Good morning our faithful readers! As this post uploads this morning, we will be making our way out west to attend SDHistCon 2024 held in sunny San Diego, California at the best little historical games convention on the West Coast! We departed Indianapolis this morning at 8:25am EST and will arrive in San Diego at around 12:30pm on the West Coast. We will be attending the mixer that evening and get settled into our short term rental. We also are taking along The Players’ Aid Wives (Kelly and Paisley) and are excited to spend time with them in the beautiful southern California weather but also possibly host an event with them! This convention will include 4 days filled with gaming, designer interviews, looks at new prototypes, visiting with friends, publishers and designers.

This will be our 2nd 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 excited about attending as we had such a great time last year! The San Diego Historical Games Convention is set to be held from November 8th through 11th at the S.E.S. Portuguese Hall of San Diego. The convention is about 2 blocks from the San Diego harbor, just a few miles from the San Diego airport, and is surrounded by delicious restaurants and fairly affordable hotels.

Various designers, publishers and content creators are confirmed to attend and include Kevin Bertram with Fort Circle Games, Gene Billingsley with GMT Games, Roger Miller with Revolution Games, designers Tory Brown, Harold Buchanan, Dan Bullock, Steve Carey, Jason Carr, Matthias Cramer, Justin Fassino, Ananda Gupta, Kai Jensen, Nick Karp, Alex Knight, Sam London, Jason Matthews, Joe Schmidt, Taylor Shuss, Maurice Suckling, David Thompson, Cole Wehrle, Drew Wehrle, Dan Thurot (Space Biff!), Mark Johnson (Wargames To Go), Liz Davidson (Beyond Solitaire Podcast), Grecia (Midnight Boardgaming), Candice Harris (BGG), Meeple Lady, Grant Linneberg (Pushing Cardboard), Rus Wetli (Cardboard Conflicts) and Mike Smart (Zilla Blitz) 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 2024, 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.

Here are links to last year’s debrief posts to give you an idea of what you can expect:

SDHistCon Day 1 Debrief Post

SDHistCon Day 2 Debrief Post

SDHistCon Day 3 Debrief Post

We have at least a few things planned that are official including several big wargames like Shiloh – The First Day from Revolution Games with Grant Linneberg (Pushing Cardboard) and designer Steve Carey, a 5-player game of Crisis: 1914 from Worthington Publishing with designer Maurice Suckling, Russ Wetli and Harold Buchanan, Virgin Queen from GMT Games, Greek Tragedy from Blue Panther and a 3-player game of Battles of the American Revolution Savannah from GMT Games with series designer Mark Miklos. We also have been recruited for a celebrity game of John Company from Werhlegig Games on Saturday evening. We are looking forward to taking a look at other “as of yet unreleased” games including Absolved from All Allegiance designed by Sam London, Rebellion: Britannia designed by Maurice Suckling and Fifth Platoon designed by David Thompson and Non-Breaking Space in addition to some others. 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