We are exhausted! After 3 days here at SDHistCon we have experienced so much, including playing some great games and meeting some fantastic people! I’m going to make this entry a bit shorter even though we played a lot of games today.

Our first game of the last day of the con was John Brown designed by Alex Knight, whose debut game was Land and Freedom from Blue Panther. John Brown is a bit of a different game for a few reasons.

First off it is a historical game that has two distinct parts, which are almost like 2 separate games in the same box. The part we played was a sort organizing game where you meet conditions of scenarios by moving characters around a map of the country recruiting fighters, finding and moving guns and raising funds all in an effort to get to Harper’s Ferry. The second part of the game is the battle at Harper’s Ferry.

We played the first part only and had a great time. The game is cooperative and each player controls a historical character that has special abilities and who can take actions. The goal is to move John Brown around and keep him from being found and arrested by the US Marshalls as he is a wanted man. You then have to recruit various fighters with special abilities and get them all to Harper’s Ferry. The hard part is this takes money but John Brown can attract patrons and also earn funds for giving abolitionist speeches.

People will like this one if they enjoy narrative driven cooperative games where players work together under difficult circumstances to maximize moves and actions. We had a great time but we lost the scenario because we failed to raise the required $3,000 to smuggle the guns the last few hundred miles.

This game doesn’t have a publisher as of yet and needs some refinement and graphic design but it will be a good game. I know that Kevin Bertram at Fort Circle Games is keenly interested.

Next up we played a very cool and fast playing 4X space game called Microverse designed by Sam London (the same designer for Firefight Tactical which we played on day 1 here).

The game uses hex tiles that are laid out to create the board which includes unexplored areas of space that contain planets that can be colonized, dead space, asteroid fields, wormholes and super novas.

We were playing a 4-player game and it played very fast in about an hour. The players use cards to take actions such as explore, colonize, mobilize (move) and build (ships). The other very interesting part of the cards is that there are no dice used for combat and cards are pulled and icons for shields, hits and command are included and compared. Overall a very nice looking game that was a blast to play. Alexander won by building 6 colonies to claim the victory. I had a chance to win by conquering one other players home world just the round before but the cards were unkind and I failed by 1 hit.

I also really liked that there are over 80 species that players can choose from which gives lots of replayability. Each of these civilizations have different abilities and even weaknesses.

We next played Tyranny of Blood: India’s Caste System Under British Colonialism, 1750-1947 designed by Akar Bharadvaj. This game won the 2021 Zenobia Award and is really deep and involved. The game has quite a lot of complexity but not just for complexities sake as the designer is trying to model the situation and show why people allowed caste systems and how they benefitted from them and the price it exacted.

I really liked the system which is based off of Here I Stand with Home Cards and events as the game is a Card Driven Game.

The most interesting part of the game is the Caste Hierarchy Track that shows how individuals can struggle to move up in a society which is based on wealth and position. The players take actions that will provide the ability to move up and down on the track and also can be covered up by tiddlywinks that come from other players actions. The key to this game is that all player actions help and hurt different players and it is important to understand how that works.

Asymmetry abounds in this game as you would imagine and it is a bit on the complex side and will probably take 3-4 hours to play a full game. I am very interested in learning more about this one and will be reaching out to the designer to do a written interview. We did shoot a video with him but it probably won’t do the game justice.

The final game of the day was In the Shadows from GMT Games. In the Shadows is a 2-player card-driven wargame about the struggle of the French Resistance against the occupying Nazi and collaborating French forces between January 1943 and June 1944 during WWII. In the game players are either the Resistance or the Occupation. The game strives to have players better understand the nuances of the Resistance and the clandestine nature of the fight that led to the founding of the modern French Republic.

One of the designers Dan Bullock taught us the game and it was very good. It is one of the Lunchtime Series of games and plays in about an hour. But it really has a lot of meat on its bones. The cards are great and each player has their own specific asymmetric action menu. It also is a very graphically pleasing game and will definitely be a hit once it is released.

Alexander won as the Occupation and our game ended on the last action point requiring Alexander to pull a success on an arrest to win. He was successful and we both had a great time!

After that we decided to call it a day and said our goodbyes and left the convention. Sunday was a lighter day for attendance as many people had to catch planes back east but we still had a very enjoyable day

I was finally able to meet several content creators at the con that I regularly interact with on social media such as Mike (Zilla Blitz), Michael (Hissy Cat) and Grant (Pushing Cardboard as well as Liz (Beyond Solitaire), Dan (Space-Biff!) and Candice Harris from BGG. It is really great to be a part of such a welcoming and fun community and I am glad for our decision to come to the SDHistCon.

We have already discussed it and I think we will plan to try and come out to San Diego every year! We hope to see many of you there!

Thanks for following along and I hope that you enjoyed reading about our experience.

-Grant