by Brant Guillory, 10 June 2022
Let’s face it, for a lot of people1, Origins is all about shopping, and the annual game budget has a significant “Origins set-aside” built in. That’s where the Vendor Hall comes in, and we’re here to help you spend your money.
The vendor hall you say? What’s that?
It’s this.
click images to enlarge
It’s a few acres of game publishers, manufacturers, retailers, and accessory merchants all showcasing every cool thing you never knew you needed.
So who’s there? If you’ve been watching our Twitter feed, then you’ve seen us talk about some of the main wargame players there. We still need some more photos from Academy Games, but here are some other wargame companies at Origins
Enterprise Games are longtime supporters of our wargaming program, and it is gratifying to see their inventory noticeably dwindling by the middle of day 2.
Catastrophe Games has Blue Panther LLC in their booth, who prints games for Hollandspiele, White Dog Games, and The Historical Game Company, so all of those are in the booth together.
click images to enlarge
Decision Games are always here, and neat the front, stocked with plenty of their own games, and some from other publishers2. They still don’t proactively talk to anyone, of course, but they’re always here.
The Dietz Foundation don’t have a full set of Littoral Commander for you to peruse but they do have 1979 Revolution in Iran along with some of their other games.
Alas, Gamescience did not appear.
Ares Games had a bigger/snazzier display last year than this year. The did have a large rack of Wings of Glory minis, with Sails of Glory on the side, along with designer Hermann Luttman’s back.
Some of our favorite people on the convention circuit, Carolina Game Tables have a great display where you can check out the best tables in boardgaming. They are built, as Ardwulf noted, “like a wharf made of Roman concrete”3.
Speaking of Ardwulf, we all pretty much knew he’d be over here spending some money with Chaosium.
The Hull Breach folks are still around after some ownership changes. It’s a card-driven game of ship-to-ship and fleet-to-fleet space combat that we’d previously covered at other conventions under other monikers.
Tabletop Terrain has a pretty snazzy booth, with all of the terrain on frosted glass, with blue up-lighting that creates a really neat visual when walking by, but is damned hard to photograph, so they turned it off for us to take a few pictures.
Free League are one of the favorite RPG publishers among wargamers. They’ve got some nice T2K products out there.
The Earthdawn, Paranoia, and Traveller sections of the Studio 2 booth barely scratch the surface of the kinds of things they stock.
That’s a LOT of Dominion
Goodman Games has the usual Dungeon Crawl Classics, as well as some Judges’ Guild reprints, and more
Watching this crowd of younger folks fawning over the ‘big book’ classic module reprints from Goodman Games was fantastic. These players were gushing about how much fun they had playing the older scenarios with their local game groups. And keep in mind that while the players are in their 20s and 30s, none of them were even born when the originals of these modules were released. It’s great to see a new generation embrace the classics.
Catalyst’s booth is half Battletech and half things-we-didn’t-bother-to-photograph. They have a lot of novels on hand, even without getting close to having all of them. There’s also a bunch of issues of Shrapnel Magazine.
There’s plenty more to see in the vendor hall, and no, we didn’t get names and details on any of these, so this is what we’ve got for you
Tomorrow we show off the gameplay around the convention!
ORIGINS 2022 COVERAGE
WARGAME HQ EVENTS ~ MiD PREVIEW EPISODE ~ EXHIBITOR SPOTLIGHT ~ CONSOLIDATED WARGAMING EVENT GRID ~ WARGAME HQ EVENT PREVIEWS
REPORT FROM THE SHOW ~ GAMEPLAY PHOTOS ~ EXHIBIT HALL PHOTOS ~ CONVENTION PHOTOS ~ AAR
DISCUSSION FORUM THREAD
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Does anybody know the story on the Gamescience absence? Hope the Colonel is doing ok…
No one seemed to know anything. Everyone was concerned though, because Lou is the last remaining veteran of The War of 1812.