GaryCon 2026 Recap
I recently returned from GaryCon, my first game convention. I had a really wonderful time & got to play some interesting & thought-provoking games.
Aside from one game of Delving Deeper on Thursday morning, I ended up exclusively playing wargames. This was partly because the TTRPG sessions that interested me most tended to fill up quickly, but mostly because I find that opportunities to play wargames at all are relatively scarcer.
Also, my impression from the con is that a lot of the "old-timers" tended to gravitate toward the wargames. I didn't have any agenda here, but just by floating around the wargaming room I got to have some really interesting conversations, including with an editor of Strategy & Tactics magazine and the first person ever to play a dwarf in D&D.
Anyways, here are my thoughts on specific games:
Dawn Patrol (Fight in The Skies)
Dawn Patrol is an instance(?) of Fight in The Skies, a WWI dogfight simulation designed by Mike Carr. It was the source of the OD&D aerial combat rules, and also was one of the first games to introduce the idea of "experience gain" (pilots can be brought from scenario to scenario, improving stats as they score kills).
The session I joined was a simple scenario where five British planes were trying to interdict a German bomber escorted by five fighters. I was on the German team, flying a Fokker D7.
All told, the rules of FiTS are pretty easy to learn. It's a good with a large group because each player controls a single unit and not all that much coordination is required. I wouldn't say it's all that tactically interesting -- a lot depends on initiative: if you roll well, your task is just finding someone to shoot, and if you roll badly you can try to escape but usually you just have to accept getting shot at.
Oddly, I had the most fun resolving hits against my aircraft. When an enemy shoots at you, they say something like "two hits from above" or "three hits -- left side". You then get to roll a bunch of dice to resolve a very crunchy system that allocates hits to different parts of the plane, with varying chances of a crit. Using the dice to figure out what happened takes the sting out of getting shot up, and the critical chances mean there's always the possibility of something wacky or extreme happening. In this game, one of the downed pilots actually succeeded at the 5% chance of landing in a haystack.
Braunsteinboine & Braunstein 1
Braunstein is one of the most interesting immediate precursors to D&D. It was invented by David Wesley, who was part of the Twin Cities wargaming scene. Wesley had wanted a way of generating scenarios for Napoleonic miniature battles, so he set up a role-playing scenario where each player controlled a person in a fictional Prussian town in 1796. One of his players by the name of Dave Arneson would go on to adapt this concept to a fantasy setting, and the rest was history...
I played in two Braunsteins at GaryCon.
The first was a Braunstein-inspired scenario called Braunsteboine, set in 1870s Manitoba. Characters included the captain of a British garrison, the local Metís population, the French-speaking Catholic congregation, nearby indigenous tribes (me), and the local blacksmith. Each character had a set of secret objectives (mine concerned preserving ancestral lands and trading my furs for food for the winter). Play occurred via written moves a la Diplomacy. To communicate and trade with another player, you had to place your character in the same zone on the map. Some players also had soldiers they could order around.
The game itself went a bit off the rails in an amusing way: I decided early on that since my indigenous troops were the most mobile, I would try to form little kill squads and defeat-in-detail the scattered British garrison before besieging the fort. After I picked off a couple troops, the garrison fled into the fort, but I managed to secure a marriage alliance with the Catholic congregation after burning down the protestant church. The game ended when the indigenous-catholic alliance (green & blue) stormed the fort, killing everyone inside.
David Wesley himself was present at this game, and invited everyone to attend his game of Braunstein the following evening. This proved to be very different.
Wesley ran a reconstructed version of his first Braunstein ("Braunstein 1"). The evening began with an amazing, impromptu 1.5 hour lecture that went over how Braunstein came about and concluded with a concise survey of Prussian history. Some interesting tidbits:
- Aside from the miniature wargaming context, Wesley was inspired by reading academic studies about negotiation and conflict resolution, and wanted to create a scenario that wasn't zero-sum.
- Resolution of specific events within the first Braunstein was ad-hoc -- he related a story to two players approaching him saying that they had arranged a duel, which he adjudicated with a roll-off of 2d6 (for the student) vs. 3d6 (for the Prussian officer).
- Apparently Braunstein 2 and 3 were failures due to an over-emphasis on systemization. The lesson: "let them have fun".
The game had (I think) at least 20 participants. I played "The Banker's Daughter", tasked with filling out a dance card for her upcoming debutante ball and helping her crush, the pro-revolutionary "Student B", escape from the town jail. Where as Braunsteboine unfolded in turns, here we were turned loose to mill around & negotiate. The room was full of energy despite it being after-hours on day two of the con. I managed to secure funds for a new dress and paid the jailer to release one of my student friends (but not Student B), but I sadly did not manage to manipulate my lovestruck math tutor into dueling the hated snob Student A.
At the end, we gathered in a big circle and went through each character's objectives, for a sort of loose, qualitative "final score".
Ultimately, both Braunsteins were very fun. Wesley's original had much more "sauce" as the characters were more interesting and complex. However, the structure and Diplomacy-style turns of Braunsteboine made for a more coherent and strategic game. For example, in my briefing as the Banker's Daughter, it was implied that I would have to convince my parents to let me leave the house, but in practice there was no structure to adjudicate my location and not enough alignment among the players to make location a consistent and meaningful part of the game state.
Both games suffered from some vagueness around objectives. For example, in Braunsteboine, one of my goals was to trade my stockpile of furs for food to survive the winter, but I didn't get any guidance about how many pounds of pemmican and wheat flour that would actually require. In Braunstein 1, I had to borrow 400 marks for a dress, but my banker father didn't have a good reference point for whether that was a lot or not.
With that said, I really liked the qualitative scoring at the end of both games, the way we collectively resolved the outcome without recourse to arbitrary point allocations or win conditions.
My Braunstein experience was colored by the fact that I've been playing in the Dusk Witch's Vanguard Cataphracts game for the last month or so. I think that some of the issues raised above regarding a lack of structure could be solved by Phracts-esque play-by-post. In particular, PBP is "transparent" to the referee in a way that milling around in a big room is not, giving the ref more capacity to clarify or rule on ambiguities, which (I think) makes the non-systematic, qualitative approach work better. However, there is a wonderful energy to gathering 20+ people in a room that would be lost this way.
Strategos-N & Chainmail
The other two games I played were both refereed miniature wargames. I have a fair bit of experience with hex & counter, but miniature games are less familiar aside form one afternoon spent figuring out Chainmail with Scribble M. Horror.
Strategos-N is a simplified Napoleonic variant of the first American wargame, Strategos by Charles Totten. We played it with 15mm miniatures, each representing 100 soldiers. The scenario pitted two Prussian players against a French player -- I controlled the Prussian infantry & artillery.
Ranged combat in Strategos-N involves calculating a base number of casualties (based on distance) and then applying a bewildering array of multipliers based on various conditions (terrain, formation, morale, unit type, etc.) to determine total losses. Melee combat involves an opposed d6 roll, with a certain number of optional rerolls allowed for advantageous conditions. Oddly, melee usually resulted in a null outcome where both parties were prevented from attacking for 3 turns.
Movement in Strategos-N is simultaneous, which required a lot of (often slightly frustrating) adjudication from the Referee. Unfortunately, our referee had an extremely quiet voice and we were in a very loud room with about 100 other people playing wargames. I had a hard time understanding his rulings, doubly so because the ruleset is fairly obscure & unfamiliar.
The game ended inconclusively because we ran out of time; there was lots of cavalry action and some cannon exchanges but we never really got to an infantry battle. I would say that Strategos N was an interesting experience more than a fun one.
On the last day, I managed to snag tickets to a game of Chainmail held on a sand table in the basement of Gary Gygax's old house.1
The scenario had the forces of Law transporting a treasure chest in a wagon train, ambushed by a marauding army of Chaos. I played on the Law team and controlled the armored knights & associated Superhero (armed with a magic sword).
The ensuing battle was wonderfully messy. I led some devastating cavalry charges against a unit of enemy horse archers. A Giant was evaporated by a lucky shot from our wizard's Lightning Bolt. The enemy wizard cast Darkness, forcing us to bunch our troops around the two characters armed with magic swords. At the end, a dragon emerged to take the treasure but our wizard managed to blast it out of the sky with a lucky roll of 11 on 2d6 (11+ needed).
Having now played two games of chainmail, I can confidently say that it is a Very Silly Game. It's incredibly swingy, & way too prone to killing off units en masse. The "meta", as far as I can tell, is to use archers against heavy cavalry (because with enough numbers they are guaranteed to pick off a few at a time), to use heavy cavalry against nearly everything else (because they are nearly unkillable in melee), and to use Lightning Bolt & Fireball against monsters and heroes (since racking up enough hits to kill them with mundane weaponry is very difficult). I am not an expert in medieval warfare, but my understanding is that this is not a very good approximation of how battles actually played out.
With that said, Chainmail is really fun in the right circumstances. It may not be a good medieval combat simulation, but it's a great game for playing out exciting battles with your little toys. It's great at generating "hype moments" & suspense, and it's very fast-paced. This insight has helped me understand why OD&D is the way it is.
Anyways, GaryCon was really fun! Thank you to EvilTables for selling me the ticket at a discount, Justin and Eliot for hours of good conversation, and the GMs who ran the games I was in: Jim, Scott, David, Ross, & Douglas.
This was very cool one one level, but having grown up in the midwest it basically looks like every other basement I have been in.↩