Guns of August AAR

Guns of August has ended, now to work on our February convention, the Williamsburg Muster.

As far as Guns, there were approximately 160 attendees with about forty attendees, who worked with the dealers. So there were approximately 200 folks who attended. Not quite what I expected number-wise but we will hold it again next year. Even with this number the convention was a success.

I was supposed to run two games but my second one, which was a Go for Broke game, I ended up not playing as I scheduled it too early on Saturday and I was too exhausted to run it.

The game I did run on Friday afternoon went off real well. I ran a Blitzkrieg Commander game. It was Americans vs. Germans in the hedgerows of Normandy. The game took about two and a half hours with the Germans winning. If there had been one more turn, the Germans would have lost as they blew there command roll for breakpoint.

On Saturday I played in two games run by Matt Kirkhart in his excellent ancient game using his Craftees. One game was Macedonians vs. Greeks and the other was a battle between Alexander and Darius. The great thing was I played with my son Timothy and a friend in the last game.

The negatives I have about the convention mostly deal with the hotel itself. When we arrived on Thursday, none of the tables were set up and were stacked where dealers needed to set up. So we had to move the tables as well as set up. This is something we paid the hotel to do and they failed in this task. The other problems were dealing with the facilities. The Patriot room restroom was hot and the toilets overflowed once. There was also not enough paper towels. The hotel did not provide enough trashcans and the ones we had were not emptied.

All this put me in a grumpy mood throughout Friday, especially when some fellow BOD members kept putting me into situations they could have handled themselves or gave the task to somebody else as I was busy.

The other thing that bothered me is my camera. The damn thing kept eating batteries or was not working right. I only could take about ten photos during the event. This sucked as I wanted to create a Flicker page.

Our staff volunteers were great especially Scott Kidd, Jeremy Crouch, and all the ladies that helped us run the hospitality room and registration.