Everybody’s Having Fun in the Warm Florida Sun
By S. Craig Taylor, Jr.
June 13, 2004
Ah, where does the time go? It seems like just yesterday but it was actually back in April when Jeff and I threw our gaming goods into my trusty Ford Taurus and headed to Tampa, Florida for the RECON 2004 gaming convention. I guess it’s time that I slipped out of my convention coma and wrote a few words about that trip and the trials and tribulations of working a convention. In our case, we are still a small company with a small enough product line to throw everything necessary for a small convention into a Taurus sedan and not be so cramped that you have to bolt the passengers to the roof. I can remember, at Yaquinto and Avalon Hill where at least an oversize van was required to carry just the games and displays, leaving most of the crew to make their own ways to the convention in planes, trains and cars.
When you head south from the Baltimore area, you must leave early to avoid the horrendous traffic in D. C., so we hit the Baltimore Beltway sometime before 5:00 a. m. Suffice it to say that I am not a morning person and had to prop up my eyelids with toothpicks. After we crossed the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, the ride down I-95 was pleasant enough, although it was soon discovered that Jeff is not as fond of listening to loud bagpipe music while racing down the highway as I. Instead, Jeff tried to take my mind off the fact that I was doing all the driving by discussing various game design ideas. We had a great time theoretically designing oh, I don’t know, maybe a dozen different games that are largely forgotten now. After a lunch break with a friend near Raleigh, North Carolina, Jeff started reading a set of rules from a game submission that we are evaluating and this led to a succession of necessary coffee stops to keep us awake.
Using the modern miracles of cell phones and the internet, Jeff was able to call Becky back at the Bunker and have her find us a nice cheap motel near Savannah, Georgia that evening. After checking in and cleaning the road grit and bugs from our teeth, we looked up Jeff’s son, Mike, who attends college near there. Mike and a friend joined us for pizza and the play test of a new card game, to the intense amusement of the pizzeria employees.
The next day, we reached Tampa, unloaded our goodies and set up our table for the start of the convention on the next day. Jeff took some convention pictures that should be inserted into this column. RECON 2004 is typical of many of the well-run smaller conventions I have attended over the years (and, it has been my misfortune and joy to have attended well over 300 conventions and trade shows in my 30 years in the gaming industry). Although things appear (and are!) quite informal on the surface, somehow everybody gets the space they need for what they want to do. There is a core group of gamers and game masters who all know each other from previous gatherings and help keep things moving along with the actual convention organizers. Although it has been my experience that dealers are lucky to break even at small conventions (RECON had about 400 attendees), these smaller venues lack the crowds found at large conventions, so there is plenty of time to swap lies with customers and other dealers. That is, conventions of this type are great places to “show the flag.” We had a spare table right next to our booth and conducted a steady stream of BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS and BATTLELINES demonstrations during all three days. My downer for the convention was having all my dreadnoughts sunk by an eight-year old. Why does that sort of thing always happen to me?
Conventions are great places to bump into old friends. Pat Condray (Editions Brokaw - if you are into Marlborough or the Spanish Civil War, he’s the man to see) occupied the booth next to ours and it is always great to see him again. We go back to a controversial 54mm battle fought on a basement floor in the summer of 1967. Vern Stribling, who I haven?t seen for a while was a board gaming buddy back in college. Larry Brom was also there and we go back to Napoleonic and colonial gaming in Atlanta and at his gaming room in the Carolinas in the early 1970s, not to mention the publication of the first edition of his SWORD & THE FLAME miniatures rules while I was at Yaquinto Publications in Dallas. Larry wants to keep this a secret but I know for a fact that he has been painting plastic figures—shame, shame, shame!
We were cleared out of the convention by shortly after noon Sunday and on the road back to Maryland. Jeff still hates bagpipe music. We stopped at Jeff’s sister’s house on the way and got in a quick play test with Terrell Spears, Jeff’s brother-in-law and Cher Ami Legion member. Fortunately, we had sold enough stuff that we were able to squeeze in Jeff’s mother for the trip back north (the logistics of attending a convention are never as simple as just traveling to and from the convention site). Although it was late afternoon before we passed the big peach sign that indicated we had entered Georgia, we had yet to pick a motel where the cable selection included the History Channel, so it was decided to drive through the night to get back sooner and avoid another night in a fleabag. Jeff and I were pretty worn by the trip and convention so far, and we alternated driving and napping while his mother kept talking the whole way in a desperate attempt to keep the driver awake. We finally offloaded the last of the convention gear at the Bunker on a drizzly Monday morning. Mission accomplished!
