SDHISTCON Summit 2024 Recap

I’m writing this on the Wednesday following the convention. I had to take an extra day off of work to make sure I had time to recover and get my body back on eastern time after spending five nights in San Diego. With that extra time I figured it was best to use that time and give a good recap of my time and my overall impressions.

Sneak preview: my impressions are very good!!!

I figured the best way to recap this is to walk through my time day by day and share with you the reader my point of view as I attended this fantastic gathering of gamers for an extended weekend. However before I start I figured I should give some background on SDHISTCON and what it means to me.

SDHISTCON and Me

If you head over to the SDHISTCON website you’ll see near the bottom of its page the organization’s mission: “…to create a diverse and supportive gaming community dedicated to playing, discussing, designing, and promoting historically-based board games. Through this commitment, SDHC seeks to serve both the existing historical board gaming community as well as grow it through the addition of new voices and perspectives.”

To this end SDHISTCON host’s the annual summit over veteran’s day weekend in San Diego as well as a second in-person event for the last couple years: SDHISTCON East hosted at the Naval War College in Newport, RI in August. I’ve only attended this one in-person event, however what I think makes SDHISTCON unique and fantastic, is that since the pandemic they have been very active in hosting several online conventions that take place on discord.

It was the spring 2021 online convention that really took me from a novice board gamer with a curiosity into historical games into what I’d call a hardcore wargamer! The welcoming and friendly atmosphere, direct access to designers whom were very passionate and helpful, and connecting with similar minded people all around the globe immediately introduced me into a fantastic community of which directly have led to my starting this blog! I attended most of the other online conventions since then but given the distance hadn’t made the trip to San Diego before this year.

I share this mainly so that you, the reader, can understand just how excited I was to finally get the opportunity to attend the Summit this fall and where I hold SDHISTCON as an organization that is a champion of the community. With that introduction, let’s get to the good stuff: The Convention!

Thursday Night Social

Festivities opened with a social at Eppig Brewing Biergarten on the waterfront. What a fantastic little location and couple with many of my friends and fellow content creators and designers with a chance to say hello and enjoy a beverage together it was really a great way to set the tone for the rest of the weekend. I stayed long enough to have a few drinks but really the time change (-3 hours) really hit me by about 8pm local so I ducked out a bit early to try and get some sleep and save energy for a long weekend!

Day 1 – Friday

The time change hit me hard Friday morning. Mix that with the excitement of the con and I was laying in bed awake and ready to start the day by 4:30am. I used the time to read a bit of rules for Cataclysm which I was scheduled to play that evening (more on that later). I finally left the hotel room around 7am and grabbed some coffee and a breakfast burrito to start the day making it to the convention hall shortly after 8am.

By 9am things were quite busy with lots of gaming going on. I took the time to capture a few pictures of games in session before conducting some gaming of my own:

The first thing that I hit was a neat little demo of Norway 40 from Nuts! publishing. This one is a nice quick little game to follow the same size and game time as 300 and Port Arthur. Nuts! has really been doing great with these small games that pack a lot of decision space and this one is no different.

In summary the game pits the British Navy vs. the German Kriegsmarine for the battle of Norway in a very simple scenario. Essentially each side has several counters representing, submarines, destroyers, and for the British Aircraft carriers. The map has several cities along the coast and a handful of sea areas. The German player has two paths to victory: Take control of 4 cities, or get commerce raiding vessels out to the Atlantic ocean at the opposite end of the map by the end of 15 turns. The British player is trying to stop these from happening

Each player takes their counters and secretly forms many tasks force by stacking ships together to start the game. Each turn in sequence each player can take 1 of two actions, move a task currently on the map one space, or deploy a task force to either your start area or an area you control. The interesting part is if you don’t deploy, all your forces shift towards the end of the track which has 15 spaces on it. Eventually any forces that are pushed off the track become permanently unavailable. This gives an interesting decision on what forces you delay and how much you balance moving current forces with brining on new ones before they disappear.

Each force is deployed hidden, and is revealed when they move into a space with enemy starting a battle. Combat is simple with each counter granting a number of dice to roll and a strength showing the number of steps each ship has. With a game time of 30 minutes or less I was impressed at the cat and mouse aspect along with lots of chance to bluff with hidden units. Definitely a game I’ll keep my eye on. Keep in mind this is still very much in prototype state and many changes could come.

Next up was a demo from two of my favorite people: David Thompson and Liz Davidson called Queen of Spies. This is a solo game that has the player controlling a cell of resistance fighters with stories inspired from both WW1 and WW2. The missions we played centered around trying to acquire then train carrier pigeons for the cause. To do so you take your members and assign them to missions based on their skills and the skills required for various tasks around town. The game also gives the opportunity to train your operatives skills to get them better at tasks, however this takes time which is an extremely limited resource and will disappear with each action you take.

Resolutions of each task involves pulling from a bag and looking for a success. This is very much mechanically similar to David and Liz’s previous design: Night Witches. Untrain operatives MUST pull 2 tokens with trained choosing to pull 1-3. However other than failures and successes, there are tokens that expend more time, and alert tokens that might put police tokens into the bag. Those are bad as police drawn send operative to jail, where they are slowly interrogated until they are either rescued by your team (not easy) or crack under pressure and divulge your cell ending your game in defeat.

I really like taking the mechanic of bag building/manipulation and moving it from a more tactical game in Night Witches to something narrative focused. Thematically if you like the solo game Maquis or even Resist! but like bag building and a bit more choice on how to deploy your team, this is one I’d highly encourage everyone to keep an eye out for. As we were the first people to see this I feel I should put a disclaimer that very likely things could change as the design continues to develop.

The next game demo I had a chance to check out was one called Common Sense (previously Absolved from All Allegiance), a design from Sam London. This one is a trick taker in a new system that he is hoping will see many more games called “Will to fight” system. The game itself is set in the American Revolution with one side controlling the Colonials and the other the British. It uses a clever trick taking system for activations and is highly asymmetric, but each side performing actions to try to chip away at the other’s will to fight.

The game starts with each side’s will to fight level set to opposite ends of the same track. Each time a side loses will to fight they slide towards the middle where eventually both sides will met and cross one another. This triggers the end of the game and scoring when this happens.

The game focuses the British on having to maintain tight supply lines to do any actions but with much stronger forces. The colonial player can drop forces quicker and without worry of supply, but generally have weaker forces and very much are trying not to lose colonies to the British which drops the will to fight quickly.

I played horribly as the British but still ended up getting a few blows near the end to make things interesting. I really was quite taken by the system and felt that the trick taking in this felt much more pronounced than some hybrid trick takers on the market the last few years. I look forward to see what Sam does with this one and potential future games in this system.

The last event I attended was a 4 player learning game of Cataclysm. It’s a game I’ve always been interested in. One of my favorite games of all time is the Grand Strategic The Lamps are Going Out on WW1 and I wondered if someone could catch the same feeling in a WW2 game. I was hoping that Cataclysm could be that.

It does a lot of interesting things in relatively simple terms such as diplomacy with neutral countries, the political commitment of the people back home at each country as well as alliances and mobilization. This gives a much more holistic feel than traditional games that focus more directly on the kinetic combat.

My only complaint is that the game has a lot of sub-systems and tricky little rules to control all these things. On the surface it feels like it should be a simple game to play, but it unfortunately was a game we spent half of the time in the rulebook and after a couple turns each taking an hour plus we decided that we all had seen enough for the night, especially after a long day of gaming.

I think there is something interesting going on with the game, but would say if this is something you are interested in be prepared to commit several sessions to getting all the nuances down as there are a lot of small things that add up quickly.

That wrapped up my Friday, but with a lot more other gaming going on I decided to snap a few more shots along the way so you can get a feel for what else was happening:

Day 2 – Saturday

Day 2 I had a relatively open day but the great thing about SDHISTCON is that you’ll always find something to do! I spent the first hour or so visiting with folks and just walking around seeing what was out there. Here are a few shots from the morning:

The first game I played was a late sign up on my part. I saw an opening for a demo of The Halls of Montezuma from Fort Circle. This is a game I have on pre-order and very eager to see as it is loosely in the same system of the Shores of Tripoli but adds a very interesting political dimension.

Kevin did a fantastic job teaching and I wish I could say my partner and I did a fantastic job running the US faction, but we did so poorly that we ended the game early as it was pretty clear we were in a position we couldn’t come back from after losing most of our forces on the map!

As for the game itself, it has the core loop of playing cards for events or discarding for basic actions you saw in Shores of Tripoli but here adding a political dynamic where the US player is trying to introduce and pass legislation and ratify treaties, and the Mexican player is trying to manage unrest and the rapid turnover of presidents in such a short time.

The map itself gives much more options for advance than Shores and just about everything screams more and improved upon a system in Shores that was already impressive. Especially exciting is even with a much bigger game decision space wise, the game retains a very easy to learn system that I think would be a fine intro to wargaming that I found impressive.

I went in with high hopes for the game and can say it surpassed all of my expectations. Another banger of a game from Fort Circle!

After a short break for lunch I returned to the con for an impromptu game of The Expanse. It had been a while since I played but I taught the game and had fun running through. We had to end a bit early as one player had other commitments but we got pretty far and I think everyone had a blast. Such a clever design in this one with the Pax style market, but unique CDG/event system that takes the Twilight Struggle system of each event triggering and twists it enough to be interesting but still fairly light with decent decision space. Glad we were able to sneak this one in!

The evening I played a game of Pax Porfiriana which is always a beautiful chaotic mess. The game can be brittle and started out strange with a weird market that had mostly mines from the Sonora region but troops from Chihuahua. That said it was a fantastic way to end out another fun day and bring the Saturday to a close!

Day 3 – Sunday

This was the big day! I literally had back to back games scheduled from 9am through 10pm and was wondering if I’d get all of them in!

It started with a highly anticipated demo of the 18XX game on P500 by Dominick Duhamel called 1867: Big Wyoming. Most of my experience in 18XX is centered around 1830 and 1889 which are highly focused on stock manipulation and not so much on running good companies. 1867 has a two dimensional stock market much like those companies that functions much in the same way, but uses incremental capitalization and focuses the operation on picking up resources and delivering them to refineries for bonuses that make it feel more operational.

The end game is unique as well with no bankruptcy by players or the bank, but rather the end game is triggered when entering the final phase each round Union Pacific will make a bid to acquire each company with a mandatory purchase of the last company required. This puts a timer on the game and a very interesting decision on when to allow the merger to happen as it freezes the company, but existing stocks will get a single bump each operating round, so setting up for this is a really interesting wrinkle. I had a blast with it and it confirmed that I was wise to back it on P500. I’m hoping it climbs steadily up the print order quickly as I’d love to get it to the table when it releases!

I had just enough time to leave Big Wyoming and grab a snickers and mountain dew from the snack table to get me through the next game and another highly anticipated game: Red Dust Rebellion, the newest entry in the COIN family and first non-historic entry.

I played the Church of the Reclaimer a group of “eco-terrorists” that are committed more to humanity adapting itself to Mars rather than the other way around. They break just about every standard COIN rule even having a hand of cards that drive their resources, events, and capabilities separate from the main event deck and allows them to usurp initiative by discarding cards!

The game has lots of other cool chrome such as dust storms, variability population that can either be housed or displaced by by repairing/damaging the infrastructure and a non-playable 5th faction that represents Earth and their confidence in the Martian government or local corporations to quell the growing rebellion.

It was a fun game and we saw the Red Dust faction eek out a win but my reclaimers came within only a couple VP from winning ourselves so I’ll consider that a good game played! Can’t wait to try this one with my group here locally that are into COIN!

The last event I had Saturday came right after Red Dust Rebellion as I ran a full 8 player game of Lords of Baseball. For those of you that haven’t seen this one. It is a game where each player represents a General Manager of a Deadball era baseball club. You go through each phase of a season: Spring Training – where you sign players, trade players, increase fan and media coverage, Regular season – where you play season series against all 7 other teams over the course of the season, Post Season – where the top team competes in the world series, Finance – where you earn income and then pay upkeep to players, front office, manager, and farm system then Hot Stove phase – where you upgrade your stadium, hire a new manager, and/or increase front office or farm club.

The game I think does a really nice balance of engine building and variability by use of cards drawn during each phase and die rolls for resolutions of games. That said each phase is very easy and the game really comes down to a series of procedural steps that one by one are very light and intuitive. The table had fun talking baseball and chucking dice. With the teach and slow first season we were only able to get two seasons in but everyone had a blast and I was happy to see it on the table! At 8 players it is a sight to behold!

During Lords of Baseball the second silent auction was resolved as well as give aways. I was able to snag a copy of Combat Commander Europe which has been on my wish list to try for a long while, but this copy came with one of the very cool Combat Commander throw blankets. A must have accessory for the wargamer that wants to keep warm!

Day 4 – Monday

It was pretty clear that Monday was a slow day. The hall only had maybe a quarter of the tables filled in the morning and I had but one thing on the agenda that I didn’t have time for the rest of the con: Angola!

Angola is a game from MMP that is an updated edition of a Ragnar brother’s game and was originally published in 1988. It is a four player 2 vs 2 team game that uses action programming for your units. Something that Levy and Campaign lovers will be familiar as it was the direct inspiration for Volko’s inclusion in Levy and Campaign. Three out of the four of us it was our first time so the first turn was a bit rocky. But the game does an interesting job onboarding as you start with very basic units and a very small activation deck. Each turn you get more units and so the make up of the forces and battles get increasingly bloody and chaotic.

The game uses dice differential system that modifies the original combat odds by ways of shifts that can be extremely brutal to both sides. It also includes an interesting catch up mechanic where the side that lost the most VP during the turn gets high powered foreign aid units that can nearly break the game with their abilities.

We got through about half of the game before we had to call it but it was a blast and definitely one I’ll want to bust out soon, but it is a game that can take 6+ hours to play. I can see why the game is held in such high regard as one of the best if not best team wargames ever made. I loved the chaos of it and once we got going relatively simple rules. Definitely one to check out!

That’s a Wrap

Whew! what a block of gaming! As I said at the open. I had very high hopes for this convention as SDHISTCON was one of the things directly responsible for my deep dive into wargaming in the spring of 2021. The convention was a blast! I was happy to meet several friends that I converse with online and play a lot of cool demos and games that I don’t get a chance to play often.

Couple that with the beautiful weather of sunny southern California and the ability to have meals out by the waterfront and it is definitely a top convention in my book. A big recommend for anyone that is even remotely interested in wargaming as it is super welcoming and has positive vibes all around. If you get a chance to check it out do it! With that I’ll leave you with my final picture a little selfie after my dinner Monday night on the dock! What a weekend indeed!