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.

2014 Fall Auction Items

The local gaming club here (Edmonton Wargames Group) is holding an eBay auction in the fall to raise money for its operating costs, and I'm donating some of my unused Warhammer 40k miniatures.  I painted these years ago to get them quickly into gaming, but I think the paint still holds up fairly well.

The batch consists of two Tyranid hive tyrants with magnetized arm hard-points, two tyrant guards, and a carnifex with permanently glued guns.

 Here is the whole gang together, a total of 3 large models and 2 medium ones.

 The two tyrant guards.  These are the older all metal models.

The two tyrants, again both previous edition metals.  Both have four magnetic hard points each.  I have two big guns (venom cannon and barbed strangler) for one of them, and a pair of wings and two twin-linked devourers for the other.

This is the tyrant with wings and devourers.

This is the tyrant with the two big guns.

The carnifex is also from the previous edition, but is still all-plastic.  It has a venom cannon and a barbed strangler permanently glued on.

All of these are painted and based, ready to play.  I'll be wrapping these up in bubble wrap and putting them in boxes for the auction.  The tyrants will be shipped with the magnetized weapons detached for safety.  The club member who is running the auction, Dave, will be putting up the auction link when it starts in September.

Mayday Again!

This past Saturday I went to our local gaming mini-convention, Mayday, again.  This time the event had rather fewer people than past years due to some other gaming tournaments happening at the same time.  However, there was still plenty of fun to be had.

I ran a skirmish game using the Strange Aeons ruleset, but playing out scenarios based the X-Com computer game.  (Both old and new).  The Strange Aeons base game is a great Lovecraftian adventure ruleset, but my adaptation followed the X-Com plotline, with near-future soldiers fighting invading aliens.

I had two 2 X 3 ft. boards set up, one a rural UFO crash site, the other an urban roadside scene.  In both cases the human and alien players were simply trying to wipe each other out.

The miniatures I used for snakemen (old X-Com game) were from Critical Mass Games.  These are supposed to be 15mm aliens, but they fit quite well with my 1/72 scale ultra-modern special forces soldiers.

On the first level, the human player had a lot of trouble advancing against the snakemen's withering plasma fire.  He did poorly in all his cover save rolls, and ended up losing all his men to major injuries.

On the urban map, he tried to take advantage of cover by moving from car to car, and sending some of his men, including a sniper, to the top of the convenience store to get a good field of fire.  But again, the alien plasma weapons proved to be too deadly for the rifle-armed humans.

Despite the one-sidedness of the game, both players had a lot of fun, and I think the rules generally work quite well.  Maybe I need to increase the cover save amount to give the initial tech level humans a chance.  I'm thinking of running a campaign for Tuesday nights, since that's where the SA ruleset really shines, at allowing the player to keep a squad of humans through multiple missions gaining experience and abilities.

There were quite a few other games and displays running at the same time.  Here, Dave was running his Carpi campaign with late Western Romans using the Hail Caesar ruleset.  It looked very nice.

There were some display tables on the side of the room, including this very nice X-Wing setup.

After my morning game, I participated in a DBA tournament.  There were only four participants, and we played three games each.  The theme of the tournament was elephants, and each player had to use an army with at least one.  I borrowed Dennis' Seleukid army, and faced off Dave's Sassanid Persians in the first game.  I lost 4-2, and lost my general in the process.

In the second game, fighting against Dennis' Numidians, I did better, winning 4-2.  My scythed chariot was the star player, mowing down one of his light horse and his general.

In the third game, I played Mark from Calgary and his Carthaginians.  This map had a lot of terrain, and we both maneuvered quite a bit.  The picture shows my pike block trudging around in bad terrain for much of the game.  The game ended in my favour with some bad rolls on his part.  Overall though, Mark won the tournament with the highest score.

In the evening I played in a Star Wars fleet battles game using old clix miniatures.  I didn't know a lot about the ruleset, but it played very smoothly and quickly with a large number of ships.  It seemed to be very well suited for the sort of large scale cinematic action a Star Wars game demanded.

All in all, I had a lot of fun again this year, and I hope I can come up with some more interesting ideas for running a game next time.

Fallcon 2013

Over the last weekend I went to Calgary for my second Fallcon visit, and it was a blast!

This year, there seemed to be fewer miniatures games and more boardgames, but I still managed to get my fill.  I also met all the old Calgary crew again, along with Mark W., who moved there in this past year.

Friday night, there was a Saga game run by Mike Johnson.  At first, I thought it was some kind of tournament, so I brought my own Saga warband.  However, it turned out to be a loosely depicted version of the Battle of Brunanburh, with all the miniatures provided.

Here both armies were arrayed against each other, and I was on the Scottish/Viking side.

I took control of the Scottish King Constantine's warband and faced off against the Anglo-Saxons.  It was a pretty standard Saga warband with a leader, a couple of groups of hearthguard, and a couple of groups of warriors.

There really wasn't much room for maneuver, and I charged through one of the Anglo-Saxon warbands facing me, managing to break them in cooperation with the Viking players on my side.  The battle ended up with the Anglo-Saxons losing, having something like three of their warlords killed.

On Saturday morning, I played in Sean's GASLIGHT game, a Victorian Science Fiction skirmish using 1/72 scale miniatures.  The objective was to collect a bunch of blue crystals, and their collection triggered monsters.  The players also could cooperate or backstab each other.

 

Here was the board setup showing Sean's excellent terrain.

 

I took the role of the Ethiopian prince Haile Unlikely (clever eh?), commanding a bunch of warriors on camels and on foot.  Sean had some very nicely-painted 1/72s.

 

There were all sorts of interesting units, like this Italian steam tank controlled by Mark.

A lot of monster-killing fun was had by all.  Here, my leader attacked a giant spider by himself.

 

Mike Johnson's Fez Patrol was attacked by a giant sandworm.  He managed to kill it though.

 

Eventually, the players all had to turn on each other.  I prematurely attacked the Highlanders next to me and got a lot of my warriors wiped out for my troubles.  Here, my lone camel rider bravely charged the remnants of the Highlanders.

Later on Saturday, Don Ray's Calgary DBA group put on a friendly introductory tournament of ancients DBA, set in the time of Alexander the Great.  I participated and put my ancient Spanish army in there as a stand-in for Thracians.

I played a couple of games with an Alexandrian Macedonian army against other people who used my Spanish, and I managed to win both times, even in bad terrain.  This was more due to bad luck on the part of both of my opponents than anything else.

Most of the armies were actually Alexandrian Macedonian, provided by the club, but there were several other interesting armies too.  Here, a Persian army faced off against their historical enemy.

 

In this one, the aggressive Macedonians attacked an Indian army.

On Sunday, I participated in the Alberta Open DBA tournament with all the usual suspects.  My army of choice here was the Komnenan Byzantines.

My first game was against Mark S's Carthaginians, and it was really bizarre.  I attacked with my knights, including my general, on the right wing against his warbands in the open.  Even though I had quick-kills on his units, my general died without killing any of them.  This ended the game with 1G-0 against me!

The next game was against Mark Wall's Spartacus army.  In theory, I should've been able to take any of his units (mostly warbands and blades) in the open with my knights.  Knowing this, he cleverly positioned his warbands in rough terrain and drew up his blades to support each other.  It ended up being a grinding match, with both of us losing units until he won out 4-3.

In contrast, the next game was rather quick.  My opponent had a mostly blades army and deployed on a gentle hill.  His general and one other unit got run down by my knights very quickly, ending the game.

There were quite a few nicely painted armies in the tournament.  The brightly-coloured Sassanid Persian army here was a good example.  The tournament ended with everyone having a lot of fun, and Don gave away prizes (mostly donated by Mark W!) to almost everyone.

This year's Fallcon was an enjoyable experience, and I'll definitely be back next time!

Mayday 2013 Events

On this Saturday, I attended Mayday, our annual local gaming convention.  This year, we had quite a turn out, and there were more games than last year.

Various hosts ran individual games, and there were also two big tournaments, for Warhammer 40k and Warmachine.

I ran a Tomorrow's War scenario, where a hi-tech security company has to escort a convoy of important cargo through an area controlled by insurgents.  The asymmetrical game setup of the Ambush Alley game engine allowed an excellent game to be played.

The convoy started at one end of the table and had to reach the other side against opposition.  The enemy could pop up in various hotspots around the table, and outnumbered the smaller but higher-quality security teams.

However, the game went badly for the convoy from the very beginning - one of the vehicles was immobilized, and the other had its weapon destroyed.  From then on, the convoy had serious problems going through the town.

The vehicle that still could move tried to forge ahead, but was demolished by a large IED.  Only the foot security teams could protect the convoy now.

 

The men pushed on though, and managed to cause some casualties to the insurgents due to their high quality.  However, eventually they got beaten back and were overwhelmed by superior numbers.  Here, a shot of one of the last turns had one of the security teams all wounded and captured by the insurgents, while the other one was pinned with casualties.

The game ended with a major victory for the insurgents, and the scenario might need some more balancing.  I'll probably add a sniper team for the security company, to add some firepower and coordinate the beyond line-of-sight fire capability of the vehicles.

There were quite a few other games going at the same time.

Dave C ran an El Cid game using I believe War and Conquest rules.  It sure looked great with crusaders painted up in all their glory.

There was a Victorian Sci-fi game run by the guys from Calgary, and it looked quite fun.  I saw a funny looking steam tank, a dinosaur, and some sort of summoning of a giant spider.

There was of course the 40k tournament, which provided a lot of opportunities for nicely painted models to get shown.

There was also a nicely done WWII game, Command Decision I think.

Later in the day, I played in the DBA tournament, where all of us used armies that were historical enemies of Rome.  I had the ancient Spanish.

The first game, I faced off against the Seleukid army of Don from Calgary.  This was a slow game where we both maneuvered for position most of the time.  We only started engaging near the end of the time limit, and I eked out a win by killing his general from some lucky rolls.

The second game was against Dave's ancient Britons, and I was not so lucky.  The fairly open terrain didn't suit my army, and I deployed poorly, allowing his chariots to smash against a weak flank.  Add some unlucky rolls to that and I suffered several units destroyed, losing the game.

The third game was against Stu's version of the ancient Britons army, and I did better.  I managed to hang onto edges of steeps hills and attacked his army from a location of advantage.   This ended in a win for me.

I think Mark won the tournament at the end, winning all three of his games.

In the evening I played in a 15 mm sci-fi game using the Gruntz rules.  I played aliens trying to attack some human colonists protected by marines.

The aliens started in a power plant and had to attack humans on the other side of the board.

I eventually overwhelmed the marines through relentless alien attacks.  Here is a shot of the aliens breaking into the human settlement.

Gruntz is an interesting game system, where you roll two D6s for each figure, in order to beat a target number to hit and wound the enemy.  It played quite quickly even with a fairly large number of models, so it can be another rule set for me to try out.

All in all, this year's Mayday was a great success, and we all had a lot of fun.