Railroad Swap Meet

Today, I went to the Mainline Model Railroaders Fellowship's semi-annual swap meet for the first time. I had long heard there was great potential terrain at these railroad events, and I've seen interesting pieces painted up by others (hi Bob!), but I've never been to one of them.
It turned out to be quite a bit more crowded than I thought, and I did get a good haul. I was mainly looking for HO scale buildings to go with my 1/72 scale figures. Technically the scale is a bit small, but it's close enough on the table top. I certainly wasn't disappointed, and I ended up with some good, cheap stuff. (most of the buildings below were between $2 and $5 each)

These are classic railroad buildings depicting old-fashioned downtown core offices or tenements. Most of these are in decent shape and can do well with just a base coat and wash. Maybe they'll serve for zombie infested streets or an X-Com alien abduction/terror site.

These are small-town restaurants, shops, and houses. Again, good X-Com fodder or some mysterious small-town home to strange cults?

More small stores, bu the gas station needs a bit of love. These buildings when put together can make a great board for all sorts of interesting scenarios.

And finally, there are these two much higher quality buildings. They have a lot more detail and are made of very tough hard polystyrene. In fact, they are almost like wargaming miniatures. Does anyone know who actually makes these? The seller didn't know.

Mayday 2016

Yet another year has come and gone, and I went to Mayday 2016 over the weekend. Even though this year had somewhat lower attendance than usual, Mayday has become enough of a fixture that most of the usual suspects were there.

I ran my typical Strange Aeons: X-Com game, with the boards mixed up a little bit from usual to provide some variety. I hosted Wiley and Andy in a couple of introductory games - Andy had been interested in Strange Aeons for a while but had never played my game, whereas Wiley had played once before.

The rural board, which I modified to add a farm house.

The urban board, which is now a UFO crash site.

Here Wiley and Andy were trying to figure out the rules on the urban board.

They ended up winning one game each and had a good time. We talked about possibly running a campaign on normal game nights, which is where the base system really shines.

In the afternoon, I played in a series of DBA games with Dennis. Due to low turnout, we were the only ones in the DBA time slot, originally meant for a British-themed tournament. We went through three games, with me playing an ancient British army and Dennis using a sub-Roman Briton army.

We played through slightly different terrain set-ups using the same armies. Dennis ended up winning 2 to 1 and won the "tournament".

In the evening, Terry hosted several players in a Frostgrave game. Frostgrave seems to be the new thing around here, being a fairly simple skirmish campaign game. A lot of people are building their own warbands, and I'll probably modify my Mordheim warband to add some wizards.

The scenario we played had each of us trying to get our wizard to a fountain in the center of the board, to drink its magical waters. Of course, we had to kill each other (and random monsters) along the way.

We played quite late into the evening, and I ended up winning after killing another wizard, which gave a lot of experience. I really liked the rules, since they're both simple and quite flavourful, with everything you'd want in a fantasy system. Time to dust off my Mordheim stuff!

So another enjoyable Mayday has come and gone, and I can't wait until the next one. Maybe I'll run something other than X-Com...

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.

Mayday 2015

This past weekend, I attended the Mayday gaming convention here in Edmonton again.  This year, due to the lack of conflicting Warmachine tournaments, we had both the Warhammer 40k and the Warmachine crowds, and the community center was packed.

The room was so full of tables that my X-Com game had to be moved outside in the hallway.

I ran the same scenarios from last year, but with some gray aliens (sectoids) filling in as the enemies for the UFO crash site, and humans with medium armour fighting the snakemen in the urban scenario.

I hosted a local player who was also here last year through the urban scenario, and it proved to be a lot easier for the humans this time around. Here is a shot of X-Com troops taking cover behind the convenience store.

Since there was time after the first game, we played through the UFO crash site again. The sectoids were weaker opponents, but this time the humans were not so lucky.

At the end, the humans were wiped out and failed to kill all the aliens at the crash site. Here a sectoid captured the wounded X-Com sniper, probably taking him away for probing...

After my game hosting, I played in a DBA tournament. This year, it was rather sparse since some of the regular DBA players were away at the time. We also used the new 3.0 version of the rules, which took some getting used to.

Later in the day, I played in Terry's "All Quiet on the Martian Front" game, which I play-tested on the previous EWG night. This time around, the Martians (including me) were more aggressive, and tripod casualties were high. In the above picture, you can see one of Terry's flashing fire/smoke markers on a destroyed tripod.

It was another great gaming convention, and I can't wait to try the updated X-Com game at Fallcon this year.

Back to X-Com

For this year's Mayday gaming convention, I'm running my Strange Aeons: X-Com game again, this time with slightly different scenarios to make it easier on the human player.

I've painted up some extra miniatures for both the human and alien sides, to make the original scenarios better-balanced.

First up are some Elhiem Figures "armoured fed troopers", used as medium-armoured X-Com operatives. These are incredibly good miniatures that fit well with plastic 1/72 miniatures. Hopefully they are part of a trend popularizing 1/72 scale science fiction.

This is one of the armoured troopers compared to a Caesar ultra modern miniature.  You can see that they fit together perfectly in terms of height and proportions.

Here's the whole gang I painted up.  They can be used as a squad with rifles, a heavy weapon, and a leader with some sort of carbine.

A close-up of the heavy weapons trooper and his loader.

Another comparison shot with a Caesar miniature and the Elhiem carbine trooper.

I'm thinking of using these medium-armoured X-Com troops against the original snakemen, and give them better armour and weapons ratings than the poor initial tech-level humans.

To get a bunch of easier opponents for the humans at early tech levels, I painted up some sectoids. These are Rebel Minis alien grays, and even though they are designed for 15 mm, they can fill in as child-sized aliens for 1/72.  The only modification I did was to add some wrist-mounted plasma pistols since the originals were unarmed.

Here's a comparison shot showing the height of the grays. They look fine as small aliens versus human miniatures.

I'll see if the humans do better this time. The sectoids, just like in the computer game, are significantly weaker than humans and only have plasma pistols. Hopefully this will give the early level humans a fighting chance.

FallCon 2014

This last weekend I went to the FallCon convention in Calgary for the third time, and it was great as usual.  Unfortunately this year it seemed there were fewer miniatures games than last year compared to board games, but there was still a lot of gaming to be done.

Friday night, I joined the "Roadkill" DBA event run by Paul from Seattle.  This was a tournament where you were encouraged to bring one of the worst-performing DBA armies.  I used my ancient Spanish army to proxy the Ilyrian army, one of the obscure book I armies with a strange set of units.  It has a mostly Aux army with a LH general and a high aggression, a bad combination.  I had a good time, but the army didn't do well.  I think I lost a couple of games and won one, but since my camera ran out of power, I didn't have many photos.

Saturday morning, I ran the same Strange Aeons: X-Com game that I ran at Mayday.  There was only one guy playing it, but I think he ended up liking the game and setting.  The humans died pretty badly again in the game, which led me to rethink some of the rules to make things a bit more even in earlier tech level games.

Saturday afternoon, I played in another DBA tournament run by Mark S., this time using only the same armies against each other.  This was mainly for fun, without much score-keeping, so I just took a bunch of pictures.

On Sunday I attended the annual Alberta DBA Open with my Komnenan dynasty army, which I've always considered a fairly versatile one, and I took on three opponents.  I lost against Mark S's Medieval French and won against Marco's Libyans and Dennis' Italian condotierres.

I ended up tying Mark W for second place in the tournament, which is a pretty good showing.

This turned out to be another great weekend, and it's now a gaming tradition for me to go to FallCon.  I'm definitely looking forward to the next one.