Good morning our faithful readers! As this post uploads this morning, we will have arrived in beautiful Columbus, Ohio to attend the best little game convention in the Midwest called Buckeye Game Fest. We have raved about this convention for years and always look forward to attending as it is such a great place to play games, meet great people and enjoy the glory that is our hobby of wargaming! This year will be our 4th time attending and we have been invited back as Guests of Honor, which means we have agreed to host several events and help to promote and advertise the convention. BGF is a multi-day convention that has two different parts. We are going to be a part of the War Room at Buckeye Game Fest which is open from Monday, April 29th through Sunday, May 5th. This year, we will only be attending from the evening of Wednesday, May 1st through Sunday. Our 4+ days at the convention will be filled with gaming events, designer interview videos, looks at new prototypes, and of course visiting with friends, the publishers who are there including Blue Panther and Catastrophe Games and various designers. But most importantly, we attend conventions to play games! We love to get together and do lots of multiplayer games and we are very much excited to get to playing.

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 written coverage will supplement the videos. This summary will most likely not be posted until after midnight 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 2 concurrent COIN Series Teach & Play Events where I will be teaching Fire in the Lake: Insurgency in Vietnam and Alexander will be teaching Andean Abyss: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Columbia and 2 concurrent sessions of Nations & Cannons RPG, which is a D&D 5th Edition American Revolutionary setting from Flagbearer Games. Should be a lot of fun! We also will be bringing along lots of other multi-player games to hopefully play and we have a 6-player game of Here I Stand from GMT Games already scheduled for Saturday. Our philosophy of gaming at conventions is big multi-player games and each of the games we are bringing plays anywhere from 3-6 players. No 2-player games at BGF for us!

We also have plans to sit down with Hermann Luttmann to get a look at some of his upcoming projects and play some games (possibly The Struggle for Zorn: The Red Blight and The Plum Island Horror) and also get video interviews with Steve Jones with Blue Panther (who is partially sponsoring our attendance at BGF this year), Tim Densham with Catastrophe Games, Wes Crawford, Ryan Heilman and Dave Shaw. Should be a busy few days and a lot of fun.

Finally, if you are at Buckeye Game Fest please feel free to find us and say hello. I believe that we are very friendly and accessible 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.

Please check back each day for a summary of the days exploits. Thanks for following along.

Here is a link to the Day 1 Daily Debrief.

-Grant