Convention Report — Stack Académie

Perigee, 18 May 2026

Another spring in the destination city of Montreal officially kicked off – for gamers at least – with the Stack Academie Convention on 1-3 May. Now in its 14th year, the convention caps a season of monthly gatherings with a full three day event all located at the Novotel in the heart of downtown.

Organized by the indefatigable Marc Guenette, Stack gatherings have become central to the Montreal heavy board gaming community. Originally dedicated to the hardcore hex and counter crowd, Stack has gradually evolved into an omnigaming Mecca, with a healthy mix of traditional war games, multiplayer consims, and heavy euros. And with every gathering providing an advance signup sheet, finding a game (or hosting one) is always easy. Attendees also represent the very best of gamers: kind, polite, bilingual, and sharp as they come – naturally to be expected in Canada! The group also skews younger than many wargaming meetups, with everything from Gen Z to Boomers represented at our tables.

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With demand at all time highs, the convention sold out early this year and in response Guenette was able to add a much-appreciated third gaming room. And whether it is due to the appeal of Montreal, the available games on offer, or his innate charm, Stack pulls: This year’s guest of Honour was Volko Ruhnke, and gaming at tables nearby were other wargaming luminaries like Mark Simonitch, Cardboard Campaigns podcast host Don Levick, home-grown design talents Carl Paradis, Marc Rodrigue, Marco Poutré, along with Kerry Anderson from Micro Design Group, Mark Hinkle from New England Simulations, etc. etc. Attendees came from all over Canada, the Eastern U.S., and even a group flying in from Belgium. TLDR: People travel from far to be part of it.

This year’s iteration had the added benefit of coinciding with the Montreal Canadiens starting out on what everyone hopes will be a long and successful Stanley Cup playoff run. Along with experiencing the excitement and revelry coursing through the city, the location of the convention – about 2 minutes walk from the Centre Bell – ensured that hardy convention-goers had to arrive early Friday and stay late to avoid massive increases in foot / metro / and road traffic. Undoubtedly a perfect recipe for even more hours of gaming!

Kicking things off on the Friday, the games of convention favourite Ed Beach were well represented with two simultaneous sessions of Here I Stand and one of Virgin Queen. Only in large gatherings like these can you imagine all 18 available spots filled for 8+ hour games and the sounds of intense negotiation, vociferous backstabbing, and curses levelled at the dice gods filled multiple rooms. Highlights here included Virgin Queen ending with an English Catholic Rebellion roll-off for a shocking Spain victory, and buckets of dice at one HIS table landing almost zero hits to much consternation from all sides.

Several attendees also got to experience their first session of at the freshly-arrived Imperial Borders – Congress of Vienna from Larry Harris – a stunning production to be sure. Not to be outdone in the looks department, Luthier and Speakeasy brought in the Euro crowd. Organizer Guenette took time from running around to sit down in his regular foursome for New Cold War. However, for table presence and “wow” factor, it was hard to overlook the table featuring a six player game of Holland ’44 including the game’s designer in the flesh.

Mark Simonitch was making his second Stack appearance, the first having come as a guest of honour several years prior. This time around his attendance was purely to game with his Canadian friends. As he explained, with so many Canadians choosing to avoid U.S. travel these days, it was either find a convention in Canada or go without seeing his group this year. The bonus for him was returning to Montreal, a city he appreciates for its friendliness, its food scene, and for the cultural experience with everyone around speaking French.

Along with treating people to the spectacle of a 6 player Holland ’44, Mark also took the opportunity to walk around and check in on a few of the games being demoed, offer some helpful tips to a few tables playing his own games (the guys from the Caesar: Rome vs. Gaulgame were most appreciative), and sign a few rulebooks. He also confirmed good progress is being made on his current projects with North Africa ’40 (expansion to North Africa ’41) already at the printers and Konigratz ’66 and Ukraine ’43 3rd Edition both well along in their development.

Saturday is always the biggest day of the convention and all three rooms were packed for 12+ hours. The main room on the ground floor also served as the demo space and attendees were able to do guided playthroughs of many exciting new designs.

Marc Rodrigue – designer of the brilliant Bayonets and Tomahawks – demoed Steel Platoons, an exciting new WW2 tank skirmish game that garnered a lot of attention and looks to be quite near publication.

Designer / poet / renaissance man Carl Paradis challenged some lucky attendees to plays of his brand new game Battle Commander: Volume I, the first in his planned series of games on Napoleonic Battles published by Sound of Drums. With its smart diceless mechanics and its gorgeous table presence, finding an available copy is already becoming a challenge so this was a welcomed first look for many Quebecers looking to support one of their own.

And promising local designer / regular Stacker Nicolas Cusson brought three of his own designs that could very well find their way to the market in the near future.

Of course, as was the case throughout the weekend, guest of honour Volko Ruhnke’s station seemed to draw the largest crowds, with many eager to test out his latest demos. Coast Watchers, Hunt for Blackbeard, Drachen 1916, Race to Rabaul,and the brand-new Vietnam War recon game MASHER all racked up the plays.

Bringing in Runhke for the weekend was something of a coup for Guenette and Stack, but for his part Volko was delighted with the opportunity to come back to Montreal. “I really enjoy the group up here and it’s been wonderful to reconnect with the personalities” he said, making specific mention of Paradis, Rodrigue (who did all the art work on Hunt for Blackbeard), and Marco Poutré (one of GMTs full time developers, and working with him on Drachen, amongst other projects). With Montreal becoming known for the sharpness of its gamers, Volko also appreciated the amount of interest in play testing his designs, feeling that feedback was of excellent quality and constant throughout the weekend.

Keeping so busy may have prevented him from checking out many of the city’s well known food meccas, but he still had the chance to go to a few of his favourite downtown places between sessions. However, when pressed on the city’s burning question: are Montreal bagels superior to New York’s? he answered like the cagey ex-intelligence analyst he is by demurring and likely ensuring he continues to receive a warm welcome in both cities moving forward.

Just beside what became known over the weekend as “Volko’s Corner” was a double table setup of the final prototype of New England Simulation’s upcoming On Hell’s Highway by John Butterfield – attended to by company owner Mark Hinkle and Kenneth Guerin. The second year in a row the game has been play tested here, the final product is looking fantastic (par for the course for NES) and according to all who experienced it, is a much-improved remake of the Victory Games classic. It is easy to imagine this quickly becoming NES’s best selling game ever, and Hinkle stated he is very happy with the final product, has truly enjoyed working with Butterfield, and looking forward to the pre-order being launched in the coming weeks.

Saturday also saw the annual Combat Commander Tournament, with some of the best players from the competitive ladder taking part. Matches were fiercely fought and, like many years, a winner was yet to be determined at the end of the day with the two finalists agreeing to take their showdown to Vassal rather than play into the very early hours of Sunday morning.

With so many games in session over the day, it is hard to select just a few highlights, but the games that seemed to draw the most check-ins were Imperial Elegy from VUCA, a Plum Island Horror game run by Poutré (who developed the More of a Bad Thing expansion), Europa Universalis: The Price of Power, Brian Train’s self-published COIN game on Canadian politics O’Canada (run by an eager American in the form of Don Levick), a massive map game of Angola (taken particular notice of by Ruhnke who has credited it as one his main inspirations for the COIN system), a 12+ hour Arcs – the Blighted Reach campaign, and a sprawling four table setup of the Red Sash Games monster Cold Waves – The Atlantic and North Sea 1739 – 1748, perhaps making its first-ever documented play as the lack of any online stats, reviews, and comments would seem to suggest.

A bring and buy market also brought quite a bit of traffic and some great deals were snagged. With the dynamic pricing model in effect, the best prices were to be seen later in the afternoon, but some in-demand games didn’t make it past the 30 second mark. Several attendees (this one included) rued their inability to get the lone sealed copy of RAF – The Battle of Britain 1940 on offer!

Even though Sundays at conventions tend to be subdued affairs with people recovering from two heavy days of brain-burning gaming, as well as packing up to catch flights, there were still many hardy souls still at it on the last morning.

John Company 2nd Edition, the Official Game of Stack such is its omnipresence at all gatherings, made its appearance as it always does. At this point it’s clear Guenette will need to reach out to Cole Wehrle for next year’s guest of honour spot, such is the love for his games amongst this group. Burning Banners, another convention favourite was also seen, with the Stack crowd eagerly looking forward to its upcoming expansion. And putting a raucous cap on the convention was a seven player game of the venerable classic Wooden Ships and Iron Men in a mini-Trafalgar scenario featuring limited communication, Admiral Nelson writing out panicked (and often ignored orders) to his insubordinate “teammates”, multiple collisions, dismasted ships, and historically accurate ineffective Spanish gunnery from point blank range.

A wonderful weekend of gaming in North America’s most fun city, and a convention that just keeps getting better every year. We’ll leave it to be summed up in the florid prose of Carl Paradis, who put it as only he can:

New commanders entered the fray… and survived. The drums of war sounded all weekend long at the convention tables. Another battlefield conquered, one command cube at a time. All the while learning history through smoke, steel, and difficult decisions.”

See you at Stack 2027.

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