The first New Hampshire Challenge ended recently. For those who don’t know, I ran the New Hampshire Challenge on Sunday, April 27th, 2003, on day 2 of Games Weekend. Games Weekend is a gaming convention that Jumpgate (the store I run BattleZone at) puts on four times a year at a local hotel’s convention room.
This Games Weekend was special for the store because they where having a special, special guest drop by (and on the same day of the NHC too!), creator of Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gygax. Personally I don’t play D&D, but I can imagine for someone who is really into the game, it must have been an honor to meet Mr. Gygax. I begain weeks in advance for the New Hampshire Challenge… well really two weeks. My first goal once reading the email that I had a time slot and when was to get a logo into the store for the event. On short amount of time, none of my sketches looked good, so I sunk to the level of reusing the old challenge series logo wizards used… but its still a cool logo. Working from the pictures I have taken at the Stadium Challenge NJ, I did my best to create the up side down stadium image wizards used, and even added a touch by adding “New Hampshire” on the top of it. One Saturday after I had the logo finalized, I printed up 50 NHC flyers and made a special trip back to the store to put them up with the various other Games Weekend flyers. Later on that week I mentioned the event whenever I could to get the word out… plus some mentioning of Gary Gygax too.
Finally the day came, and well… I got four players. But don’t get me wrong, four players was great… at the first Games Weekend, I was set up for causal play and I got no one. Anyways, I arrived at 12:45ish, headed into the hotel, and found Hector, the store owner, He showed me where I would be set up for the tournament, nicely placed with counter space. At this time, I was also greeted by Zeophyte LuMaga, who drove all the way from New York state to meet Mr. Gygax and play in a Pokémon tournament…a real fan of the game he is :). As the clock was getting closer to 1:00, I set up my laptop on the counter, and fired up DCI Reporter, and hunted down Deane, the store’s DCI Guy. He got me set up with a pad and entered his data in on Reporter. Next thing, sign up the new players… out of the four players playing in the event, three needed cards, but never fear, the store had a huge thick pad. Then the games started. Three rounds of unlimited swiss, was the way things went. Strangely right now I am only recalling when one player, Ben, kept having energy issues with his deck. Once the third round ended, I gave the players a break for bathroom and such (I also ran to the vending… again, water cost more than soda o_O). Once we where all back it was time to bust out the prizes. A week earlier the store found a few Pokémon BattleZone January kits. Since I know all the BZ players are sick of rainbow energies and Rocket’s Sneasel (we need another BZ kit for once!) I figured distribute them as NHC prizes. Also in first through third place I distributed 3 Box-topper size promo cards of the 3 legendary birds, each with a Games Weekend stamp on them. All the players seemed happy with their prizes, here are the final results:
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