SDHistCon Summit 2026 takes place later this week, Nov. 6-9 in San Diego, and we’re ready to reveal more details on an exciting new event. The inaugural SDHistCon Summit Skunkworks (first announced in April) will take place at the convention on Friday, Nov. 6 at 8 p.m., and will see a carefully-selected group of up-and-coming designers offer short pitches to anyone interested in their in-the-works historical games.

The Skunkworks concept is similar to publisher speed dating events at other conventions, but it’s open to many beyond publishers, including other designers, reviews, content creators, and gamers attending the convention. The presenting designers will have an opportunity to get their games in front of a variety of people in a short span, and with this event taking place on the Friday of the convention, that will hopefully allow Skunkworks attendees who are intrigued by a presentation to check that game out in more detail later in the weekend. Here are the games and designers we have for this first-ever edition of the SDHistCon Summit Skunkworks, listed in alphabetical order by designer last name along with short blurbs they provided on their games. 

Reid Booth, Decline and Fall: A semi-cooperative game about navigating Roman politics circa 300-500 AD.  Players may trade, fight barbarians, govern, and vie for control of the empire while potentially causing its disintegration.  Similar to John Company in spirit and design.

Andrew Brailey, Waterways: A game for 2-5 players about trading goods on the canals and other waterways of the antebellum United States and Canada in 1836, in the lead up to the financial panic of 1837. You will be managing trade flows and planning logistics, with one eye on the market for goods and another on the dubious stability of the banking system.

Edward Damon, Train of Thought: A combination of classical philosophy and an 18xx-style train game, with a tightly-contested worker-placement system at the core. It covers the development of classical philosophy in the wake of the death of Socrates, with each player taking on the role of one of six schools of classical philosophy (e.g. the Cynics or Stoics), each with a unique and thematic set of Philosophers and special abilities, and each seeking to become the most influential. 

Keith Donaldson, Battle of Vertières, 1803: A two-player, 30-minute asymmetric card game about the final campaign of the Haitian Revolution. One player leads Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ Indigenous Army and the other commands General Rochambeau’s French expeditionary force in the weeks leading up to the battle at Vertières on 18 November 1803. That battle forced the French to leave Saint-Domingue and cleared the way for Haitian independence on 1 January 1804. 

The two sides play differently. Haiti builds Momentum and fights for the mountains, while France holds the ports, draws faster from a deck that is running out, and uses Reprisals to stamp out the revolution. Every card can be played three ways: as an Order, facedown under a Territory as a hidden Control Card, or turned into a Resource. Each card also carries a Rule line that takes effect when the card leaves play for good. The rules of the war keep changing under both players, and the victory condition itself can be swapped mid-game.

Bernease Herman, Surplus and Solidarity: A competitive auction and market manipulation game set in Chicago, 1871-1905, with some ideas for an additional map and setting in the early idea stage. Drawing on Marx’s ideas about class, capitalism, and labor, the game asks players to navigate the economic, political, and class identity struggle experienced uniquely by the middle class and those who benefit from capitalist exploitation in industries without strong financial power themselves. Mechanically, the game is heavily inspired by Keyflower—tile building with multiple auctions for tiles using different colored cubes that represent people—but instead with all tiles shared and a stock holding and negotiation element 

Alex Knight, Dethrone: A 2v2 team game covering the French Revolution from 1789-93. Two players represent the Revolutionaries, and two play the counter-revolutionaries. Parallel struggles take place inside the National Assembly (Monarchists vs. Republicans) and out on the streets (Ancien Regime vs. Sans Culottes). 

Mechanically, the game combines deck management, bag building, blind bidding, and poker. Certain cards “shift” out of one player’s deck, either joining a different player’s deck or exiting permanently. For the Revolutionaries to win, they must first pass the Constitution, second capture the King, and finally send him to the guillotine. The counter-revolutionaries win by avoiding any of those steps, including by the Royal family fleeing the country or by overthrowing the National Assembly.

Alastair (Ali) Kocho-Willams, Black Wind: A COIN-compatible wargame recreating Nestor Makhno’s anarchist insurgency in Ukraine, 1918–1921—a civil war within a civil war, as Ukraine’s own struggle over independence and ideology played out as one of the decisive theaters of the wider Russian Civil War. Four asymmetric factions contend for control of a revolutionary Ukraine caught between rival visions of statehood and empire: the Makhnovist Insurgent Army, fighting for a stateless anarchist federation of free communes; Ukrainian nationalists, pursuing an independent Ukrainian state along different ideological lines; the Bolsheviks, seeking to fold Ukraine into a centralized Soviet order; and the Whites, fighting to restore a unified, non-Bolshevik Russia that would subsume Ukraine’s independence entirely. 

The game treats the Makhnovshchina as a serious strategic actor rather than a historical footnote. It uses the COIN system’s asymmetric mechanics to capture how each faction pursued victory through fundamentally different means—insurgency, political mobilization, conventional military force, and shifting battlefield alliances—while exploring the practical and ideological tensions of sustaining a stateless revolutionary military campaign amid a fracturing, multi-sided conflict.

Tom McKendree, Constantinople’s Wake: A 4-player card-driven wargame between Hungary, the Ottomans, the Mamluks and Venice over 1443-1485.  Anatolia is filled with rivals, the Balkans is filled with rivals, Italy is filled with rivals, and these 33 minor powers are controlled using Minor Power Home Cards.  Play the card, control the Minor, and maneuver to keep the Minor cards you most want.   The Fall of Constantinople is the hinge on which this history turns. 

Tristan Muntsinger, Art of War: A fully deterministic, asymmetric area-control game for 2–8 players set in the final decade of the Warring States period (230-221 BCE) as Qin drives toward the unification of China. Each player leads a rival state competing for territorial supremacy, with zero randomness (no dice, no player order randomness, no shuffled decks, no hidden luck). Every conflict resolves deterministically, so tension comes entirely from combinatorial depth, planning, and reading opponents, echoing the period’s emphasis on statecraft and calculated strategy. The design is grounded in scholarship through our historical consultant, Dr. William Matthews (LSE).

Stephen Negus, Zapata: The Mexican Revolution in the South: A game for two players, where one takes the role of Emiliano Zapata’s peasant movement in the state of Morelos just south of Mexico City during the 1910-20 revolution, while the other represents the various central governments who fought him. The game emphasizes both political maneuvering and guerrilla warfare, especially the contest for the loyalties of the region’s colorful revolutionary warlords.

Christopher Thomas, Seats of War: This is a game series, a large formation operational- themed model covering various conflicts in the 18th and 19th centuries. Christopher currently has several separate games within the series, with the most polished concepts covering the Seven Years’ War and the Peninsular War, but several other games are in the works on subjects such as Napoleon’s Italian Campaign, the American Civil War’s Eastern Theatre, and more. The scope and scale can vary from a particular campaign such as Waterloo or Napoleon’s Italian Campaign with a limited timeframe and geography to grand strategic level concepts like the Seven Years’ War that encompass the entire conflict.

In these games, players are given a set of victory conditions to strive toward.  The sequence of play generally provides for a reinforcement phase in which players receive a fixed or variable amount of additional manpower. After the reinforcement phase is the action phase, with several action rounds where players are allotted so many action points to activate forces for movement and battle, establish supply depots, regroup units to remove hits/stress, etc.  During battles, which can consist of up to three rounds plus a bonus pursuit round, the players roll customized color-coded dice based on what units, terrain, and other bonuses apply. As players roll a “star,” they earn cards that provide bonuses and exceptions to core game mechanics and can also provide an opportunity for additional historical flavor.

Henri Whitehead, Battle of Carthage: A solitaire American Civil War card game that combines narrative historical scenarios with tactical company-level leadership. Drawing inspiration from games such as Arkham Horror: The Card Game and Fields of Fire, the cards function both as the battlefield and as the player’s deck, representing the soldiers, tactics, orders, and assets of a Union Army company in the 3rd Missouri Infantry. 

Players command their company through a campaign covering the Battles of Carthage, Wilson’s Creek, and Pea Ridge, making decisions that emphasize unit cohesion, casualty management, and adaptation to battlefield events rather than simple victory conditions. The game features deck construction before and between scenarios, while combat and skill checks are resolved through a suspenseful chit-pull system that reflects the uncertainty of Civil War combat.

For SDHistCon Summit attendees interested in checking out any of these designs, please come to the Skunkworks Friday night! For anyone who’s interested to find out more on any of these designs but isn’t going to be at SDHistCon Summit this year, please reach out to SDHist Conflicts of Interest Online editor Andrew Bucholtz at andrew@andrewbucholtz.com, and we can put you in touch with the designer to learn more. Thanks to all of these designers for being a part of our inaugural Skunkworks!