Mayday 2017

On Saturday, I went to this year's Mayday convention held here in the Edmonton area. Jonathan, the organizer, found an excellent community center in St. Albert that served as a new location for us, and we managed to gather a decent crowd.

This time, I ran a game of Imperial Skies. This is a steampunk Victorian flying battleships game created by Brigade Models. For the miniatures, rather than Brigade Models products, I used ship models from an unrelated board game called Leviathans, an interesting product that unfortunately didn't do well commercially.

Newcomer (to EWG but not to gaming) Derek and long-time EWG member Dan played my game, which involved German battleships attempting to destroy British forts on Mars. Derek played the British fleet and Dan the German.

Dan sent his German warships on board in several columns, with Derek's smaller British fleet attempting to maneuver and cross the Germans' "T".

Initially, the Germans did some damage to the British fleet, destroying a destroyer and a cruiser that wandered too close to the German columns by themselves, while the British did relatively little damage, mainly owing to Derek's dice initially performing badly. However, Derek finally managed to get his battleship into position, and blasted one of the two German battleships at close range. "Crossing the T" is quite nasty in this game.

The battle descended into a swirling melee where generally the British managed to cross the T more and did more damage over time.

Dan finally got his remaining battleship close to the British forts and demolished one of them. However, the forts were heavily dug-in and proved hard to destroy, while the British blasted the German ships one by one. At the end, we called the game at the time limit and Germans were not getting any farther. Both player enjoyed the game quite a bit though.

Next, I played in Dennis' DBA tournament, where each player had three games against different opponents.

I played using one of Dennis' armies, the Anglo-Irish, against Rob and Don from Calgary, and Dave from right here in Edmonton. Things went poorly for me due to die rolling in the first two games, and I lost them both. However, in the third game, Dave's dice were even worse than mine, and I managed to win. It really reinforced the view that DBA is very dependent on single die rolls, leading to a lot of player frustration.

Later that night, Dennis ran a big-battle DBA game of the Battle of Ilipa, between Romans and Carthaginians. I think I like the big-battle version quite a bit more, since there are more die rolls for PIPs (i.e. action points), and so the game is less dependent on single die rolls. Also, more miniatures are involved and the whole thing looks a lot more like a large battle.

All in all, this was another great Mayday, and I hope we can stay at the new location, which proved to be a very nice one indeed.