haha and Ian I will work on a new squad to beat you with in tile wars

ill be back, in particular for tile wars and a couple other tournies. But it was great this year, and i was happy to see a different variety of armies this year for tile wars.

Pretty high actually. The Champs was down to 55 people, but considering everything that was pretty good. It might be that being the judge simply gave me a difference perspective, but I can honestly say from watching, we didn't seem to lose the competitive players. I thought this year's champs was one of the most competitive from top to bottom of any we have had. It really looked like we lost the people who typically finished at the bottom, and all the new players we gained filled in near the top instead. So while it was less players overall, the competitiveness seemed to be much higher.

JC was about the same as the last couple of years, Mass battles all sold out, TWs and DD were about the same. So we would have been looking at a very minor total player drop off, but we added the mystery map event, which had a staggering 66 players on thursday morning, a slot that normally is very weak. Team event was I think 14-16 teams as well. So all in all, we had more people playing than last year, but remember, we also had one extra event from last year.

And considering all of the events of this past year, a drop off was expected, but we really didn't see it. We've lost a lot of players this year, but the amount of new players at their first Gencon was the highest I've seen since the jump from 2005-2006. All in all, it was about what I had hoped for, and a little more than I expected.

(Oh one last note - we lost probably an average of 4-6 players from every event due to the necessity of running the software, judging, organizing, and so on - things which were not entirely our responsibility in the past). So if you add in those numbers, we would have been way above the last two years probably.

55 is definately a solid number all things considering.

Considering what I have heard people saying about their LGS attendance that's great news. I know our LGS suffered this summer. Last year we had upwards 20 players and this year we are lucky to pull in 10 on a weekly event. We got some new players but attendance is spotty.

I was hoping we would get an announcement at GenCon on the future of the game. I'm hearing rumors that it will be at the celebration. I hope those rumors are true. More importantly I hope any announcement is good news.

I'm anxious too. As much as I would like to be done spending $$ on SW miniatures at this point, having new commercial product that could be used with the existing game would be huge. (cue Carly Simon... "an-ti-ci-paaaaa-tion.....")

If you love football games? Do you only love the ones you play in?

Wouldnt it be great if you could go to a pro game to watch them and still be able to play football too.

Well that is gencon for SWM. You can see ultra competitive and play totally uncomeptitive while being there. no one cares and there is fun for all. Just meeting everyone is worth the price of admission. Really I can tell you there are 8 million headaches with running the whole thing and I gladly do it just to see everyone.

thanx for running it Dean.
it was a blast