBA games). After that, Steve and JM played a small game of DBN while I checked out some of the other games, but I wasn’t as interested in some of them as I thought I might be.

I wanted to see what Sharpe Practice looked like, since it’s billed as a skirmish scale game.  It was still a lot more figures than I’d want to paint for Napoleonics, and they were 28mm.  I think in this case “skirmish” means it has a 1 man to 1 figure scale, but you still need a lot of figures/men to play a game.

The Sword and the Flame scenario looked really interesting, but not enough players showed up to actually run the game, and I was there long after it should’ve started anyway.

I pushed lead for a few turns in Jim’s Battles of Napoleon game, but there wasn’t much action on my end of the board, and I was planning to stop when JM and Steve were finished.  Unfortunately for all the Napoleonics players looking for new opponents, I’m still not very interested in this period.  I’d play a DBN event because I like those rules, but I still have no interest in painting for the period.

When the DBN game was finished, Steve left.  I played DBA with JM: my Spartans vs. his Athenians.  Next was a slow game of DBA with John: his Nikephorian Byzantines slowly extracted my Mountain Indians from their fortified positions in the woods and steep hills.

Then, John and JM played DBA with Byzantines vs. Alexander the Great. I looked around at games and products for a while, and when Jim was finished with Napoleon’s Battles, I played DBA with him.  Our second game was cut short when I needed to leave.

I feel like I might have forgotten one of the games I played; it seems like not enough games to fill the space.  Unfortunately much of the day there were 3 players for DBx games, so one of us just hung around during many of the games.

Overall it was a fine day of DBA, but unfortuantely we didn’t participate in the non-DBx games very much.   I suppose that’s not a downside if we weren’t interested in the games, though.  I think the best result was getting more historical gamers in the same room at the same time.  For future events, I think in order to succeed the event may need to be more strictly separated from the open pick-up gaming going on at the store concurrently.