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GMT Fall 2023

I was anxious to go to GMT Weekend at the Warehouse this fall. I had missed the spring weekend because it conflicted with our trip to the Midwest in April. I had a lot of fun at Consimworld Expo in August so I was looking forward to attending another con and doing some serious wargaming.

Even though it takes about twelve hours to get to Hanford, I always drive. That way I can take whatever games I like. More importantly, I can buy as many games as I want at the Saturday sale, when all GMT games are 40% off (and no shipping charge). Half of the trip is pretty easy, through Idaho, Oregon and Nevada. The half in California, over Donner Summit, through Sacramento, and down Highway 99 through all the Central Valley cities, is not fun. The important thing is to get through Sacramento before 3 pm to avoid rush hour traffic. I got a reasonably early start, leaving my house at 6:30 am, so I thought that I was in good shape.

Things didn't start well. There was a surprising amount of traffic on the interstate heading out of Boise. That didn't make sense so early in the morning. Shouldn't people be heading into town to go to work? Even after getting off at Nampa, there was a lot of traffic. The strangest thing was that in Marsing I was stuck behind a line of cars waiting to turn left to go to Grandview. There was so much traffic coming the other way that it took a while before there was a gap so they could turn. Who the hell goes to Grandview? And why was there a whole line of cars going the other way through Marsing?

Fortunately no one turned south on US 95 when I reached the junction just west of Marsing. As usual, going through the mountains in Idaho, Oregon and Nevada was easy. And to make up for the aggravation at the start, traffic was lighter than usual going through Reno and over Donner Summit. I considered that a fair trade.

Unfortunately, it didn't last. I hit stop and go traffic going through Sacramento on the Capitol City Freeway, even though it wasn't even two oclock yet. And that was just the start. Traffic was heavy all the way down Highway 99. There was a lot of construction, which made it much worse. I didn't count but there must have been ten times that traffic completely stopped and just inched forward a few car lengths at a time. Man, I hate that road. Even with no stops for food it was a twelve and a half hour trip by the time I reached Hanford, an hour longer than it should take. I was starved by the time I got to Round Table Pizza for dinner.

The next day I was at the warehouse early and ready for wargaming. Since I come in the night before I am usually one of the first ones there on Thursday but this time there was a large game of Third World War already set up. It was the new Compass Games Deluxe Edition, a reprint that combines all four of the original Third World War games published by GDW in the 1990's. Games that big are common at Consimworld Expo but not at GMT weekend. It took up four tables and had six guys playing.

One of the participants was Mark Ruggiero, who is struggling with advanced stage cancer. Besides playing wargames he buys and sells a lot of them online. He and I have bought games from each other many times. Once I even bought an out-of-print game from him that he bought back a year later. This time I was picking up three games from him that a friend in Boise had bought (I was carrying them back to Boise to save shipping cost and effort). I got to talk to Mark and although his chemo was a real challenge, he said that as long as it was physcally possible, he would be coming to wargame conventions. He even talked about plans for GMT weekend in the spring and CSWE next summer. He said that if his time is limited, he wants to spend it doing what he loves.

My plan for the first day, appropriately enough, was to play Shiloh: The First Day. It's a new game being designed by Steve Carey using the Blind Swords system. It should be published next year by Revolution Games. It's bigger than any previous BS game, the first two mapper using the system. It also includes several shorter, one map scenarios. I had played two of them at CSWE in August. This time I was playing a scenario on the attack on Sherman's division. I took the CSA while Steve played the USA. It starts with a lone Confederate brigade far out in front leading the advance. Rather than maneuver or wait for the rest of my forces to come up, I made a bold attack on the very first move. If it went well, I would be able to drive deep into the Union position before they could react. If it didn't, my advanced brigade would be on its own and in big trouble. Of course, it didn't go well. After that I fought hard but was never able to recover from my first turn gamble. The Union won a decisive victory. Steve was appreciative of my playtesting efforts and sprang for lunch at Chile's.

At the next table, Roger Miller and Richard Handeworth, the two guys who are Revolution Games, were playtesting the full two-map campaign game for Shiloh. Of course they had lots of comments and questions for the designer so they were constantly calling "Hey Steve!". They meant Steve Carey of course, not me, but by the end of the day I had a stiff neck from turning around every five minutes.

The next two days I had scheduled with Larry Davidson. We always play East Front games. This time we picked Uman Pocket from the new Battles in the East series from Decision Games. I had bought the first two games in the series at CSWE directly from Doc Cummins. They were pricey but not too bad with the convention discount and no shipping. The series is very similar to the old Panzergruppe Guderian and Army Group South Quad games from SPI, all games that I think are really fun. I thought it was worth giving it a chance, even though I am usually suspicious of DG products. Turned out that the game was fun and that the components looked great. The only negative was that we came up with a LOT of rules questions. There really isn't any excuse for that when you are using a system that has been around for thirty years. And a lot of this would have come up if the game had been thoroughly playtested. Rules uncertainty did slow us down so we didn't finish on Friday. Normally I would expect we would be able to play one of the BitE games in a single day.

Saturday morning started with doughnuts from GMT and Gene's usual State of GMT talk. They seem to get longer every time but Gene started by saying his talk would be short. I was skeptical but surprisingly he finished in just under half an hour, a new world's record. They still had a lengthy "every designer and developer gives a status update" but Larry and I just ignored it. Our game was set up way in the back so we snuck away and resumed playing.

Of course, we did break when it was time for the sale. Usually Gene gives 40% off but today he said everything was 50% off. I bought three games: Downfall (w/mounted map), North Africa '41 and Inferno. Then it was back to our East Front game. We finished around dinner, Larry scoring a Soviet Tactical Victory.

As usual, I took off first thing next morning. Traveling on a Sunday, there were no traffic delays. This time it only took eleven and a half hours and I was home before 8 pm. It was a really fun weekend and I was psyched to do more wargaming. I wanted to dig into the systems for both of the games that I played to really learn them.