Gettysburg Address

By S. Craig Taylor, Jr.
December 8, 2004

Once again, the whole Lost Battalion Games crew built phony campfires and stealthily slipped away into the night to man a gaming convention booth. This time, it was at the FALL IN 2004 Miniatures Convention, which, after a one-time sojourn in the Baltimore area, at the Maryland Fairgrounds last year (see Publisher’s Corner “Show Me the Toy Widows and Orphans ”), returned to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. As can be expected here in the Middle Colonies in November, the weather was not the best and the main gaming areas and the flea market seemed to be located at the other end of Pennsylvania, so I never managed to get over there during daylight hours. The outstanding layout that I did get to examine closely was a meticulously accurate layout of Omaha Beach. WOW! Of course, what is a miniatures convention without actually pushing some lead around, so at night, between slices of pizza, I managed to participate in a FIRE & FURY game run by Bob and Cleo Liebl (the game was pretty good but Bob’s cookies were great) and a FUNNY HATS IN THE SAND (don’t ask) pickup game run by Paul Potera.

They say that travel is broadening and we all learned something staying at a small motel down the road from the convention’s Eisenhower Center. If they tell you that $5 a day can be saved by not having the maids come in to make up the beds, this also means that you will see no clean towels during the entire weekend. That’s another important travel tip from your somewhat moldy-smelling Publisher.

During the daylight hours we were manning our demonstration tables right near our booth. The semi-retired Katrina made an appearance (in her civvies) on Saturday to win two Tractor Works battles against Joey Guth’s diabolically clever customized 11th Panzer Deck (no tanks but plenty of extra artillery and engineers). At one time or another, we had demonstration games of our old standby BATTLELINES and BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS card games in progress. There was even one quick (Free Game has been discontinued it is in development as a box game - February 1, 2006) BATTLESHIPS IN ACTION plus multiple runs through of our spanking new SERGEANTS! ON THE EASTERN FRONT board game and COMBAT SOLDIERS IN THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE card game. The PaK 2 module of the PANZER Miniatures Rules was also new but Bill Frye’s scheduled miniatures game featuring it fell through as Bill was hospitalized to have his appendix removed (all-in-all, a pretty decent excuse not to show). He’s recovered now and we are looking forward to seeing his expertly-run games once again at COLD WARS in the spring. PANZER designer Jim Day was able to join us in our booth to explain the finer points of his rules to interested customers.

You know us; we’re never content to leave well enough alone and we tried a new and frightening gimmick this year that seemed to be quite successful, so watch out in the future. We handed out several hundred souvenir “LBG—FALL IN 2004” buttons and then turned Becky (she of the shockingly multi-toned hair) loose to find them and hand out free prizes to the lucky wearers. She handed out three games, a Ship Print and a t-shirt over the course of the convention. The chosen button men were probably relieved that she didn’t toss a tire over them (see Publisher’s Corner “By the Twitching on my Thumbs, Something Weird This Way Comes ”). As usual, we all enjoyed meeting, talking and even playing with many of you there, even the guy who asked if Becky was a lady wrestler. In all, we had a great time and look forward to next year at FALL IN!

Now that we have returned home, we are putting the finishing touches on yet another great new card game called BATTLEGROUP that will be out shortly after Christmas. This has been a sort of completely in-house, hush-hush and semi-secret project of ours for some time now (heh, heh). With so much else going on, there was no way we could get this published earlier without rushing, and this game is, at least in our opinion, so good that we want to take whatever time is necessary. Jeff Billings and old Mr. Slyboots here collaborated on the design, Becky Mauder did the graphics layout and Liz Billings (alias Katrina) did the artwork, including stunning work on the 64 different battleships and aircraft carriers (even sister ships have different illustrations). I’ll cover BATTLEGROUP in more detail in a later column but let me whet your appetites by saying that it is a World War Two naval card game that has approximately the complexity of BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS but far more strategy and much less luck—despite its short rules and monumental amounts of dice rolling, it is not a “beer & pretzels” game. Some hints on play—try not to fight against the Japanese at night or against the Americans during the day when their fast carriers are present!

As this will probably be my last Publisher’s Corner before the holidays, let me wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2005!