NHMGS Auction a Success

Saturday we held the auction at American Eagles in Tacoma. The attendance was light, but not ridiculous. About 35 buyers and sellers exchanged some $1,300 in gaming treasures. There were no items that brought down the house. The painted miniatures were nice, but small in scope, and fetched low prices from the crowd. There were, of course, lots of rule books, some Ospreys, and many collections of unpainted miniatures. There was a pleasingly higher strata of trash this year, with nothing that fell into category of utterly worthless.

It was, of course, great to see everyone at the auction. I hadn't seen Mark Serafin since Enfilade. I had a pleasant breakfast with David Sullivan. I made future game plans with Dennis Trout. It was great to see Max Vekich, who is among my oldest friends on the planet. It was especially wonderful, however, to visit with Mike Pierce. Mike was the founding mind of Enfilade, the person who said we could make it work, and he was right. Mike ran the convention for the first two years, and showed us how it was done. It was great to catch up, share about our grown up families, and talk the tribulations of running conventions. He is now the director of Fall-In.

I liked the format of the auction. The silent auction was effective, and kept the live auction to a mere 40 minutes instead of the endless affair it usually is. I'd like to change the format a bit next year, with a silent auction lasting about two hours instead of the 4 1/2 hours of yesterday. We'll follow the same rules for silent and live auction-unless we get a lot of feedback from participants. I'm considering other sites for the auction for 2007, but everything depends on availability.

Special thanks to those who volunteered their time to the auction. Bryan Shein ran a Dogs of War game, and still managed to effectively auction off all the painted goodies in the live auction.
Arthur Brookings and Dennis Trout helped set up the silent auction, were the runners during the live auction, and reduced me to the status of door post with all of their work. Bruce Meyer was our comedian, and oh, by the way handled all of the money, devised a system on the fly for getting money from buyers to sellers, and made this one of the smoothest auctions ever. NHMGS made just under $500 through donation items and fees for the day.

Me, I got some cool stuff. I ended up with three sets of ancient and medieval rules--Revenge, Tactica Medieval and Warrior. I got a very nice del Prado figure of an International Brigade soldier, and a gazillion Ral Partha Hellenestic figures from Steve Ghan. The latter will be used to fill out my 25mm Republican Romans.