Good morning our faithful readers! As this post uploads this morning, we will be in attendance on Day 1 of the SDHistCon 2023 held in sunny San Diego, California at the best little historical games convention on the West Coast! We departed Indianapolis last night at 6:48pm EST and arrived in San Diego at around midnight on the West Coast. I don’t want to think about how tired we are right now but we are here and ready to get going. This event will include 3 days filled with gaming, designer interviews, looks at new prototypes, visiting with friends, publishers and designers.

This will be our initial trip to SDHistCon and we appreciate the constant prodding and encouragement from our friends Harold Buchanan and Andrew Bucholtz to get us out there and I am really looking forward to the experience. The San Diego Historical Games Convention is set to be held from November 3rd through 5th at the S.E.S. Portuguese Hall of San Diego. Various designers and contributors are confirmed to attend and include Gene and Rachel Billingsley, Jason Matthews, Ananda Gupta, Kai Jensen, Joe Schmidt, Justin Fassino, Terry Leeds, David Thompson, Liz Davidson, John Butterfield, Trevor Bender, Dan Bullock, Kevin Bertram, Roger Miller, Tory Brown, Taylor Shuss, Lauren Ino, Maurice Suckling and convention organizer Harold Buchanan amongst others.

The mission of SDHistCon is to create a diverse and supportive gaming community dedicated to playing, discussing, designing, and promoting historically-based board games. Through this commitment, SDHistCon seeks to serve both the existing historical board gaming community as well as grow it through the addition of new voices and perspectives. Recent events run by SDHistCon include this convention last year, the 2022 Summit Award (given to Red Flag Over Paris), an online convention in March 2023, and SDHistCon East at the U.S. Naval War College this past August. 

At the end of each day, I will be putting together a short summary of what we did that day at the convention. I would like to keep this to just a few paragraphs with several pictures to give you an idea of the games we played that day, people we talked with and other activities we participated in. We will still work on doing multiple videos as well that will be released on the YouTube Channel over the next few months but this coverage will supplement the videos. This summary will most likely not be posted until after 1:30am EST each night, if not a bit later, so you might be checking it out the next morning which is fine.

We have at least a few things planned that are official including a Written Content Panel featuring Candice Harris with BoardGameGeek and Dan Thurot (aka Space-Biff!) on Friday, November 3rd at 5:00pm PST and a celebrity game of Liberty or Death: The American Insurrection on Saturday, November 4th at 8:00pm with several distinguished players including Harold Buchanan, Jason Matthews, Liz Davidson, Jason Carr, Cole Wehrle and Candice Harris. Should be a ton of fun!

Finally, if you are at SDHistCon please feel free to find us and say hello. I believe that we are very friendly and accessible (well at least I am as sometimes the Brit is a bit crusty and gruff!) and love to make connections with our fans and followers. In fact, we have TPA buttons and stickers to give away so just ask. We also would like to take a picture with you so we can document it in our writings.

-Grant