The Seekrieg Crest Celebrating 30 years of naval wargaming history! SEEKRIEG was first released in June of 1975, so in 2005 we asked gamers all over the world to help celebrate our 30th Anniversary by naming the two lovely ladies supporting the the SEEKRIEG shield. The First Place winner was Mr. Tim Ellis of Winter Haven, Florida with his entry of Tsusi & Suri. "Tsusi" (with the full name of Tsusi Tsushima, in honor of the first clash between true battleships) and "Suri" (with the full name of Suri Surigao to honor the last time that battleships would ever engage each other in combat). Jack Joyner, Tim Ellis and Rich Sartore at Hurricon 2005. We had our first opportunity to meet and talk with the winner at Hurricon in Tampa during September 2005. A Florida native, born in Lakeland, Tim Ellis has been a resident of Winter Haven since 1984. His interest in wargaming started at about the same time when he had the opportunity to play SEEKRIEG 4 at a local shop. “I was instantly hooked.”, he said of the experience and wasn’t just content to play. He bought the rules and began running games at Downtown Comics, his local game store where, “We've had an ongoing ‘alternate timeline’ campaign running for about six years now that I like to refer to as "Slider Seekrieg". When asked about how he came up with the winning names, Tim’s response was “At first I tried the mythology route, going thru the Greek/Roman myths for the names of sea nymphs and such but none of those jumped out at me so did a search thru Norse mythology and found no joy there. Then I started looking at famous sea battles (Salamis & Trafalgar?) and those weren't working either but they did give me the idea of somehow using Tsushima and Surigao Strait for their historical significance. At that point, Tsusi & Suri were the ones that first popped out!”. As one might expect from a long-time naval wargamer, Tim has a rather impressive collection of skillfully-painted 1:2400 scale ship models, one of which was voted 'Best In Show' at Hurricon ’05. It was only a few month prior to the convention that Tim had the opportunity to play SEEKRIEG 5, but he became a big fan of the system and says, “I love SEEKRIEG 5 with the new ship charts and how you folks have expanded the command/orders aspects of the game, simplified the tracking of cumulative damage and combined gunnery fire control and firing solutions all on one page, (Amazing!) thus greatly reducing the workload of the game operations director. I also really like the greatly expanded damage effects tables and the tier system to manage degraded performance due to accumulated damage...it just works so neatly! Seekrieg 5 is an order of magnitude beyond Seekrieg 4 in terms of playability & faithfulness to reality (as much as a table-top simulation can be).” Other entries receiving HONORABLE MENTION were Stella & Maris - Jacqueline Cadwgan (Revesby, New South Wales, Australia); Scylla & Charybdis - Keith Hunsinger (Defiance, Ohio); Ebb & Flo - Janean Jorgensen (Spokane, Washington); Nemesis & Nike - George Gerolimatos (Barrington, Illinois); Portia & Starina - Roy McCammon (Austin, Texas). Our thanks to all those who entered the contest and a hearty Bravo Zulu to Tim Ellis and the other winners! Be sure to visit the Seekrieg Store for a SEEKRIEG 30th Anniversary T-shirt. View site map Contact us for more info CONVENTIONS During 2011, we will be running SEEKRIEG 5 events at RECON (Cocoa Beach, FL), RAPIER (Jacksonville, FL), HISTORICON (Valley Forge, PA) and HURRICON (Orlando, FL). Links for the upcoming conventions are below: HURRICON (September 22-25) in Orlando, Florida.