It’s November, friends, which means SDHistCon! I decided to fly into San Diego this year for reasons, which then created a different set of problems because many of us weren’t sure at the start of the con if our flights were still going to exist by the end of the convention. Luckily, the worst that happened to me was a flight delay. 

I flew in early enough on Thursday to catch the first of two pre-convention events, which was a late lunch and hanging out at Stone Brewing at Liberty Station. I know I’ve said it before, but I always appreciate pre-convention events because it gives you a chance to get to know people in person out of the Discord – before all the gaming commences. 

The second event was at Eppig Brewing, where OMG – they had an ube cider. It was delightful! Highly recommended if you like ube! These are the things I miss from not living in California anymore. Eppig Brewing is right on the waterfront and it was great catching up with even more people while enjoying the cool weather. 

Friday

I started the day with Indonesia. Thanks, Andrew Heim, for running two games of this simultaneously! It’s been a long time since I’ve played a Splotter game, but this one and Food Chain Magnate are my favs from them. In Indonesia, you’re producing and shipping goods – rice, spice, rubber, siap faji and oil – across the country on boats. The brutal thing about this game is that if you have product to ship, it has to ship, even if you lose money paying to use other people’s boats to get the city that demands it. Weirdly, our cities never made it past level one. Lastly, the font for this game always makes me laugh. It totally reminds me of the font that everyone used in the 2000s for their wedding invitations. 

Next up was Microverse, a game that I got to play at Origins this past summer. It’s a fast-paced 4x game that plays in about an hour where players are alien factions are fighting in space – and not have their home planet blown up. So this past summer, my home planet got annihilated because I miscalculated how much speed someone could use to get to me. I vowed to prevent that from happening in this game.

Well … I was doing so well until the end, when someone attacked me and blew up my home planet. GAAAHH! The designer, Sam London, assured me that I put up a good fight though! That made me feel a little better. Kinda. I did back this game on the P500 so I am very much looking forward to this game!

I then played a prototype from Taylor Shuss called Quantum Train. It’s a trick-taking that takes place in space! Normal trick-taking rules apply for this game, which has alien suits, but the two highest cards get taken back by the player who played them for the card to be turned into passengers, and the two remaining cards remaining in the trick determine which direction the rocket ship on the board will go.

The now passenger cards that sit in front of a player have a location on the card where they’d like to get dropped off. When the rocket ship moves to that matching location, players can score their dropped-off passengers for points. Manipulating the rocket ship is a fun trick-taking twist. It really makes you really think about what card to play when you know you cannot win the trick. 

The last game of Friday night was Sidereal Confluence. I love this game, and in the pre-pandemic times, I used to run this game at most conventions I went to. I wasn’t sure if this game was something historical gamers wanted to play, but after some discussion in the SDHistCon Discord, I put it on the schedule and a full table came out to play. Hurray!

In Sidereal Confluence, you are alien factions with cool technologies that produce resources that you cannot use. So the crux of the game is negotiating, negotiating, negotiating. I put a timer for the negotiation phases so that the game can move along quickly. There’s nothing quite like yelling at people for small cubes and large cubes and grabbing pieces across the board with my giant tweezers. 

Dan Bullock, Brooks Barber, Cory Graham and I ended the night at a tiki bar, of course. We hit up False Idol in downtown San Diego, and the vibe was so cool. And of course, I had to order an ube bae, a drink blended with rum and sugarcane. I can’t resist anything ube. Those are the Filipino rules.

Saturday

Saturday morning started like any other morning – asking Volko Runhke, THE VOLKO, creator of the COIN system and all-around cool dude, to film a Tiktok with me that used a trending music mix of 4 Non Blondes/Nicki Minaj. I was a little nervous asking him to lipsync a song that contained curse words, but he did amazing! Thanks for participating, Volko! And thanks to Yoni for filming my vision!

Next up with a game of Cross Bronx Expressway, a game I had originally played at Origins as well, but this time, I played a short scenario that took place in the 1990s. This decade was BRUTAL to the community, the faction I played. The game is a 3P game where the community, private and public sectors work to house vulnerable populations and build infrastructure in the South Bronx during the 1940s-2000s when urban development was basically creating all sorts of havoc. It has a collective loss condition so players need to kinda work together while working to achieve their objectives. In my game, an event removed the one infrastructure the community had, and I could not raise any money because in order to fundraise, you roll a die based on how many infrastructure you had on the board. See the dilemma? I was spiraling!

I then played a quick game of Yubibo, which I’ve been describing as Twister with fingers. Players use one hand for the game, and the other to turn a card from their deck, which dictates which person and finger they need to place a stick in between.

As more cards are played, more sticks – and possibly squishy balls – are in play, making everyone really focused in order to hold the precarious stick structure together. If too many sticks fall, the game is over. Man, my fingers were kinda cramping, and it was so difficult getting a good group shot. My fingers were very occupied!

We then played a quick game of Cat in the Box. This trick-taking game without any suits is seriously a convention staple of mine. We play it all the time! It always amuses me teaching this game to people and telling them that you have to decide what the suit is for a card that you played, and that at any time you can declare you are out of a certain color.  

The last big game of the night was Game of Thrones. Love playing this game, especially with Dan Bullock and Brooks Barber, who were in the game I played this past summer at Consimworld.

Players are GOT houses trying to capture castles in 10 rounds. There’s always backstabbing, intrigue (as you place order tokens face down and they are all revealed simultaneously) and watching out for the Wildlings. Unfortunately, with SDHistCon closing its doors at 10 p.m. each night, we were unable to finish the game. Conquering Westeros just takes up so much time!

Afterwards we went across the street to Point Break Bar and Grill, where we played even more Yubibo and just hung out until it closed. As much as I love playing all the games at conventions, it’s the moments like where you hang out with friends and share life stories that make it all worthwhile. And man, there are some bonkers stories!

Sunday 

Sunday morning was the annual in-person SDHistCon board meeting. As an SDHistCon advisory board member, I attended the meeting with other board members and we talked about the state of the convention, the growing attendee list, plans for the future and other administrative stuff. The meeting is always open to the public for anyone who would like to attend. 

After the meeting, we went outside to play Medusa’s Garden, a game that requires some space and moving around. In this game, one person is Perseus, who turns away from the group and holds up a mirror, their only viewpoint of the group playing behind them. The rest of the group gets a secret card that says they’re Medusa or statues. The game starts when everyone freezes like a statue, and the Medusa player discreetly touches another player, who then falls to the ground after 10 seconds, like a shattering statue. Perseus must figure out who in the group is Medusa. If Medusa can shatter the majority of her statues, Perseus loses. If Perseus identifies Medusa, they win instead. 

Next up was Harmony of Discord Shogunate, a prototype from Sam London where players are warring Japanese clans trying to take control and complete their secret ambition. The game uses cards in a Pax-style market that has two clans on it and two actions, and on your turn, you can take one of the actions on the card or do an action with any clans on the card. If you take the first card, it’s free; the farther along the market the card is, the more coins it will take to use it. During the game, alliances can be made and broken, and battle resolution plays out in a specific order regarding samurais and others. The designer said this was the very first time this game had been played out in the wild, and he thought we were going to break the design, but the game ended up being really fun with our large group.

After that, we played Steel Beasts, another prototype from Sam London. It’s inspired by Tank Duel, a game I first played in New Orleans this summer, except Steel Beasts is played with just a deck of cards instead of including player boards. My experience in tank games are very limited, but I was able to quickly pick up the rhythm of the game as all the stats are printed on the card itself. The game is quick and fast, perfect when you have a small pocket of time in between games. 

Mid-afternoon, I was on a panel titled “How do we talk about historical games?” with Dan Thurot and Liz Davidson, moderated by Akar Bharadvaj. We discussed how journalism about historical games fits into the broader conversation about history, how academics study and use historical games for teaching, and the moral/ethical obligations we have about historical games, and other topics. Thanks, Akar, for asking me to be on this panel with two heavyweights in the historical gaming sphere. <insert gif of here of a smiling cat that says “I’m just happy to be included”>

After the panel, a group of us played Terra, a game about cooperation to save the world from environmental destruction. Players draw cards into their hand. If it’s a solution card, they keep it, but if it’s a crisis card, it’s placed face up into the middle of the table. Players then have a chance to play numbered solution cards to add into the crisis number on the crisis card. If they play the first matching solution card, they get 3 points, and the player that played the highest solution card gets 3 points. If crisis cards are not solved, they turn into full-blown crises and a collective loss can happen. 

Much like Terra, where players had to work together, players had to do the same thing in Bowie, a game from Dan Bullock. Four players are different versions of David Bowie, and you’re trying to visit locations to record albums while trying to prevent any version of Bowie from dying through the various things that happen living like a rock star, things like threats, dark princes and figures of the occult. 

Monday

Monday was the last day of the con. It went by so fast! I started with a quick game of Close Assault, another prototype from Sam London. My experience in tank games has now tripled just from this convention! In this game, you’re playing as two teams of two players, and each team has a couple of cards that act as replacements if your officers die. Game play is similar to Rummy where sets of cards are played for an action that’s printed on the card, and a higher value set can partially or fully beat what your opponent played. I enjoyed the hand management aspect of this game, as well as sometimes hiding out in a house so that my tank doesn’t get destroyed. 

Next was a demo of Queen of Spies, a game coming to Gamefound next month by Liz Davidson and David Thompson. I had seen an earlier earlier version of this a year ago, and to see a game’s development and fruition are one of the highlights of attending conventions such as SDHistCon. 

Queen of Spies is a solo, story-driven game about espionage and missions in occupied Belgium during World War I where you play as Alice – a former journalist turned spymaster – who runs a secret spy network. The artwork on this is gorgeous, and completing your missions before you run out of time or getting someone in your network imprisoned is hard work!

I then picked up a game I won at an auction: The Plum Island Horror. And guess what folks, I’ve already played it! I’ve had a very productive post-convention week. I love the horror theme of the game – as well as all the side jokes in the cards and rulebook – and playing cooperatively like a wargame to stop the hordes of murder zombies will always be a good time. 

And after that, I flew back home on Monday night, after a two-hour delay. The plane was super empty, which was a rare thing for me to see. 

This is my fourth SDHistCon, and I will definitely be back again next year. It’s such an intimate experience being surrounded by designers and gamers alike, and the location is super convenient to the airport as well as plentiful hotels and restaurants nearby.

SDHistCon was the last convention I will attend this year – maybe one day I’ll make it to Pax Unplugged, but it’s smack dab in the middle of holiday travel, and I do not want to add another trip during that chaotic time. But for 2026, I’d love to attend an overseas convention. What are some of your favorite non-U.S. conventions? Let me know! And thanks for making it all the way down here. Until next time!