by Brant Guillory, 21 May 2026
Remember when conventions regularly held wargame tournaments at conventions? Yes, WBC does still have a bunch, but that’s one convention out of the wider convention calendar, and most of those tournaments top out at, what – 8? Maybe 12? Once upon a time, all the big conventions had tournaments, and in many cases, they were the key reason for attendance.
Back in 1978, GenCon XI featured a Dungeon championship for TSR’s adventure boardgame. They were expecting up to 256 players!
There were also tournaments for D&D, as well as The Africa Campaign and The Russian Campaign, which somehow were going to be “judged”?
And remember when GenCon was “America’s premier wargame convention”?! 😆
click images to enlarge
In 1981, Pacific Origins had a variety of tournaments you could play, including 50(!) different “war game”1 events.
In 1983, you could enter the “Fifth Official Invitational AD&D Tournament” with Gygax & Mentzer as GMs, plus the guy you didn’t like (Blume) and a couple you’d never heard of.
At Origins in 1984, there were a bunch of tournaments promoted as key attractions for the convention, including Car Wars, the James Bond RPG, Traveller, Risk2, and something called “Superheroes” that didn’t specify the rules or game being used.
When GDW launched their First Battles series, they tied in with the hit novel Team Yankee from Harold Coyle, for a game in that system specifically built around the units in his book. And as a part of the launch, they were sponsoring a major tournament, with cash prizes! And not just for the winner, but all the way down to 10th place, indicating they were expecting a pretty good turnout for players on this one.
Now, there are still plenty of tournaments at the big conventions like Origins and GenCon, as long as you’re playing collectible card games, or some collectible minis games, and occasionally a mega-popular game like BattleTech or Ticket to Ride or Catan. But the days of a 128-player tournament for The Russian Campaign are long past in the rearview mirror and we’re not likely to see anything like that come back any time soon.
You can chat about this event in the Conventions & Clubs section of our discussion forums
Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons.
Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web.
You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
