FallCon 2019

This past weekend, I went on my annual visit to Calgary for the FallCon gaming convention. This was the third year that they've had the convention at SAIT, and I've gotten used to the new location and parking opportunities.

On Friday night, I went to the Calgary DBA players' hosted event. This was a refight of the battle of Telamon, between Romans and Gauls. There were several tables depicting the same battle in different scales.

I played the 2 mm version of the battle. The miniatures were near invisible, but they provided a good sense of scale. I lost the battle as the Romans from some pretty unlucky dice, but it was a lot of fun.

On Saturday morning, I ran a game of Imperial Skies with my newly painted aircraft miniatures. The scenario called for a Royal Navy aethership fleet to chase down an Irish pirate ship and locate its hidden base.

When the game started, the British ships were in hot pursuit of their target, the Fenian Ram, and managed to damage it rather badly.

The Fenian Ram deployed its fighters to harass the pursuing British destroyers while it made its escape.

With the British ships distracted by the fighters, the Fenian Ram was able to damage, then destroy, several of them.

Here, a light cruiser went down in flames.

 A destroyer was also shot down.

Eventually, the British fleet closed in on the pirate base, but we ran out of time and had to call the game. Unfortunately, I didn't design the scenario objectives quite right, and the Fenian players simply flew their ship around without landing in the base, which didn't give the British players enough opportunity to locate it before time ran out. This probably made it too difficult for them.

Later on Saturday, I participated in the annual Alberta DBA Open tournament. The dice were not with me that day, and along with some bad decision-making, I lost quite badly. I did play against some nicely painted armies though.

This weekend turned out to be quite cold in Calgary, and it was snowing most of the time. On Sunday morning, the streets looked like this.

I played in Dennis' Flames of War introductory game, with a scenario set in the African desert between the British and the Germans.

Due to the game's rather ahistorical rules, our side, the British players, started the game aggressively close to the German tanks in the middle of the table. This allowed us to take out some Panzer IVs early on, which made the game easier later.

In the end, our side took a lot of tank losses, but managed to destroy enough German units to make them reach a breaking point and lose the game. This was my second time playing this game, but it gave me the same impression that I had the first time - it's a good game, but not that historically accurate or realistic.

All in all, this was another great weekend spent on gaming.