So GottaCon 2015 was last weekend; I managed to be at the whole convention, and it (mostly) good.
Friday night I ran a Pulp Alley game. The non-tournament miniatures games at GottaCon are perpetually under-promoted, under-supported, and (unsurprisingly) under-attended. The convention doesn’t even have assigned tables for non-tournament gaming, you can just set up whereever the tournament folks aren’t using, basically.
Kind of hard to promote a game to people when you aren’t even sure where in a large venue (Victoria Convention Centre) you’ll be running your game…
I got a grand total of one player for PA, but we still had a good game. His team of Intrepid Reporters completely and utterly beat my skulking group of Foreign Cultists, principally by being significantly more competent than them at the gathering of clues!
Saturday daytime and Sunday daytime I participated in the Blood Bowl tournament with my crocodiles (Lizardmen). Won two games out of five, tied one, had a great time in all five games. Got to face off against goblins (twice), Skaven, Vampires and Norse – these last three were all new teams to face for me and made for interesting games. Both goblin games were full of the usual explosive high-risk stupid awesomeness you expect from Gobbos, the high point of that being a gob Bomber who fumbled a bomb at his feet and blew himself over, as well as every single other player in the surrounding squares, two more goblins and three crocs!
The Handbag Factory – my crocodile’s amazing habit of getting themselves killed or maimed despite being among the most heavily armoured players available in BB – was in full operation. I lost Sauri every game, and even my Krox once. Thankfully it was a resurrection tournament, we started each game with exactly the same roster!
Saturday evening I ran a really good Russian Civil War game using the TFL Chain of Command rules. The defending Reds bloodied the White Cossacks good and hard, the high point being pulling off a series of close assaults on the White armoured car that ended in it being immobilized with both guns jammed in the centre of the hamlet, and the crew being bayoneted by the Red militia!
The VCC is quite a change in venue from the drafty and loud old Pearke’s Fieldhouse of previous GottaCons; it’s got a few issues of it’s own (no coffee before ten in the morning!) but being right downtown is convenient for more people than the out-of-the-way Pearkes Rec Centre. Mind you, I might be biased because it’s a ten to fifteen minute easy walk to the Convention Centre from my front door!
Looking forward to GottaCon 2016 next year, and in the much more immediate future, I need to start getting prepped for Trumpeter Salute 2015 at the end of March, just four weeks away!