An unanticipated benefit of lockdown has been the continuance of the Virtual Conference of Wargamers, which complements the face to face conference in summer. This time it ran in early February.
The conference adopted its usual format of a number of open sessions available to all participants, and some bookable ones.
I mainly attended the open sessions, and particularly enjoyed the discussion session on Wargaming from Omdurman to Sarajevo where we broke out into discussions groups to examine particular aspects of the period. I came away with some very useful recommendations for books and games.
I didn't go to the bookable sessions as I've actually played most of the before - as we have an active and regular online gaming group, we got to playtest an awful lot of the games before they were run at the conference. See various other blog posts for details (Origins of WW1, Take that Hill, Doodlebuggers, Putins Heirs etc).
As an online conference, no particular eye candy to put up here. There will be full session writeups in the Wargames Developments Journal of course.
Who would have thought that the lockdown would leave such a legacy - there are a number of blogs currently reporting on zoom type games, the experience of which has brought quite a solid fan base.
ReplyDeleteAfter mulling over a return to the club, we've stuck with our weekly Zoom sessions as the regular group is now quite geographically dispersed. I've got used to the limitations now although there are some things I miss, but they are more than made up for by the increased audience and planning time. It beats lugging everything to the club anyway. My f2f gaming itch can be scratched with our month Friday games.
DeleteBut yes, it is interesting the things which have stuck. Hybrid and remote working being the main one.
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