Lies, More Lies and Conventions!

By S. Craig Taylor, Jr.
August 30, 2004

As mentioned in my last column, I’m a very busy man and, once more, I wish that I could say that the column this week will be very brief but there are just too many tasty things crawling around on my plate. Lost Battalion Games busted caps during the summer convention season in a big way. Since the rest of us just stooged around here at the Bunker while Becky and Katrina sweated bullets at ORIGINS, we had the whole gang except for Becky in Lancaster for HISTORICON and, since WBC was just a hoot and a holler down the road from us here in the Baltimore area, we all made it over to the Hunt Valley Marriott for the WBC fun and games, although Katrina was there only one day. Someday, we hope to grasp the concept of "a day off" but until then, everybody works all the time.

This year, for the first time, we had our own booth at the HISTORICON HistoricalMiniatures Convention and actually had our very own miniatures rules to sell there - not only the PANZER® Miniatures rules, which we introduced in March at COLD WARS, but also the first module to the system - PANZER PaK 1, which has a hefty booklet of orders of battle along with 32 more German and Russian unit data cards. Master scenarist Bill Frye and designer Jim Day ran several games using the PANZER Miniatures Rules during the convention and we provided some of our ever-spiffy t-shirts as prizes. We actually ran out of the PANZER® PaK 1 after the first day but Debbie Billings assembled some more and brought up enough to see us through the convention.

We also demonstrated BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS™, using our new BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS™ Expansion Deck, which was introduced back at the ORIGINS convention. I had the pleasure of teaching the game to Edward Bearass, Jr., the son of the renowned American Civil War writer, lecturer and guide (I’m a big fan). Ed was looking for some games to take back to the Middle East with him and I certainly wish him well. The BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS™ Expansion Deck sold out twice during the convention but Debbie was our hero and hand cut enough additional decks that we were able to restock twice and actually take a couple extra decks home with us.

Katrina Koniev was also there at HISTORICON, demonstrating BATTLELINES™ and extending her unbeaten streak defending the Tractor Works. There was a free t-shirt offered if you could capture the Tractor Works from her but no one did. Katrina was in such demand that she couldn?t get away until after 9:00 in the evenings. As at ORIGINS, she played so many times over the weekend that, after the convention was over, she again "zoned out" and was playing games in her sleep.

To repeat a plug from the last Publisher’s Corner, Five Forks finally published my NAPOLEON’S BATTLES miniatures rules, Second Edition (we did the printing here at Lost Battalion) and the rules were on sale at HISTORICON. My co-designer Bob Coggins ran a specially-designed and horribly sneaky scenario using these revamped rules at the convention.

Well, less than two weeks later, we popped over to nearby Hunt Valley for the WBC Board Gaming Convention, hosted by the ever-genial Don Greenwood. A special feature this year was that Lost Battalion Games had the t-shirt concession and we provided custom shirts in place of the generic ones from WBC Conventions past. This included producing over 100 Gamemaster polo shirts each with a different picture of the event’s game box and the name of the gamemaster, nearly 100 "Centurion" equally customized t-shirts for the winners of the Centurion events (sent, obviously, after the convention) and hundreds of "souvenir" shirts showing from one to three selected games, team names, mottos or whatever. This must have kept the cotton gins working overtime. Every one of these different custom designs had to be printed on shirts of the correct sizes, a considerable logistical chore that, despite a few missteps (the beatings will continue until morale improves) that we had to make good during or after the convention, we managed to deliver almost everything correctly, on time and piping hot. Many thanks for the good work by our computer meister Jim Baker, who perfected the programming that made this feat possible. The production efforts by the Billings family and their friends was also pretty useful.

Daughter Liz consoles designer Jeff on his imminent defeat in the WBC BATTLELINES™ Tournament. Katrina Koniev was there, once again demonstrating BATTLELINES™ and completing her unbeaten streak defending the Tractor Works. Katrina was only able to defend herself for a few hours on Friday before entering in Ken Whitesell’s BATTLELINES™ Tournament, along with designer Jeff Billings and myself. Sad to say, the whole Lost Battalion crew got their clocks cleaned and the eventual winner was Steve May. I must note that Steve went to great lengths to cleanse my personal clock to a state of squeaky cleanness. Sad to say, this was Katrina’s last public appearance and she is retiring from convention appearances to run her worker’s market on our web site. The question now is: what do we do with all those t-shirts we printed up for her would-be conquerors, who all stubbed their toes on the Stalingrad rubble?

Our publisher leads a merry band through a game of BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS™ at HISTORICON. Due to a series of mishaps, my stint as gamemaster for the BRAWLING BATTLESHIPS™ tournament turned into something of a marathon event. I ended up running three one-hour demonstrations back-to-back immediately prior to gamemastering the two-round, four-hour event. Great fun but I pretty much lost my voice. Rob Mull, who had learned the game at one of the demonstrations that afternoon and despite losing 34 points when he was eliminated in the second hand, rallied to add 33 points in the third and final hand to win with a total of 49 points in the championship round. Congratulations for some excellent game play and all-round good sportsmanship to all participants.

One other trifling event from the WBC must be mentioned. It’s usually nice to be recognized but I am not sure if I’m really happy hearing the words, "Hey! It’s Craig Taylor, big-time game designer," when I’m standing at a stall in the Men’s Room. Did everyone have to turn and look? This was even worse than, "Craig Taylor, I thought you were dead," at the 2003 ORIGINS. You know who you are, so stop it!

Our last convention fling for the summer consisted of air freighting Becky Mauder to GENCON up in Indianapolis. She ran a lot of demos and helped out at old pal Jerry Corrick’s Adventure Retail Limited booth but her clever medieval dress failed to win the costume contest, so she has been uncharacteristically silent about what else happened there. Apparently, she beheaded no further victims (see Publisher’s Corner Between Two Conventions ). Whew! That pretty much brings us back up to date here in the Publisher’s Corner.