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Playing the board game ‘World at War’ at the Lancaster Host Resort and Conference Center are Don Stanley, left, from Canada and John Hogan from Los Angeles, Friday in Lancaster.
AP PHOTO
LANCASTER — The Battle of Midway was waged anew this week, with Allied and Axis forces desperately fighting for control of the Pacific island — in the heart of Amish country.
The World War II showdown was staged on a cafeteria table in a hotel, amid sprawling hills and fields of sheep and cows of central Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County. A Canadian was at the helm of the Japanese forces.
It’s the World Boardgaming Championships, which has drawn hundreds to Lancaster this week from around the globe and concludes Sunday.
Fred Ehler, 40, of Calgary, inched his cardboard ships closer to Midway on Thursday, the third day of a marathon game of World At War. Jerry Smolens, 45, of Lansdale, Pa., led the allies in what turned out to be a successful attempt to thwart the Japanese attack.
“Midway is toast,” Ehler conceded after a few moves. Smolens deposited Ehler’s sunken ships into a container dubbed the “hall of shame.”
The weeklong WBC tournament, which started in 1991 and has been held in Lancaster the past six years, draws about 1,500 gamers from 15 countries and nearly all 50 states. They play about 150 different games in assorted conference rooms at the Lancaster Host Resort, about 70 miles west of Philadelphia.
The convention’s organizer is Don Greenwood, founder of the Bel Air, Md.-based Boardgame Players Association. He started doing the tourney in 1998 after his former employer, Avalon Hill Game Co., which had previously conducted it, was bought by Hasbro. Now, his full-time job is managing the strictly bragging-rights only tournament.
Some come to play casually, while others are fiercely competitive and compete for internal rankings. Game champions, dubbed “centurions,” accumulate “laurels” (ranking points) and special hats. Winners garner prestige for next year.
These combatants, many of them sporting sweat-stained shirts after hours of nonstop play, definitely aren’t playing Monopoly or Scrabble.
The games are largely divided between lengthy strategic military games similar to Risk and so-called Eurogames, such as the fantasy dice game Settlers of Catan, in which players gather resources to establish settlements in the mythical land.
Dave Wong, 41, of Old Bridge, N.J., was patrolling one conference room with a camera, snapping as many shots of the action as he could in between his games — clad in a black T-shirt that said “Everything I ever needed to know I learned from gaming.”
Wong said he was glad to be back at the convention after missing in 2009 because of real war. An Army Reserves engineer, he was serving in Afghanistan.
“In life, you don’t get second chances,” Wong, who had come to play the World War II game Tigers in the Mist, said of the difference between real battle and games. “It’s always better to be lucky than good.”
WBC is not as large as some of the world’s major events such as the Gen Con tournament, a four-day event that draws more than 25,000 to Indianapolis each year, and the Origins Game Fair, which draws more than 10,000 to Columbus, Ohio. In Germany, Internationale Spieltage draws as many as 150,000 gamers to Essen each year.