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GMT Weekend - Fall 2019

Sandy had just returned home after spending a week in Wisconsin with her parents and it was time for me to leave for fall GMT weekend. We get around a lot for a couple of old people.

I got my usual 6 am start. As always, the first half of the trip through Idaho, Oregon and Nevada was pleasant. As soon as I stopped for lunch at McDonald's in Reno things took a turn for the worse. After getting my lunch they told me that their soda machine was broken. They had not one but two and they were both broken. They said they could get my drink from a third machine that was in the back that they used for drive through orders but when they tried, it didn't work either. That was just weird. But at least there was a guy there to fix it. He said the machine just needed to be rebooted. It was one of those fancy machines with a touch screen for selecting your drink. So I stood there and watched the boot screen. When it finished, a second boot screen came up. Then a third. For Pete's sake, how many boot up screens does a freakin' soda machine need? After standing there waiting for a full five minutes, I gave up. I ate my lunch dry and bought a Diet Coke in the mini mart afterwards to take with me. Life can be tough.

After Reno the drive isn't fun anymore. For a small city, the interstate through Reno is busy. After that, Donner Pass is narrow and windy. Going into and through Sacramento is always jammed with traffic. There was actually a section of stop and go, bumper to bumper traffic on the Capital City Freeway when I came through at 1:30 in the afternoon. Then Hwy 99 was worse than usual. There were five different times when traffic slowed or stopped. Pretty much every time I went through one of the Central Valley cities there was a traffic jam: Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Fresno. Even Chowchilla. Yeesh. Even though they have widened a lot of Hwy 99 from two to three lanes in the past few years, there is just more and more traffic. Too many people in California. I finally did make it to Hanford though. Even with minimal stops, it took twelve and a half hours, half an hour longer than usual. It seemed like more than that though.

My first game on Thursday was Colonial Twilight. I was playing Dennis Dowd who had come all the way from Omaha, Nebraska. It was his first time at a GMT weekend and he was loving it. We had a good game but I was able to pull out a win with the FLN on the third propaganda card.

Gaming cons are a good place to meet other wargamers. Since Dennis is retired like I am we exchanged contact info so we could play via VASSAL. He also expressed interest in playtesting my Fallujah game. After I got home to Boise I mailed him my extra set of playtest counters and the file for the map so he could get it printed.

Later that day I played Hearts and Minds with Karl K. I wanted to play the US because some of the folks at the weekend at the warehouse who had tried the game were saying that the US couldn't win. I like a challenge and I wasn't convinced that the US had no chance. It's tough but possible to win. Karl had played before so I was expecting a good game. It was a rough fight but I was able to win as the US at the end of 1968. It helped that Karl had a string of bad rolls on some political conversion attempts near the end. I do think Hearts and Minds is a lot of fun so was glad that I didn't have to consign it to the back of the game shelf.

Afterwards a group of us went out to dinner at Chili's and had a lot of fun trading old wargame stories.

Friday was a game of Panzergruppe Guderian with Larry Davidson. He is the master of maps and when he looked at the one in VASSAL, which is what I told him I had printed out for us to use, he got a better map that some guy in Russia had posted on the web. He did a lot of work on it. He changed all the names to English (from Russian). He changed the colors and shades for the background and terrain. He moved some of the game tracks around. Finally he blew it up so it would be less crowded. Impressive, especially since he doesn't have the game. Since I had upgraded counters that I got from the SPI Wrecking Yard, I made a deal with Larry to get the map in return for buying him lunch. Now I have a really nice Panzergruppe Guderian game, much better than any published version.

Our game went well. It seemed like every five minutes someone would come by and comment on the game, saying it was an old favorite, that they had played it many times back in the day. Larry won a marginal victory as the Germans. One more VP and it would have been a major victory. Since a lot of the writeups on the game say it has a pro-German tilt, I considered holding him to a minor German victory to be a minor Soviet victory. (And with that double speak I think I could run for office.)

One day I was chatting with Trevor Bender. He is designing a COIN game on the Syrian Civil War and the second expansion to Labyrinth. Since the US had just done its sudden withdrawal from Syria that week, I asked him how many new cards he had needed to make. He smiled and said "You're the third person to ask me that today." Turns out when Trump talked about withdrawal several months ago, he had already done cards for "Trump Tweets" and "US withdraws". He said he did create a new card this week for "Trump impeached". Now we just have to draw that card!

Saturday of course is the big day - the sale. I had been walking through the warehouse for two days trying to decide which games I was going to buy. I was agonizing over one in particular - Les Guerres du Roi Soleil from Ludifolie games. It's a period of history that I enjoy and that my friend Erik especially likes. The game had just shown up on the GMT website a month or so before so I was surprised when I got there to see that they had only one copy! For two days I had considered hiding it but had resisted, thinking that wasn't fair. But I made sure I was there extra early on Saturday before the "State of GMT" talk so I could get a seat close to the door. As soon as Gene finished talking I planned to bolt for the game.

As I talked to my friends Larry and Pat they said not to take any chances. They told me to just go get the game now. Why take chances? It didn't matter because we just turned in sheets later saying which games we bought. I figured that since I had at least waited till the morning of the sale, I had been patient enough. I snagged the one copy and put it with my stuff.

Gene's talk usually has some interesting stuff but I've noticed a trend - each time I go they seem to get longer. When I first came ten years ago, the talk was about an hour long. This one was two and a half hours. That's too much of a good thing, especially when everyone is anxious to buy new games and then get back to playing wargames.

When the talk was over and it was finally time for the sale I did show some restraint. I didn't get everything that I could have. I did let Larry and Pat talk me into getting a game on Kursk by a strange Asian publisher. We couldn't figure out if they were Chinese, Japanese or Korean. But hey, it was an east front game.

My one unusual purchase was Tank Duel. It's a card game of tank to tank combat on the eastern front. Normally that would be too tactical for me, but a game that you can play with teams, with a variable number of players, and finish in two hours or less would be perfect for my current gaming group in Boise. So I decided to get it, even though my friend Pat was dissing it. I got the last laugh though when he told me the following week in an email that on Sunday he broke down and bought it himself.

After the sale and several trips out to the car to put away all of my purchases, it was time for gaming again. I played Fallujah Fury with Pat. He played the Coalition and I was able to get a win with the Insurgents, but only by six points. Fairly close. I am very interested in the play balance at this point so this was a good result. Pat said he liked the game and would play again. Hey, an unsolicited testimonial.

I also got some good input from him on a point of rules that I was thinking about. He had some good ideas that convinced me which way to go in the rules. And I got good visibility for the game. Lots of people stopped by to look it over and ask about it while Pat and I were playing.

Saturday night was a game of Epic Ancients. We played a battle from the Successor Wars and our Greek faction won. Always a good game after a couple of days of more serious games at a convention.

And then Sunday it was time to drive home. The weather was good and traffic on Sunday is always pretty light so there were no problems. Another GMT weekend at the warehouse was in the bag. Well, the games I bought at the sale were in the bag. Or at least in the car.