SDHistCon 2024: Giant John Company, Shakespeare’s First Folio, Hell-Raisers in Kanawha County

I think about the conventions I go to every year, and half of them are in the historical gaming sphere. Am I a wargamer? Some people would say I am not because I haven’t actually played a hex and counter game — like ever. But I love learning about history, I love learning about people’s design projects, and I love playing all types of games. And I’ve been lucky to have met and gamed with some of the coolest and interesting people in the hobby! 

Earlier this month, I attended SDHistCon in San Diego, held in the SES Portuguese Hall in the Point Loma neighborhood. There is a good selection of hotels and food areas within walking distance from the convention, and it’s really close to the San Diego Airport. I arrived from Phoenix on Thursday late afternoon, checked into my hotel, and went over to the pre-convention meetup at Eppig Brewing. 

I love this meetup as it gives people a chance to meet in person or catch up with old friends before all the gaming gets underway on Friday. This year, SDHistCon continued through Monday, Veterans Day, instead of ending on Sunday like previous years. I enjoyed having that extra day to game before driving back to Phoenix!

Friday

The first game on Friday was Queen of Spies, a prototype from Liz Davidson and David Thompson. Queen of Spies is a bag-pull game, inspired by female spies and their networks during the world wars. Alice is the leader, and the other women belong to different cells, and they move through the town to fulfill objectives, train up, research technology and deal with officials when one of them gets caught. Our mission for our game was to gather pigeons and train them to become spies. Players decide which spies enter which locations to take an action, but those decisions require time, which is in short supply. And if strangers meet at once location, an alert token gets placed into the bag, making them more susceptible to getting caught.

I really enjoyed the tension created by the limited number of time cubes. When you decide to place a spy at a location, a certain number of cubes get placed there as well, and they come off one at a time during turns. When different locations use different amounts of times, it delays that space’s activation, creating an interesting puzzle about where to place your resources. Can’t wait to see this printed!

Next up was Gibberers. This game was bonkers — and so incredibly innovative! Taylor Shuss brought this gen of a Japanese game from Gen Con where players create a new language with a specific number of words, and they must use those new words to get other players to guess new words on a card. You always start with words for Yes, No, I and Understand. We then created new words for 14 more words. Some of the useful words we created were living, hot, thing, person, etc. 

You then speak and try to communicate in this new made-up language that probably sounds like gibberish to someone walking by. And having yes and no to pair with new words helped communicate if the object is something that it’s not. And as you progress with each new round, you add words to your new dictionary. Readers, let me tell you that we were talking in this language throughout the rest of the con! What a lovely experience. Zeby lopa-lopa! (translation: I understand.) 

I then attended a seminar called: Games as History: Academic Preservation of Board Games that featured three professors (2 from Stanford and 1 from UC Irvine) who digitally archive board games. Liz hosted the talk, and I learned about the challenges of collecting archival material for game preservation, which aren’t necessarily about the board game itself. The panelists also discussed the changing mindset about how libraries can indeed rent out board games like any other resource material they have on hand, but that sometimes they don’t have the hobby knowledge and/or space for them, and they don’t know where to start. Yay for libraries!

I then got a chance to play a prototype of Shakespeare’s First Folio. I love me some Shakespeare and this trick-taking, resource gathering card game fits the bill. Players start with a hand of cards (cards are divided into three suits: histories, tragedies and comedies), which are used to win tricks during the first phase of the game. If you win the trick, you collect that card into your score pile for later. For the rest who didn’t win the trick, you collect the resources printed on your card, either paper, type, ink or money. 

The second phase of the game starts with players trading resources (one of each) to publish a play from the market, or paying money to hire workers who give you special abilities. You can also take a gamble to draw chits from the bag, which could potentially net you more resources, or take a rolled dice from the market that also has resources on it. At the end of the game, the cards in your personal pile are scored if you have sets of the same number, or if you have straights of the same suit. I love the artwork for this game, and I can’t wait to play it in Washington, D.C., in 2025 at Fort Circle’s Circle DC convention, which will be held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in March.

One of the restaurants we eat at frequently at the con is Ketch. It’s close and nearby, and the menu is large enough for all kinds of eaters. Unless it’s a busy Saturday night, you can usually just walk into here to get a meal.

The last game of the night was Rock Hard: 1977. This game is a worker-placement euro, but was very surprised how well the theme was incorporated into its design. Gameplay just oozed rock ‘n’ roll! Players are up-and-coming musicians who have to work their regular job to pay for recording demos, create records or hire PR. And those jobs are either day, night or after-hours!

As your chops, reputation and song list grows, which are tracked on these very cool dials on the player boards, you’ll be able to perform at bigger and bigger venues, gaining more money and potentially more chops or reputation. And yes, you can crank that dial to 11! If you want to make a second action during a phase, you can spend “candy” to do so, but if you use too much “candy,” your craving might get too high and you’ll end up in recovery. You might end up with a skiing problem. As the game progresses, you’ll be able to skip your regular job because gigs are paying enough, paving the way to become a full-fledged rock star. Rock on, party people! 

Saturday

I started the day with Pax Pamir, which has become a staple at every single convention I’ve gone to. It’s always so nice to slide into a game you’ve played before countless of times!

It was a tense 4P game, which ended in a three-way tie, with yours truly a few points away from the rest of the pack. I should’ve switched my alliances! 

I then got to meet this lovely gentleman in person. Pete Skaar always leaves a nice comment on my blog posts. We got a chance to talk about games and his family in the San Diego area. Thanks, Pete, for always reading along! 

I then played a prototype from Taylor Shuss called Love Potion Factory. Players are placing meeples into a factory to collect resources and trade them in for potions and victory points. If you’re the first player to come into a space, you get one resource of that type. The second person then gets 2 resources, etc. As the main board fills up, there’s a danger that the meeples will come together because they’re magnetic, which then ends your turn and clears off the board. It starts to get a little stressful placing your meeples, and there were a few times I jumped because the meeples snapped together. Super duper fun! 

I then taught a quick game of Bonsai, a tile laying game where each player is cultivating their own bonsai tree. I really enjoy the choices for this game (essentially gather resources or lay down resources), and the game creates such a gorgeous table presence when over. Each game randomly chooses three sets of objectives, where you can claim one or push your luck to claim a higher-valued one, skipping the lower-valued one permanently. If you want to learn more about the game, I did a review of Bonsai on The Five By Episode 148. 

Next up was a pretty-finished prototype of Hell-Raisers of Kanawha County from Milda Mathilda and Luke Evison, coming next from Wehrlegig Games. This game is set during the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike, a confrontation between striking coal miners and coal operators in Kanawha County, West Virginia: The strike lasted from April 18, 1912, through July 1913.

Games like this are exactly why I attend historic gaming conventions — to learn about these moments in history that affected a group of people and/or culture and how this event influenced present day. The strike was one of the most violent conflicts in American labor union history, and this game captured the tension between the miners and coal companies. The game also featured prominent labor figures such as Mary “Mother” Jones.

I then attended a seminar called How Professional and Hobby Wargames Connect. I learned a little bit about the unclassified processes of real life wargamers who work with the military and how they have turned some of that work into published games into the hobby industry. Liz also ran this panel, and I enjoyed attending these very academic seminars. Thanks, SDHistCon, for having these on the schedule! 

I then played a quick demo of another game from Taylor Shuss, this time about parking requirement laws when creating a shopping area. You’re drafting various tetromino shapes and objectives to place on your board. The first half of the game features various businesses with a whole bunch of parking spaces. Then in the second phase of the game, you’re adding different businesses on top of those parking squares while trying to fulfill a second set of objectives. 

On Saturday night, I got invited to participate in the celeb game of giant John Company. This game was ginormous, including plastic ships, a substantial elephant, and our family members enclosed in these Victorian-looking photo frames. In John Company, players assume the roles of ambitious families attempting to use the British East India Company for personal gain. According to the Board Game Geek description, the wrestles many of the key themes of imperialism and globalization in the 19th and 19th centuries and how those developments were felt domestically.

The game featured 16 players, split into four people per family. The Hastings family included venerable war game designers Mark Herman, Ananda Gupta, Sebastian Bae … and me. LOL Ananda suggested using the strategy of putting a bunch of writers out there on the board, which helped for a bit, but it did no good under the bad leadership of a chairman who seemed to just completely mismanage the funds.

The game included a lot of wheeling and dealing, and some forceful yelling to get the chairman to do our bidding. (The yelling mostly came from Sebastian.) What an awesome experience to play with all these cool people! Cole Wehrle did a great job of making his game ginormous!

Sunday

I started my morning attending a public SDHistCon board meeting. I wanted to hear about the state of the convention as board members discussed how to make it grow and be more accessible to all types of historical gamers. SDHistCon does online conventions a year, as well as SDHistCon East held in Newport, Rhode Island, at the U.S. Naval War College Museum. 

I then attended an announcement of the Zenobia award winner. The Zenobia Award is both a competition and a mentoring program in which game designers from underrepresented groups develop and submit historical tabletop game prototypes. This year’s winner was The Porters, designed by Lucas Cockburn, Neco Cockburn and Alex Goss. The game tells the story of Black porters on the Canadian railways who were working to organize unions. The grand prize for the award is $1,000 and a travel grant to a game convention of their choice.

I then taught a game of Arcs to Trevor and Treg. Arcs is quickly becoming one of my favorite games of the year, and I’ve been teaching this game every week for the past few weeks to different groups of people.

It’s a sci-fi strategy game where you seize initiative using multi-use cards and declare ambitions, while destroying opponent ships and capturing their workers. I love the gameplay mechanisms and the look of the board and components. 

I then got a chance to play LetterLine Junction from Ido Magal, a roll-and-write railway game where you’re creating words with the limited number of letters you have in order to complete your path. If you love word puzzles, this was a fun challenge, as we did not get good letters! At the start of the game, you roll the dice to determine your letter pool, and as you collect more iron from the map, you can roll for more letters or buy shares in various columns or rows, from which letters in those columns will boost your share price. You also have to collect wood from the board in order to cross mountains, while making sure revenue is higher than your debt. 

I always bring a couple of non-historic games to events like these because it amuses me a little bit to get a bunch of wargamers playing offbeat games. I mean, last year’s My Favorite Things was a big hit! After dinner, we played Wandering Towers, which, I think, is always a fun time. You move towers to fill your potions, and you move your wizards into the keep. But that darn keep won’t stop moving, and now you’re accidentally stuck inside a tower that someone moved over you. Sometimes people forget where their wizardis, which often leads to “Hmm, I thought my dude was in this tower.” It’s hilarious fun — and it’s a short game!

The last game of the night was Phantom Ink. This game is AMAZING! It’s a clever party large-group game that manages to keep everyone engaged throughout the game. Players split off into two groups of mediums who try to guess an object that one person on their team, the designated spirits, knows. The mediums choose two cards from their hands that have random questions and give them to their spirit, and the spirit chooses one to answer — one letter at a time.

The mediums at any time can say “Silencio!” if they can guess the answer. Or if they don’t want too much of their word revealed as it may give the other team a clue, even though they don’t know what the question is. It’s really entertaining when a round goes off the rails, but it rarely completely comes undone. One team usually ends up getting the word before the end of the game. I also did a review on it on The Five By Episode 150.

Monday

Monday was the last day of SDHistCon. Some friends had already flown out this morning, but I got a chance to play a few games before I drove back to Phoenix. I played Nathan Fullerton’s prototype of The Most Insignificant Office, a card game about who will become vice president to George Washington. The different suits represent different men, and players are playing one card into their scoring pile and, depending on the round, a card or two or three into the middle, which then will be shuffled. Players then vote for or against the cards to be tabulated into votes for a specific person, and if it gets approved, that person moves up on the track. Hopefully the cards you put into your pile match the person in second place behind George Washington at the end of the game. Because if George isn’t No. 1, then everyone loses. 

The last game of the convention I played was Bread by Xoe Allred. It’s the end of the world, and you need bread to survive. Players play through a deck of cards where they can gather or build in their bunker, but you need bread in order to quell unrest. I love the artwork on this, and working together is harder than it looks! 

And that ended my four-day convention in San Diego. It had been an exhausting few weeks leading up to this convection, so I was glad to step away and unplug for a few days with good company.

The convention is always so inviting, and I love meeting new people and learning about their game designs. By the time this post goes to print, I have already attended Rincon in Tucson (more on that coming soon), but the next historic gaming convention I’ll be going to will be Circle DC in March. Hope to see you there one day. And let me know which of these games you’re interested in!