This has been a real hectic year for Smith Novelty, we no longer have much down time during the fall/winter season due to our new ventures in Las Vegas.  Finally I have time to do the wrap up on Conquest SF 2007 which turned out to be a pretty boring day.

Sunday in past Conquest was the actual day for the game auction, but this was it was moved to Saturday.  There was really no rush for me to get up to the con by 10 am, instead I took my own sweet time and even had a decent breakfast.  I had reviewed the schedule and the only thing I was remotely interested in was the Silent Auction and possibly gaming with Lyman and his friends (Phil & Michael).  I headed to the auction room to check out the Charity Silent Auction.  I had given to the Kublacon Charity Auction and figured to do the same at Conquest SF.  However instead of some real items for charity, this one looked like a junkyard for discarded merchandises.  All the unsold items from the previous day auction were dumped into the room with a few contributions from the dealers.  Most of the items were junks except for couple of military history books.  This is a clear case of mismanagement since Kublacon had so much more success in raising money by having real items for their charity auction.  To expect to raise any money, the auction items have to be of some values to the bidders.  I walked around the room and just couldn’t bring myself to bid on any item except for the two books (one on sinking of the Shinano and the other one on Tank Destroyers in WWII).  The really odd thing is that the silent auction was run by the same person as in Kublacon.  However, there is no attempt to put together any of those thoughtful packages like they did at Kublacon.  I had to wonder just how much effort went into the Charity Auction and whether the management shake-up had an effect on this.  Since it was still early, I headed up to the dealer room to find Lyman.

Once again Lyman had volunteered to man the booth for GMT Games which kind of restricted his gaming time.  To my surprise GMT was giving away these nifty posters of their games as a promo, so I snapped up a few of my favorites (SPQR, Europe Engulfed, CC: Europe).  These looked like color proof that Roger had created during production of games, but they looked awesome as posters. In between admiring the posters I chatted with Lyman about this East Front game that he was designing plus the latest gaming news.  I was going to take a picture of Lyman as a GMT salesman but he is camera shy and I ended up taking pictures of the painting contest displayed at the GMT booth.

This year since Conquest invited Roger MacGowan as the special wargaming guest, GMT had a large booth in the end aisle which in turn generated a bit more foot traffic.  Since I had pre-ordered on GMT P500, I found very few games that I wanted to add to my collection at the booth.  I was very excited to get my copy of Deluxe Great War in Europe just a couple of days before the convention, so I was only browsing their games in the booth.  In fact my game shelf looked like the GMT booth since I had so many of their games.  I wish I had time to sit down and play any of those games with Greg, Niall and Phil, but most are probably too long to complete in a single day.  After kibitzing a bit, I decided to head down to the Board game area to see if I can enter into an event.  Unfortunately it turned out the only game that I know how to play were either full of players or start at a very late hour.  I headed up toward the Open Gaming room to see if I can get in on a game plus to check out what the Ex-TimJim folks are gaming.  I couldn’t find anything that interested me and the Ex-TimJim group was already playing a game of the new Arkham Horror with the Dunwich expansion.  I went into the Dealer’s room to check on Lyman’s availability but he had signed up for Prince of Florence tournament at 4 pm.  I ran around the Dealer’s room and actually bought the sealed copy of Metagaming Trailblazer. 

Since I couldn’t decide on any game, I opened up the Louis XIV game I got from Greg and started to organize it into the Ziploc baggies and read the rule.  This was a fairly highly rated euro game on BGG that I had wanted couple years back.  I organized all the bits and read the rules but decided to check out the Board game tournaments.  Phil and Michael were playing Die Macher and Lyman was in the Prince of Florence event.  So I decided to grab a quick bite from the food line and relaxed outside the Open Gaming area.  I went back to check on Lyman and his friends, but looked like Lyman was eliminated from the tournament but Phil and Michael was having fun in Die Macher.  However, they lost one player and wanted me to substitute but I knew it was going to take more than a couple hours since all the players were fairly new.  I went up to the GMT booth but Lyman had skipped out already and they were in the process of closing up the Dealer’s room.

            I wandered around and found a line queuing up outside the Flea Market area and I decide to stay around for it.  I ran into Jason Pipes and he was helping out the staff in setting up the flea market.  I decided to see what he had left since he was pretty much sold out of his stuff on Saturday.  It turned out he had managed to get a copy of Legions of Tekumel supplement and still have a copy of Ral Parth Chaos War.  I was tempted on the Tekumel but decided to forgo it since I had spent close to my budget.  I went around and the only game that interested me was a punched copy AH Age of Renaissance.  I make an offer of $65 but the seller decided to wait for more offer, by the time I went back it was sold.  I checked out Dan’s pile of goodies but didn’t find any more old TSR items.  Again he was offering Dragon magazine #1 for $150 but I am not sure any one was willing except for Mark Kramer and he was thinking about the resale value.  After digging through several sellers’ stuff, I decided to head out.  I was trying to decide on this copy of the GDW Traveller’s book when I saw Tony lounging outside the flea market area playing with his iPhone.  I chatted with him for a little while since he was waiting for Becky and Steve to play a quick session of Cyberpunk RPG.  I decided to head home to relax and go through all the goodies I got from the con.

            My impression of Conquest still have not really changed much since the prior years, it is a convention in transition.  Whether the new management Gabriel (Mondo) Vega can turn things around is yet to be seen.  Some of the positive signs are the hosting of West Coast Boardgame Champions and the return of flea markets to Saturday and Sunday.  The move to Santa Clara Marriot next year is a great plus for me since it will cut down on travel time and there is suppose to be better facility to centralize all the events so that it doesn’t feel like a ghost town compared to Kublacon.  I still feel that both Kublacon and Conquest are the two main gaming conventions for me to attend even though I still have reservation about some of the fees that Conquest was trying to impose on gamers.  There seems to be no better place to meet other gamers, to learn the latest games and to find those hidden bargains than at these conventions.