Last November, I attended the San Diego Historical Games Convention for the first time and it was one of the best events of 2025. When the SDHistCon board announced they would be putting on a new convention outside of San Diego, SDHistCon North, and invited me to attend, I was absolutely thrilled. Even more so when I learned it was just about an hour flight from Chicago, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Purple and Gold
Given my undying love of Prince, Hüsker Dü, and the Coen Brothers, it’s strange that this was actually my first time in the North Star State. The downtown St. Paul office buildings, ballparks, and breweries definitely gave it a different vibe from the tiny surf shops, bait shops, and oceanside restaurants of Point Loma in San Diego. The convention itself had a distinct feel, as well. To begin with, it was only a two-day event, as opposed to four in San Diego. While this meant that I had to pack my gaming schedule pretty tightly, it also meant that I didn’t spend too much time exploring the city.
SDHistCon North took place at the historic St. Paul Union Depot. Originally built in 1881, it was rebuilt in 1923 after the original burned down in 1915. Still a working (and bustling) railway station, it was a joy walking into the venue every day and seeing the grand columns on the outside leading to the marble floors of its enormous lobby. Heading up one flight of steps and we had an entire floor of rooms to play games in. So far, the location was on par with San Diego. So how about the gaming…
Day One: Coming Attractions
While I didn’t intend it when signing up for events, everything I played on Saturday was an unreleased game in various levels of development. Some were nearly ready to hit the market while others used hand-drawn cards and random pieces from other games. My first of the day was the closest to being complete: Night Witches.
This is a game I have been bugging designers Liz Davidson and David Thompson about for a couple years, so it was at the top of my list of titles to play. Based on the real-life, all-female regiment of WWII Soviet pilots who bombed Nazi’s during night missions (using beat-up and minimal equipment no less) I was curious to see how it has evolved since they began development. Night Witches is played on a storybook-style map, consisting of different missions that you, as the “Night Witches”, must complete. Through a series of bag pulls, you must decipher the terrain below you, hope you are not spotted, and attempt to get yourself out of some very tough situations against difficult odds.
I found the game immensely enjoyable and really nerve-racking. You can choose the difficulty level at the start of each mission, usually by adding less good stuff and more bad stuff to your bag, which makes it accessible to a wide range of gamers. There are also cards that allow for all types of special abilities or weapons, but using them can also be dangerous. Oh yeah, and you can run out of fuel and be forced back to base if you don’t spend your time in the air wisely. Liz and David were kind enough to sit down and chat with me in more detail about Night Witches, which I will be publishing at some point in the future, but overall, I was really impressed. Also, the incredible artwork by Ian O’Toole doesn’t hurt. Definitely worth the wait.
The Game’s the Thing
Night Witches will be published by Fort Circle Games, as was the next game I played: Shakespeare’s First Folio, which was actually designed by the founder and owner Kevin Bertram, along with his wife, Kate Bertram. We’ve covered Fort Circle’s Votes for Women and Shores of Tripoli and they have a great track record of making compelling historic and war games with excellent production value, usually on the heavier side. Shakespeare’s First Folio is probably the lightest title of theirs that I’ve played, but that didn’t make it any less strategic.
What looked on the surface to be a pretty simple set-collection game, Shakespeare’s First Folio mixes elements of worker placement, auction, resource management, dice rolling, card powers, and even trick-taking, to produce one of the breeziest casual games I’ve played in a while. Given the high number of mechanics involved, it didn’t actually take long to get the hang of the game, which has each player trying to score points by making the longest run in a suit, represented by different play types produced by the Bard of Avon. This was one of my most unexpected joys of the convention and, playing in under an hour, was a nice break from a weekend of more heavyweight games.
On this Journey, Behold One who Travels Far
What’s wonderful about a convention dedicated to historic games is that, within minutes, you can go from the charm of collecting Shakespeare comedies to building an opium empire in 19th century China. I had the opportunity to sit down and play a prototype for the second edition of An Infamous Traffic, which will be released by designer Cole Wehrle’s new publishing venture, Buried Giant Studios, based in St. Paul. I never had a chance to play the first edition, published by Hollandspiele in 2016, so I was keen to try this out over the weekend.
Matt Martens, from Buried Giant, demoed the first few rounds of the game with us and it was not at all what I expected. It’s an economic game with a mean streak. It’s got a ton of player interaction as you fight over supply chains and disrupt trades. It has the snappiest turns of any Wehrle game I’ve played so there is very little downtime or even much time to think, before it’s suddenly your turn again. It’s quick and cutthroat, while still being strategic. While this might bother some who want a long, crunchy experience, I thought it was great. I could easily see this only taking 90 minutes or so to play, which is just about my limit for these kinds of economic games, before I start to feel the drag. I’m very much looking forward to this when it is eventually released.
Tonight there’s Gonna be a Jailbreak
Saturday ended with a couple of games designed by Dan Bullock. Fruit, which I observed in San Diego but didn’t have the chance to play, and Penitent. In gameplay terms, Fruit was probably the most similar to the card-based war games that I regularly play. Imagine if Pax Pamir was a COIN game and you might have a good starting point for Fruit. Concerning the banana republics of Central America in the first part of the 20th century, rather than playing as the leaders of these nations, you assume the role of investors, each with various secret objectives, sometimes overlapping and contradictory, to affect political changes in specific countries or secure high profits for the United Fruit Company. There was a lot to untangle, and many rule questions for Dan to clarify, but once we got in the groove, it was a lot of fun.
Penitent, which has you attempting to build a model prison in the early 1900’s, was probably the most memorable game that I played all weekend, and my brain still hurts a bit thinking about it. While it’s clearly built as a solo game, and I think would work terrifically as such, Dan Bullock decided to experiment a bit with the plays at SDHistCon North. He set up identical grid maps for two teams of four, separated by a white board so as not to see each other’s designs. Giving each team identical funds in which to build our penitentiaries but with our own distinct choices on how to design the architecture and to enforce the rules, it got a little out of control.
Once both teams had finalized their designs, we each got the same deck of event cards. As one might assume, these events are not good. For example: a food supply becomes contaminated and only those cells close to a water supply or ventilation system are able to avoid sickness. If you had built one cell for each prisoner, containing the effects could be handled efficiently. If not, you’ve got a full-blown outbreak. Meanwhile, more prisoners are added to your already crowded building, and you must balance reforming and releasing inmates or, occasionally, dealing with dead ones. This deck is two-sided, and if you fail the event on one side, the card is flipped to an even worse event which you will have to deal with on future turns. Every card draw was stressful.
Once the game was over, the white board was removed and we got to see how our competing prison fared. Our team managed to just get enough inmates released and still make enough profit to build helpful additions in later turns. The other team had most of their prisoners die or go completely mad. Looking at their design, it really didn’t seem to differ too much from ours, but for a few key placements of cells and administration offices. I’m not sure the experimental game count did much more than create chaos and debate over the best path forward, but it was definitely the game I thought about the most afterward.
Day Two: Feature Presentations
After playing roughly 8 different games on Saturday, on Sunday I played just two, in the same amount of time. These were also the only games I played that have already been released. The first, GMT’s recently-released Baltic Empires, was a game I played in May but not at the full five player count, and the rules variant used for four players soured me a bit during that play. With a full player count, the game really came alive. With each player taking one state in the Northern Wars of 1558-1721, the asymmetric powers are balanced with the starting territories to give everyone a chance to fulfil their goals. Neighbors go from friends to enemies on a single turn and battles break out constantly, fighting over land and resources.
What I think really separated this from so many other similar area control war games is how it deals with turn order. After income and resources are collected for each player, the player order for each subsequent phase (Finance, Production, and War) is determined by the player with the most power (the Hegemon) in each of these categories at the beginning of the round. Say you want to start a war with a neighbor but would like to see what they will do first. If you are the Military Hegemon, you can force them to take their turn first. If you are not, perhaps bribe the Hegemon with some coins to make it happen. Each phase becomes its own mini-game of planning and negotiation and it can get downright nasty, in the best possible way.
Immediately after wrapping up Baltic Empires, I went just a few tables away to take part in Virgin Queen, also from GMT. Released in 2012, this was the oldest game I played at the convention and also the most complex. A sequel to designer Ed Beach’s Here I Stand from 2006, it uses a similar but streamlined system and expands some of the elements of that title. This is a game system that always felt a little too daunting for me, but that’s what these conventions are great for. I have to give a shout out to Matt Quinn, a local St. Paul attendee who was so patient in teaching and clarifying rules. The shortened version that we played still took six hours to get through but it easily could have been double that without his help. After a few rounds, we had settled into our roles and were negotiating, backstabbing, marrying off our children, plundering, and religiously converting with ease. Though it took a while to get the hang of things, this wound up being the best game I played over the weekend.
Land Speed Record
I’ll come out and say it: two days isn’t enough. Even though, like in San Diego, there is a cap on the number of attendees and it retains a more intimate feel than larger cons, there were still entire rooms of folks playing games that I didn’t even see all weekend. In San Diego, I felt I could walk around a bit more, check out what others were playing, have a nice break for lunch with other attendees and designers, and come back for some more gaming. No panels or morning coffee meetups. Very little time to do anything but gaming. Perhaps it was the more laid-back vibe of San Diego, but I think it had more to do with the compressed timeline.
This, however, was just the inaugural convention in St. Paul, and the organizers were very open in actively wanting feedback for changes in the future. Perhaps I’m just being greedy but I just wanted more of everything. It was great to see familiar faces from San Diego and meet new historical gamers closer to my neck of the woods, and wish I had more time with them all. It’s mostly about the games, and there were plenty to be had, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how this convention evolves.
Featured Photo Credit: Meeple Lady
