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Consimworld Expo

I was excited to be going to Consimworld Expo again. What could be better? It's a full week devoted to nothing but wargaming, a dream come true.

Sandy left town several days before I did. She went to Kalispell Montana with her friend Laura to take another weeklong Quiltworx class. When I left, I took Abby to Escape, our standard doggie daycare place. Normally she only goes for a few hours but she got to spend the whole day. Since Sandy and I would both be gone for two days, she was picked up by some friends. One of her sister Abby's humans, Katie, would stay with her till Sandy got back. I knew that Abby would get to spend a lot of time with her sister. She would have so much fun that she probably wouldn't miss us for a while.

I had two days to travel to Tempe. Usually I stop somewhere along the way and do a hike. Last year I went to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on my way to CSWE. This year I didn't have a firm plan. I just figured I would see how far I got and where I ended up and then decide what to do.

My first thought was to stop in Cedar City and then do an early morning hike in Zion the next day. But I got there mid afternoon and it was too soon to stop. Next possibility was Kanab. I thought about doing a hike in Paria Canyon early the next morning. But it was really hot in Kanab - over a hundred degrees. A desert hike in scorching heat didn't sound too appealing. I kept going and finally stopped in Page. At least that way I got to eat at my favorite restaurant there, Strombolli's.

Since it was so hot my new plan was to leave very early and hike up Humphrey's Peak, the highest mountain in Arizona, which is near Flagstaff. Since it was over twelve thousand feet, heat wouldn't be a problem. But when I checked on the web that night it turned out that the whole San Francisco Peaks area was closed for the summer already due to fire danger.

No Zion National Park. No Paria Canyon. No Humphrey's Peak. That was strike three. I was out. I just took my time and drove straight to Tempe. I certainly didn't have to rush. I got to my hotel, checked in, hauled all of my games up to my room, and then had dinner at Gus's New York Pizza.

There was a strong Eastern Front theme to my games at CSWE, just like last year (actually, just like always). I spent two days in a playtest of Stalingrad 42. Designed by Mark Simonitch, it's a rework of his Campaign to Stalingrad game from the mid nineties to bring it more in line with his France 40/Normandy 44/ Ardennes 44/ Holland 44/ Ukraine 43 series of games published by GMT. I've played several of them and think they are an excellent moderate-high complexity WWII operational level system. We had four players, teams of two on each side. I had the Russians in the south. In our game the Germans tried a strategy of pushing hard in the north, where there were more VP's rather than pushing in the south as they did historically. That meant that I wasn't under much pressure and it was an easy game for me. At the end of the day Mark called the game in the Russians favor.

The next morning we started over and I switched to the Germans in the north. At the end of the day we were only about a quarter of the way through so I had to move on to another game that I had scheduled. Mark picked up the Germans from me. Whenever I checked back over the next few days the Germans were doing really well. I'm sure it was because of the good start that I gave them, not because Mark knows his own design really well.

After playing the Stalingrad campaign for two days, it was time to get down and dirty in the battle for the city itself. My next opponent was Stuka Joe, who does a well known YouTube channel on wargames. We played Stalingrad: Verdun on the Volga, a new area impulse game that had just come out at the end of 2017. Sandy got it for me for Christmas. It was a hard fight but at the end of the day I pulled out a win with the Germans. I needed ten victory points and I had eleven.

Stuka Joe made a video of his experiences at CSWE and he included our Stalingrad game with a prominent role for me. Although it was my chance for my fifteen minutes of (wargaming) fame I think I look pretty dorky in the video. If you want to see me you'll have to watch the whole thing, which is quite long. I'm not going to help you find me.

After playing the newest Stalingrad game, the next day we decided to play the old classic, Turning Point Stalingrad. It's one of my all time favorite games. My son Tim and I used to play it way back when he was in high school. Joe wanted to play the Russians again. This time my German forces broke through the Russian line early and scored a decisive win.

Playing the two games back-to-back gave us a good chance to compare them. Although they look similar at first glance they are very different games. TPS is a classic but has some faults. For one, often the Germans don't show the losses that they did historically. SVotV really shows the effect of attrition as the battle wears on. But TPS still models a lot of things well, and I think does a better job of showing the day/night shift of momentum in the battle. The fresh/spent mechanic also makes forces most vulnerable immediatly after moving or attacking. While both are good games I still like Turning Point Stalingrad better. It's a classic. It's amazing that it still compares well to modern games considering that it's thirty years old.

I didn't play East Front games exclusively (not that I didn't try). I tried Hellenes, a game on the Pelopennesian War, with my friend Paul Arena. Although we didn't finish the game I felt like I got a good feel for it and liked it a lot. Built on the standard Columbia Games type block game mechanics, it added an extra layer that gave the game some real depth. Paul and I are following up with further plays online using VASSAL.

I spent quite a bit of time talking to Brian Train, a designer I got to know quite well from playtesting Colonial Twilight (another one of my favorite games). Besides his own games he had a new game design that was done by some students at McGill University. It was a block game on the Battle for Mosul. My friend PAvE and I spent a day trying it out. It had some interesting mechanics but was still very early. We compiled quite a bit of feedback to give to Brian, who is helping the students develop the game. We'll probably continue to work with Brian on playtesting the game as it evolves.

There was a lot of other fun stuff during the week. The flea market table is always one of my favorite parts of the con. I managed to pick up several games that were unpunched or even shrink wrapped for half price or less. I also spent a lot of time in the vendor room. There are several small publishers that come to the con and this is a good chance to see their stuff (and buy some of it).

I always enjoy just checking out all of the big monster games that are being played. I've never devoted the whole week at Consimworld Expo to a monster game but would like to do that some day. It's always a tough choice because there are so many games that I want to play and friends that I want to play against. I do like seeing those big games set up and played though. Grognard Simulations set up the their whole series of games that cover the Battle of Kursk at company level. It filled an entire room and had twenty three thousand counters. I don't think they played the game at all. It took the whole week just to set it up. It sure looked impressive.

It's also fun to see friends that I only see once or twice a year, wargamers from all over the country. And it's fun to talk to other gamers, even ones I don't know. If I saw a game that I hadn't played but was interested in, I could always talk to the guys playing it to find out about it. Once I saw Christian, one of the guys in our Stalingrad 42 game, playing Fortress Sevastopol. I asked if he had played it before and how he liked it. He answered "Yes, I'm the designer." Doh! I guess that would be yes to both questions then.

On Saturday, the final day of the con, it was back to the Eastern Front for a game with Dan Carey, a wargaming buddy from Seattle. We played Ukraine 43, another Simonitch design on the summer 43 Russian offensive in the Ukraine. When I got to the main ballroom at 8am to set up it was kind of sad. All of the monster games were gone, already picked up. No one was there. For some reason everyone seems to leave early and the last day is pretty quiet. Later in the morning other people showed up but they were mostly playing light games like Epic C&C. We were probably the most serious game on the last day. It turned out that I was less skilled attacking with the Red Army than the German army. The Russians fell well short of their objectives by the end of the game. Comrade Stalin would not have been pleased with me. I'm sure I would have been sent to the Gulag.

We had a good game but the last day of the con is always sad for me. Everyone seems to be anxious to leave but not me. I'm still ready to play games, although after a week I can be pretty tired of reading rules every night. But the con was over for another year. It had been a lot of fun. Time to start counting the days till next year's con.