Game Night Oct. 20, 2015

Since I've been taking pictures with my phone on Tuesday gaming nights, I think I'll be posting more of them on here. Tonight Dave B from the gaming group ran an interesting game, Clay-O-Rama.

These rules are from an old issue of Dragon magazine. In the game, players build their own monsters using play dough (!) and assign stats to them according to their design. For example their size determines their hitpoints, their number of legs determines their movement speed (in handspans!), and their number of other appendages determines their attacks. All in all it's a great and silly game, and it's a lot of fun to play.

Here's S Harper, Bruce's monster.

My monster Centipedor attacked Phil's green guy.

Justin's orange turtle-like monster was hit with the "drop" super power, i.e. it was actually dropped from three feet above the table! The monster's name was Eeyore, so I guess it fell apart.

Phil's monster suffered a "splat" attack, where someone actually pounded on it with a fist, with predictable results...

We played a second game after the first one with different types of monsters, and more wackiness ensued.

On a more serious note, I got in with a growing trend and started using a kanban board to keep track of my miniatures projects. If anything, this organizes my current painting items in progress. There are other features such as recording time spent, etc. that I might use later if needed. I use an online free tool called Kanbanflow to do all this.

This is the board for my current project, an Epic scale Tyranid army.

FallCon 2015

In what has become a tradition for me, I went down to Calgary for this year's FallCon gaming convention. There was effort from the organizers to increase numbers and participation on the miniature side of the games. However, they were still a tiny minority of the games played, most of which were board games.

On Friday night I played in Sean's GASLIGHT game, which was a steam punk adventure involving two factions looking for artifacts and facing monsters.

The map had various ancient ruins and artifacts scattered around. The "skull mountain" terrain piece was the final objective, and the various small bits of artifacts were additional goals.

Our faction consisted of various outlaws and renegades, trying to race against British imperials and random monsters. Here, my band of pirates were attacked by a horde of blue lizard men. However, that was as far as I got. My force was severely depleted by lizard men attacks, and I had no strength to fight other enemies.

The ultimate show down came from the steam tank and robot from our side fighting camel-mounted British soldiers. A long struggle later, the imperialists captured the skull and won the game.

On Saturday morning, I ran my familiar X-Com game again. This was designated a walk-up demo game, so there was no pre-signup. Fortunately, a couple of guys from a nearby painting event came and played an urban scenario.

The rest of the convention was filled with DBA events for me. Saturday afternoon was the learn DBA event, which was actually mostly old hands trying to get used to DBA 3.0. Sunday morning consisted of the Alberta Open Tournament. Dennis and I played against a couple of guys from Calgary, Vic and Mark, and we came out on top. Dennis ended up first place and I took second. It was nice to get into 3.0 in a big way and play people from Calgary. I took some pictures of my games in progress, hopefully showing off the participants' armies.

 

Some familiar faces from Edmonton were at FallCon. Here is the excellent Martian Front game run by Terry and Scott, with their impressive signature piece, the land ironclad.

At the Sunday flea market, I also picked up a  couple of games at bargain prices. One was the classic naval game Harpoon, which I've always wanted to try. I might have to get some more naval miniatures... The other one was the highly scientifically realistic space combat game Attack Vector: Tactical. I already own the game rules in PDF form, but I jumped at the chance to get hard copies of the original rules and fleet book. Odds are though, I won't be able to play the game, since I already have enough trouble to get people playing its simpler cousin, Squadron Strike. The rules and background make for great reading material though.

So it's been another great convention and fun weekend for me. Now I have to get going on my next project, my Epic armies.