Tag Archives: Conventions

Connections 2018 Announcement

This year’s professional wargaming conference ~

GrogHeads Newsdesk, 15 May 2018

This year’s professional wargaming conference, Connections, is being held at Ft McNair in Washington, DC 17-20 July.

Click to enlarge the flyer below for details.


Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>

GrogHeads Central Command Origins Events 2018

What’s coming up in Columbus this summer? ~

GrogHeads Staff, 24 April 2018

Per GAMA, event registration goes live on 2 May.

This year, we’ve got a variety of things for you to check out –

  • Kids!  The Junior General kids’ table is back!  We’ve got 3 games that we’ll be running all weekend, in shorter 1-hour sessions.  And for any kid who plays all 3 games at least once each, and completes 1 extra mission, we’ve got a special Junior General prize.  These games are for kids age 7-14, and they must have an adult come to the table with them.
  • Team / Group events!  Command Post Wargaming is back, and this year, we’ve got an old-school Kriegspiel to go with it!  We also have big team games of Sergeants! and Lock’n Load Tactical, and a play-with-the-designer for Quartermaster General.
  • Tournaments!  We’ve got tournaments for Table Battles, Manouevre, and Nations At War.
  • Origins War College!  GrogHeads will be sponsoring/leading 4 talks at the Origins War College, and we’ve included those in our events below (note that these will be in the OWC rooms, not in our gaming area).
  • Wait…  what’s that?  A Kids event that’s also a Group event?!  Yep!  We’ve got a big multi-board game of Commands & Colors Napoleonics specifically for the kids to play a mega-big game.
  • Oh yeah, and an open gaming table (see details at the bottom of the page)

Which companies are here with us?

  • Tiny Battle Publishing!  New this year, showing off their series In The Trenches
  • Hollandspiele!  Another new one this year, presenting several games: BitsKrieg for the kids, Supply Lines of the American Revolution for the adults, and Table Battles for the tournament-inclined.
  • Lock’n’Load Publishing!  Nations at War (and a tournament), LNLT, and tanks for the kids
  • Enterprise Games!  With their support for our GMT events again this year, we’ve Time of Crisis, Talon, C&C Napoleonics for the kids, and the Maneouvre tournament
  • Griggling Games!  Quartermaster General, and some expansions
  • Lost Battalion Games!  The always-awesome Sergeants! games are back, and look for their award-winning tiles, too

Over 50 events across 4 days, for all your wargaming goodness.

Plus, the Sunday morning raffle, and a bonus this year – an absolutely FREE event on Wednesday night, as we hold a Kriegspiel for anyone who wants to join us, starting at 4pm.  If there’s enough demand (and enough pizza) we might even run it twice!  This is a chance to kick off your gaming weekend in style, with a come-check-it-out-with-nothing-to-lose event from your favorite wargaming miscreants – us!


When you’re looking for our events in the Origins master event grid, they all start with “GrogHeads Presents”.  We did that to make it easier to find when sorting through a giant spreadsheet with over 6000 events, however we stripped it out of the names on our event grid here just to simplify the listings.

Don’t forget that everyone who plays in our events gets a discount with our vendor partners, and gets entered for some great Sunday-morning raffle prizes.  There’s also at least one prize for one of the players at every one of our events.

Note that the kids’ events – as noted above – have a special prize for kids who check out all of the different kids games, and do not have prizes for each individual event.

Click through for the sortable table of events

Winterfest: Wargaming’s Mini-Mecca

Pull out of the winter doldrums with a heavy dose of hex-and-counter happiness ~

Gary Mengle, 28 February 2018

A small gathering of wargamers has met in Sandusky, Ohio for the last 21 years. While the Cedar Point amusment park sits frozen just up the road and Sandusky sleeps through its winters, the February weather is ideal for wargaming. The centerpiece is a small handful of monster wargames, with smaller titles played on the side and a variety of pickup games in the evenings, or throughout the day as folks shake loose from their bigger games.

This year the featured monsters were a playtest of OCS Third Winter and a combined La Battaille game of Ligny and Quatre Bras. The venerable Stonewall Jackson’s Way was also played throughout the event, as well as twin games of Axis Empires: Totaler Krieg. Smaller but nevertheless multi-day games included TCS Omaha, OCS Sicily: Triumph & Tragedy, OCS Tunisia II and a double-blind game of Flat Top. Short-format actions included Amateurs to Arms, The Napoleonic Wars, Close Action and Star Fleet Battles. It would be impossible to categorize the sole miniatures game of Teutoburger Wald as “small” but it only took a few hours in each of two playthroughs.

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As you can see from the above list, titles from The Gamers and Multi-Man Publishing were very well-represented, but stuff from GMT, Avalon Hill, Clash of Arms and even ADB got busted out and played. Plans for next year’s games are already afoot. This was my first year in attendance – it won’t be the last. As one of the new guys I was made to feel very welcome, and there was always something available that I wanted to play. Even with an event-long attendance of less than 30, Winterfest is a great little event that you should take a look at if you’re in or near the Midwest or can’t make the annual pilgrimage to Tempe.

More Info:
Winterfest Wargaming
Ardwulf’s Lair


Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>

2018 Convention Calendar

Your local convention…  and plenty of national ones! ~

GrogHeads Staff, 23 January 2018

Obviously, we pimp Origins pretty hard because that’s the one where we have our “official” presence.  But there’s plenty of gaming all over the country (and Europe!) that you can check out if Origins isn’t in your schedule or budget.

If we missed your local one let us know (links / feedback at the bottom) and we’ll try to remember for next year.

Game On!
8-11 Feb, Seattle, WA
An ASL tournament, along with the Hank Award and all sorts of hex-and-counter goodness.

Williamsburg Muster
16-18 Feb, Williamsburg, VA
A new date this year, but the same wargaming fun.  There’s also an additional boardgame area run by TAGS that includes all sorts of non-wargames.  This annual wargaming convention is hosted by the Hampton Roads Wargamers.

Playthrough
17-18 Feb, Raleigh, NC
A newer convention, but growing like crazy.  A mixture of digital and tabletop games, with previous exhibitors including folks like Epic Games.  A big free-to-play area of classic consoles complements another large area of open tabletop gaming.

MACE 2017 Convention Report

Our intrepid conventioneer checks out another of the South’s excellent game expos ~

Avery Abernethy, 15 November 2017

MACE (Mid-Atlantic Convention Expo) was held for the 21st time in Charlotte, North Carolina on November 10-12, 2017. I had a great time. There are a number of MACE events annually in North Carolina with MACE being the largest.

MACE is a gaming convention. There is no costume contest, concert, film show or game shows. MACE is about gaming. Except for two live action role playing games (limited to a single room) and three game panels, everything was RPGs, Board Games, Miniature Games or Tabletop Games.

There was a lot of gaming going own. There were a total of 174 RPG sessions, 121 Board/Table Top Games, 101 Card or Deck building games and 22 miniature games. This does not include the “play to win” games, pick-up games from the game library, demos, or spontaneous games started by attendees.

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