It’s about that time of year again: my club is hosting its annual convention in Northern Virginia. This isn’t a huge deal–we have 14 tables and three slots across a single day. Overall attendance is usually between 80-100 people including the hangers-on. Every year I try to run some historical games and maybe something unique thrown in. This year will be the first one where I don’t run Chain of Command. The convention happens in the third week of June and I’m not sure I can get my ragtag group sallied forth and capable enough to play a Big COC version 2 game by then.

At least, that’s what I tell myself. In reality, while I look forward to Chain of Command v2 I’m not chomping at the bit for it. I have a lot of games in my wheelhouse right now and I want to try and show a wider spread of historical and ‘just plain fun’ gaming than I have in the past. Let’s take this in the order I’ll actually enact them at Tentcon. First up: What a Cowboy.

So I haven’t wandered all that far from Chain of Command. What a Cowboy comes from the same company and takes the systems of COC and applies them to cowboys. It’s a fun game I want to play more of and happens to be a good choice for convention gaming. I’ll be running up to two tables where players will play the The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly scenario from the 2023 Lard Magazine. It’s a well designed, simple scenario that gets around the multi-player issue rather intelligently.

The players are there to fight over a hidden treasure on the board. In order to collect the treasure, you have to get the details by killing a cowboy off each other team. Once you’ve collected all three clues (one of which you hold at the start) you get told where the treasure is and can make a mad dash to get it off the board. Only players who have the clues can interact with the treasure so you have to actually get aggressive early in order to win. Simple objective + encouraged conflict = good convention game. At least, that’s my going theory for this year.

Next up is still in my standard Lardy wheelhouse: Midgard. I’m actually doing Clontarf! Right this moment I’m working on my additional Irish forces and I will then pump out my vikings. I’ll be making new bases and, time permitting, I intend to make a full sized 8×4 Ireland board. This is the bulk of my preparatory effort toward Tentcon this year. For What a Cowboy I already have everything ready. Here, I need a full player’s worth of Irish and Vikings alongside a potential bespoke board. My hope is that this board will be composed of two 4x3s which I can then apply to Saga in the future.

I’ve written about Clontarf before–it’s the battle in which the Irish drove the Vikings into the sea, liberating Ireland and cementing Brian Boru in the country’s consciousness forever. Or it’s a civil war in which Boru kicked his son-in-law’s ass with the help of his Viking mercenaries and was declared high king for all of three hours before someone cut his head off. Details. I’ll write up my scenario and post it here soon. The objectives will revolve around capturing portions of the board and winning or changing the outcome of historic duels. Again–aiming to keep it simple. It will be a four player game with two per side. I’m hoping to capture the people who will care enough to maybe play again. With our recent club interest in Saga, I may just be able to leverage that momentum for the occasional Midgard game day.

And finally the surprise: SPACE GITS! This is a game from Mike Hutchinson and has a ton of unique ideas floating around in it. It’s currently on Kickstarter but I play to run the free beta rules. Space Gits is a dexterity based wargame where you play a roving gang of Space Orcs tearing up the city after a night of drinking. You stumble around collecting loot and smashing each other until the cops show up, then you flee the scene of the crime and count points.

As an example of the mechanics (you can look at the Kickstarter for more details): to move, you roll three D6 onto the board. Your orc must then move the number of inches listed on each individual D6… toward that D6. You can choose the order in which you execute this maneuver but the point is your Orc will stumble around drunkenly based on how your dice physically land on the board. There’s a few other equally silly mechanics, including the game having a real world timer. It runs for 30 minutes, then the cops show up and the players have to flee the board to not get caught! Whoever gets away with the most loot wins.

I figure this makes for a perfect end-of-day game. Instead of a full three hour match up you play a short one hour game including explanation. I may run two rounds if there’s interest–so two hours at the most. Nice, short, and very different. Plus, all I need to do is paint up 12 Orcs. I may do some extra terrain if I have the time but I already have an Orc shanty town so we’re already in good shape for this one.

And there we have it! This will be my most diverse Tentcon year thus far. It will be a great chance to wave a few of my personal silly opinions in front of the club:

1. Games can be fun and clever (Space Gits, What a Cowboy) without being basic and devoid of strategy or so complicated as to make them impossible to play as side-games.
2. There’s a large diversity of games doing interesting things (all of these) that are worth your time and minimal investment that respect you as a player and don’t bog down (Midgard).
3. Historicals can be more than just World War 2 (literally counteracting myself from past years).

We’ll see how many participants I get. There’s interest in the above listed games but I’m competing with the standard suite of Games Workshop past and present–Battlefleet Gothic, Legions Imperialis, Age of Sigmar, and Warhammer: 40,000 all have their usual dominant slots. I’ll be happy if I can fill four slots per time period this year. It’s small but I think we’ll show well and attract more players to our niche while expanding it a little.

So there it is: Tentcon 2025 from the historical (and Gits) perspective. From the… historical git perspective? There’s a shirt somewhere in there. Napoleorc or something. There’s a dangerous idea…