At SDHist, our mission is to create a diverse and supportive gaming community dedicated to playing, discussing, designing, and promoting historically-based board games.  To that end, we seek to promote new and up-and-coming designers at our events and with our awards. As a continuation of that work, we’re thrilled to announce two new pathways for attendees of  SDHistCon Summit 2026 (to be held Nov. 6-9 in San Diego, tickets to go on sale Aug. 8 at 3 p.m. ET/noon Pacific): SDHistCon Summit 2026 Night Market and SDHistCon Summit 2026 Skunkworks. More details on each event follow.

SDHistCon Summit 2026 Night Market

In the vein of other, similar night market events (a few of the many examples include Game Market West and Pax Unplugged), SDHist will offer a Night Market at SDHistCon Summit 2026 in San Diego in November. This will give interested attending designers an opportunity to create, bring, and sell their limited-print-run, self-published games (between 20-50 copies) to other attendees at SDHistCon Summit 2026. The Night Market is for finished, ready-to-sell games (for prototypes, see the Skunkworks event below). 

Night markets offer an opportunity to complete game designs more quickly than through many traditional publication channels, as well as an opportunity to get a game to an audience without first getting a traditional publisher on board. We hope that helping to lower the bar for publishing historical games will enable more diverse voices and topics, and support greater experimentation.

We will showcase a select number of independently-produced small-print-run (20-50 copies) historical games during the Night Market at SDHistCon Summit 2026 on Saturday, Nov. 7. Submissions will be evaluated by the SDHist Board and Board of Advisors, and will be due to conflictsofinterestsubmissions@gmail.com by Monday, May 25, 2026. Only one submission per attendee is allowed. If your game is selected for the Night Market, you will be notified ahead of Aug. 8th, 2026, when tickets for SDHistCon Summit 2026 go on sale.

Submissions

If you’re interested in selling a game at the SDHistCon Summit 2026 Night Market, please submit a one-page-maximum summary of your game with a full component list (again, to conflictsofinterestsubmissions@gmail.com) by May 25, 2025. If possible, include a rulebook draft as well, as that will make it easier for the SDHist Board to determine if your game is a good fit for the Night Market. The only requirements we have are that your game covers a historical topic and that it does not use AI-generated art. 

Designer Responsibilities

The Night Market will showcase rare, independent games, and will not be a traditional vendor hall. If you submit an application that gets approved, you’re committing to bringing a minimum of 20 (and a maximum of 50) finished copies of your game for potential purchase by SDHistCon Summit attendees. We at SDHist can assist in connecting you with production resources, but everything from pricing to payment processing must be designer-led. We also don’t guarantee sales of games.

If this doesn’t sound like quite the fit for you, don’t worry! Check out the Skunkworks entry below for an alternative path focused on prototypes.

SDHistCon Summit 2026 Skunkworks

A key feature of our SDHist events over the years has been showing off games that are still in development. At many of our conventions, attending designers schedule public demos and playtests as well as private pitches. We want all of that to continue, and we encourage every SDHistCon Summit 2026 attendee who has a historical game prototype to bring it to the event in San Diego.

This year, we will also offer a more formalized Skunkworks event at SDHistCon Summit 2026. We hope this event will be of particular use to newer designers working to break into historical game design.

The idea here is similar to publisher speed dating events at other conventions, but it’s intended for more than just publishers. This event, on the Friday night of SDHistCon Summit 2026 (Nov. 6), will feature up-and-coming designers set up at their own tables, where they can give a five-minute pitch on a single game to other convention attendees, who may be publishers, designers, reviewers or content creators, or others curious about what’s in the works. The Skunkworks event will be scheduled on the Friday night of the convention to allow participants to schedule follow-up meetings or playtests later in the convention with people particularly interested in their game.

This Skunkworks event is specifically for those attending SDHistCon Summit 2026 in San Diego in November.  After convention badges go on sale on Aug. 8 at 3 p.m. ET/noon PT, we’ll provide information to badge purchasers who plan to bring prototypes on how they can indicate that to our team so we can help them show those games off, including potentially at the Skunkworks event. 

As with the Night Market event, this event is space-limited.  For Skunkworks consideration, we’d like to see a one-page-maximum game summary and information on the physical prototype you plan to have at the event. The only requirement we have is that your game covers a historical topic. 

Skunkworks is not intended to replace the existing ways designers have used our conventions to show off prototypes and pitch publishers. We will continue to support that interaction as we always have. Designers attending SDHistCon Summit 2026 are welcome to show off their designs at the convention outside this event.

Skunkworks applications won’t be considered until after SDHistCon Summit 2026 badge sales open on Aug. 8, so the only immediate action here is for potential convention attendees interested in designing historical games to start or continue working on a prototype. We want to encourage and cultivate historical designs, and we will do our best to support designers of all experience levels at SDHistCon Summit 2026.

More details on both SDHistCon Summit 2026 Night Market and SDHistCon Summit 2026 Skunkworks will follow at Conflicts of Interest Online.

Again, for those planning to attend SDHistCon Summit 2026 in San Diego Nov. 6-9 and interested in selling 20-50 copies of a finished, self-published historical game at the Night Market event, one-page-maximum pitches will be due to conflictsofinterestsubmissions@gmail.com by May 25, 2026. For those planning to attend the San Diego event and interested in bringing a prototype, all you need to do right now is work on that prototype. We’ll provide information on how you can reach out to us to showcase it, including potentially at Skunkworks, after badge sales open on Aug. 8.

If you have any questions about these new Night Market and Skunkworks events, please reach out to SDHist board member and Conflicts of Interest Online editor Andrew Bucholtz at andrew@andrewbucholtz.com.