Old Dogs, Small Children and Watermelon Wine
By S. Craig Taylor, Jr.
July 30, 2003
As with last week, this column will be mercifully brief. Once again, the gang here at Lost Battalion Games will be out of the office and, this time, attending the annual WORLD BOARDGAMING CHAMPIONSHIPS convention. Since the WBC is right here in the Baltimore area, we will be able to sleep in our own beds at night. There, as at the ORIGINS convention a few weeks back and at the HISTORICON convention just this past week, we’ll once again be demonstrating the BATTLELINES™ card game. Our formal demonstrations are scheduled for Wednesday at 6 p.m., Thursday at 6 p.m., Friday at 5 p.m. and Saturday at 3 p.m. but we’ll probably be doing some informal teaching and playing most other times in the open gaming areas—with a little luck, we hope to assemble some four and six player games.
Once again we will be bucking a convention’s major focus. Although BATTLELINES™ is not a board game, many other card games are a feature of the WBC and our offering should match the interests of many of the attendees. At the very least, we will be “showing the colors” and laying the groundwork for when we later add some board game titles to our line. Drop by our booth or demo area to say “Hi!” (or even to spend some money) and we hope to see many of you there.
We had a great time at HISTORICON this past week and enjoyed meeting some of you there. It’s always fun to beat the designer at his own game, isn’t it? Jeff was suitably embarrassed a number of times. We owe many thanks to Ed Phillips and Wargames for displaying and selling BATTLELINES™ at their booth. Their usual business is selling excellent war gaming lead figures from England, like those from Essex, so having a World War II card game was something of a novelty for them. Although I spent most of my time demonstrating BATTLELINES™, I finally, along with Jim Harler (pictured with me at right) and Paul Potera, two old co-workers and gaming buddies from when I was in North Carolina, managed to get into an IRONCLADS game played with miniatures on a gorgeous winding map of the Mississippi River. This game, which was run by Richard Johnson from St. Louis (let me know if I got that wrong—my memory seems to be having a senior moment), lasted well into Sunday morning and I discovered, to my horror, that even though I edited the rules back in 1979 and have played the game over a hundred times, I’ve only played it once in the last decade and have completely forgotten how to play and, especially, how to fire the big guns. I even required some game master assistance when I rammed that troublesome Yankee monitor and discovered that, contrary to what was clearly marked on my sheet, I had left my torpedo up the Yazoo, literally. I had quite a time re-reading the rules and applying them as I fought my way down Ole Man River with the C. S. S. “Arkansas.”
