by Brant Guillory, 6 May 2024
Buckeye Game Fest is the annual convention held by the local Columbus game folks that’s affiliated with, but legally separate from, the Columbus Area Boardgame Society. They take over part of the Hilton / Columbus Convention Center every year and spread the convention across a half-dozen rooms, plus some lobby/hallway areas. We’ve covered both the 2023 and 2022 BGFs before, and you can read them for the deets on the con.
What’s nice about BGF is that it’s a gameplay-focused convention with something on virtually every table, all day long, for all sorts of folks to sit down and play. Unlike other conventions where I’m working, this one’s nice because I actually get some games in!
One big downside to The War Room at BGF is that many of the players either (1) set up their own games ahead of time, or (2) just throw games on tables and hope for players. The end result of this is that you’ll easily have 80-90 different games played over the course of 5 days in The War Room, but only about 12 of them listed in the official program. Without those wargame events in the program, it’s much harder for a new/prospective attendee to be able to decide if the convention is worth attending based on what games they’d be able to play, or games they could join without already knowing someone to arrange one with.
Resolution for next year: get more wargames into the official program!
Overall attendance for Buckeye Game Fest was just north of 400 total people; some of those were the convention staff. Ardwulf reported that The War Room had around 20 or so people there earlier in the week when they were the only part of the con that was open. GM’s all got 1 free game donated by Rio Grande and randomly handed out with a giant foam d20; I got a copy of Glory Islands.
Most years I put a bunch of small games on the event schedule. This year, I had 2 iterations of LNLP’s Dawn’s Early Light on Friday, and the big 8-player Team COIN game on Saturday. The latter had no one sign up for it, so we canned that one. Instead, I was able to get full games of 1714 – The Case for the Catalans and John Company, and a multi-turn demo of Catastrophe’s upcoming True Command. Around my 2 games of DEL, I also got a trip through the Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, and a pretty full group dinner over at Barley’s that’s become a bit of an annual ritual.
Enough chatter! You just want the photos, right?!
The War Room
click images to enlarge
Blue Panther selling games from the 93475612398475 companies they print for
The CABS Library
The last few years we gave you a panoramic shot of the library room. This year, we’re giving you individual shots of the different cabinets. They don’t have a lot of wargames in here largely because anyone playing wargames was bringing their own to The War Room, and with limited space for the library (it was a smaller room this year) they could afford to leave the 2-3 cabinets of wargames back in the home office. Note this is the same library they bring to Origins.
The Raffle
You can zoom in to see what’s there. It was a lot.
click image to really enlarge
The Main Gaming Hall
Here’s a bunch of random stuff from different walks through the main gaming hall. I tried to get boxes in all the pictures so I didn’t have to remember game names.
Into The Whirlpool
Hermann Luttmann’s new game that’ll be coming from Blue Panther
Minis Wargame About Ukraine
John Company
Fascinating game that really makes you juggle a lot of balls all at once, but it’s going to move really slow when you’ve got 6 players all learning it at the same time
Dead of Winter
The ‘big game’ this year was a GBACW game covering Stone’s River that ran for about 5 days.
This is several of us in the Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, using panoramic mode from my seat along the way at the weapons station
And finally . . .
the late Saturday giant-floor-sized Diplomacy game
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Was never a big fan of Diplomacy, but that floor-sized map looks enticing.
It was 93475612398475 companies during BGF. It is now 93475612398475 companies plus 2 new ones.
touché!