Virtual Conference of Wargamers

On the weekend of 10-12 July I had a great time virtually attending Wargame Development Group's Virtual Conference of Wargamers usually held at Knuston Hall, but due to COVID held on-line. I've never managed to get to the physical event, so whilst attending virtually wasn't ideal at least I got there!

Since I'd been writing an article for the Nugget (the WDG magasine) on Remote Wargaming I thought I'd also put it up for a VCOW talk - so I got to present as well.

Anywhere here are the highlights of the weekend - I've done offside reports for each for the Nugget, and once they run my Remote Wargaming article in Nugget I'll post a copy up here.

Events were held on a mix of Zoom and Skype.

• The conference kicked off with a virtual battlefield tour of Landsdowne, led by John Curry (of History of Wargaming Project fame), with deft use of Google Earth and Google Streetview, and Zoom breakout rooms for syndicates to discuss options
• Several interesting talks on professional wargaming and the history of COW/WDG
• An SF skirmish game called Hadleys Hope where our team had to try and fix a transmitter and find out what happened to the previous team. Tom Mouat had the tabel set up in his house and gave us a ground-level Zoom view to work from - all very blurry and hard to spot attackers in amongst the terrain. Our characters were primary coloured meeples (see top) so easy to spot. Worked very well.
• A virtual ECW TWET (Tactical Exercise Without Troops) for a disguised Battle of Cropredy Bridge - again Google Earth/Streetview, plus on-site photos and sketchmaps and breakout rooms. Again worked very well (and helped I'd wargamed it in January)
• An Age of Sail Naval Wargame (see below) run by John Armaty’s - I was on the Spanish side trying to sink a convoy or capture and avoid the Royal Navy. As with Hadley Hope John had a hex grid table and 1/3000th models, but this time we had a fixed overhead cam view. The grid made movement and firing nice and easy. Great game, narrow Spanish win I think - I certainly captured a merchantman.  
• Interesting lecture contrasting professional and recreational wargaming
• Unfortunate Differences - a cut down professional strategic game of a dispute in the China Sea over some islands between the Chinese, Japanese and Americans. I was the Chinese Navy commander under strict instructions to keep my carrier safe whilst our subs did the dirty work. In fact they didn't need to as the Japanese ran a sub aground on the islands which trying to land Special Forces - right in front of our crack team of social media student influencers!
• A nice discussion about what we'd all been up to in lockdown, and which different parts of the hobby we were taking the time to explore
• A great presentation by John Curry on storming a medieval castle - drawing on an exercise done by a group of re-enactors. 

All-in-all a great introduction to COW, and I really must get there in person next year.

As an aside, what is interesting is that of all the "virtual" events I've been to in lockdown in terms of professional work this was actually probably the best - with everyone fully engaged, no real passive participants, and great use of a variety of technologies. No surprise really given how great Connections (another professional wargame conference) last year - with both having an emphasis on playing games more than just talking about things.