Gauntlet is the annual Deeside/Chester gaming convention. With Gauntlet we are hoping to encourage gaming. There will be vendors, there will be demos, but mainly there will be tournament and participation games along with open gaming tables. This is a fairly novel idea for a UK convention, but one that Deeside Defenders believes in.
What? A gaming convention where the emphasis is on the GAMING? Are we mad?
Hopefully not as we are basing this on the successful conventions that Graham helped run as part of the South Dorset Military Society during the mid 70’s and early eighties, and the conventions that he (and others) have been to in North America. The normal UK convention is based around vendors and club demonstration games, which do not hold my attention for more than a couple of hours. A couple of walks around the demo games to see what figures are being used and emptying my wallet at the vendors stands takes about 2 hours, after that I am bored and want to go home to examine my purchases. The normal North American convention has the same amount of vendors but ALL the games are Participation games so when I went to Historicon, Cold Wars, MIGSCON etc I either ran participation games or played in them for 2-3 days at a time, sometimes spoilt for choice as there could be 500 games going on at Historicon.
We cannot hope to operate a convention of that scale at Deeside Defenders (for the moment) but what we do aim to do is bring as many gamers together to PLAY GAMES, hopefully against fresh opponents. We are looking at a large number of gaming tables, possibly in the region of 100tables of various sizes that can be used for tournaments, boardgames, particiaption and demo games or just to have a gam,e with a mate.
Click here for all the details of the Gauntlet 2008 event.
Our first convention in November 2004 ran relatively smoothly, but our future plans hold even more promise. Details of previous events are available on this website, and as we finalise plans for future Gauntlet shows you can find out about them here.