Category Archives: Conventions

Convention reports & photo-essays.

Conventions, Pulp

Trumpeter Salute 2017 This Friday!

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Bit quiet around here but I’ve been busy painting up a storm for my Trumpeter Salute 2017 game!

“The Faithful of Dagon” will feature several competing sects of fishmen, some human cultists, and various other factions all competing to recover things Man Was Not Meant To Know, all powered by the Pulp Alley rules. Look for it Sunday morning at Trumpeter Salute.

I’ll get the WordPresss app reinstalled and running on my smartphone before Trumpeter and try to show off some photos and such from the show, but I’m on a holiday road trip right until Friday when I rock up to Trumpeter, so posting is going to be light until then.

See you at Trumpeter, hopefully, and hope March was a productive wargaming month for you like it was for me.

Conventions, Galleries, Inspiration, Pulp

Trumpeter Salute 2016 Photos

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Finally got my Trumpeter Salute 2016 photos off the phone and onto Flickr a few days ago.

The full collection is over on Flickr but here’s a few favourites and highlights!

Reagan vs Ghadaffi

Saturday morning we ran a Libya vs US Navy air war scenario, based on an amped-up version of the real Gulf of Libya incidents in the mid-1980s. The Libyan MiGs humiliated the US Navy Tomcats, shooting down two and barely losing any aircraft, while blowing up the oil tanker they had come to strike!

Ain't Afraid of No Ghost!

I didn’t play in this one, but it certainly caught my eye. Rival teams of Ghostbusters (they’ve become a franchise, apparently) try to clear a haunted subway station. This was one of Lisa’s games, she always runs awesome creative games that are very welcoming to gamers of all ages!

Cold War Hot

Another 1980s based scenario for Saturday evening, this time using Martin’s awesome 6mm hex terrain to do a complex West German vs Soviet scenario. Soviet air-landing battalion vs West German home guard, then a counterattack by West German armour that runs into a spearhead group of Soviet armour coming to relieve their paratroopers! Great game and a decisive Soviet victory.

The Pulp Finale

Sunday I ran a big Pulp Alley game for six players. It was somewhere in India after the Great War, and we had rival teams of Thugee cultists (the cult wasn’t as extinct as everyone thought…), various interfering foreigners including White Russians and Red Air Pirates, and two rival British Army Lieutenants each out to prove themselves the best! It all ended in a giant brawl in the collapsing cursed temple of Kali, with the Thugee generally being seen as the winners!

As always, a great time in Vancouver. It was good to see most of the regulars there and catch up with them, and see all the great games being put on. Until next year!

Conventions, Pulp

Heading Home From Trumpeter Salute 2016

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Heading home from Vancouver and an excellent, exhausting weekend at the Trumpeter Salute show! Good to see most of the Trumpeter regulars, many of whom I only ever see once a year at this show.

Great games all weekend, including the six player Pulp Alley game I ran Sunday, “Terror in the Thuggee Temple”, which was a gloriously confused and messy multi-sided mess enjoyed by all.

I got a good crop of photos all weekend, including a bunch of my own pulp game, and I’ll get them edited and posted here soon!

Conventions, Pulp

Off to Trumpeter Salute 2016!

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Heading off to Vancouver today for the always excellent Trumpeter Salute wargaming show this weekend.

I’ve finally gotten around to setting up the Android WordPress app on this phone so I’ll update from the field as I remember to, then do my usual photo dump once I’m home.

I’m running a Pulp Alley game sometime this weekend but can’t actually recall when it is. Looking forward to seeing all the Trumpeter regulars this weekend!

Conventions, Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Infinity in the Jungle

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Somewhere along the way the default tabletop setting for a game of Infinity became “futuristic urban/quasi-urban environment”, which is as true of most of our tables locally as it is anywhere else, but the game does have a full and interesting set of terrain rules and even tries to include things like zero-g, hazardous environments, and similar.

With that in mind, I finally pulled the box of jungle terrain that I’d built a few years ago for pulp gaming out and we set that up for Infinity this weekend for our first tournament event around here.

Looking across the jungle toward the Tohaa positions. Click for slightly larger, as usual.
Looking across the jungle toward the Tohaa positions. Click for slightly larger, as usual.

The platforms are lasercut MDF from the collection of one of the other local Infinity folks, and they look good adding a sci-fi touch to the jungle. Jungle is hard to move through, obstructs shooting but does not block it entirely, and makes things like spotting a bit more difficult. It makes for a great change from our usual urban jungle, and I’ll be taking the box o’ jungle terrain to many more Infinity sessions in the future.

Going back to talking about our grandly-named “Vancouver Island Open” Infinity event, we wound up with six of us playing, with a decent mix of factions represented. I came a solid third with a Hassassin Bahram force; here’s the rankings:

  1. Jeremy – 2/14/337 Nomads
  2. Jaime – 2/10/397 Yu Jing
  3. Brian – 2/7/353 Hassassin Bahram
  4. Nicholas – 1/10/390 Nomads
  5. Stewart – 1/8/468 Tohaa
  6. Chris – 1/4/344 Caledonians

The numbers are Wins/Total VP/Total Surviving Army Points. Total Wins determined basic standing, with VP and then Points being used to break ties. One thing I thought was interesting is that only two of us ran Sectorials, with four of the six opting for “vanilla” Faction lists.

We’ve got another event scheduled for the end of November, about a month from now, and hopefully we can get a regular round of events up and running locally!

Allow me to end with some 80’s hair and music with a highly appropriate title!
[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1tj2zJ2Wvg”]

Conventions, Galleries

Finally, Trumpeter Salute 2015 Photos!

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Realized a few days ago that I hadn’t even taken my photographs from the Trumpeter Salute 2015 wargame show off the camera, never mind looking at them and choosing which ones to publish. This for a show that was at the end of March, three weeks ago and counting!

The whole collection is over on Flickr, as usual. Here’s a couple of highlights.

Whippet Tank vs Zombies

We started off with “Russian Civil War + Zombies” or “The Undead Are The Ultimate Proletariat”, which was fun and silly even if All Things Zombie isn’t my favourite set of rules. I got to blunder around in this great papercraft Whippet tanks, attracting zombies just by leaving the engine idling (thing is LOUD!) and then running them over or machinegunning them. Good fun!

Missiles Away!

Saturday morning and afternoon were both full of Tomcats, MIGs, and other Cold War planes as we ran two sessions of Air War C21, which is a fast, fluid, great set of rules. Tomcats are scary aircraft.

Actual Russian Civil War

Saturday evening I ran my actual Russian Civil War game for four players. I had two signed up as “spares” and had to turn a seventh away, which is always disappointing but it beats having nobody show up for your games! (which I have had happen at GottaCon here in Victoria…) It was a closely fought battle but the Reds succeeded in keeping the Whites out of the village in the end.

Crash and Splash

Sunday at Trumpeter is the long single session, so we get the “big” games out. I participated in the gloriously goofy Lego junkyard race game, with half of the other players under 14. The red-and-yellow pointy looking vehicle at the very back of the photo above is my racing machine. Good fun, I can’t even recall who won, to be honest!

Somewhere near Kursk

Next table over was Thomas’ absolutely spectacular Kursk WW2 game in 20mm, hordes of Russians trying to push the Germans out of the Motherland. I spent a lot of time between my racing turns gawking at this game.

Already looking forward to Trumpeter Salute 2016. I might bring Russian Civil War back, or I might go back to my pulp gaming and run some sort of pulp adventure game. We shall see!

Thanks again to Jon for the ride over, Martin for the hospitality, and the Trumpeter Salute club for putting on another amazing weekend.

Conventions, Historicals

Martin’s Photos From Trumpeter Salute

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My own photos from the Trumpeter Salute show over in Vancouver at the end of March are still unsorted and unedited, but Martin has gotten his photos uploaded to Flickr, so I’ll happily show them off until I get my own photos sorted out!

He’s got all of his Trumpter Salute 2015 photos in an album, if you want to see all 45 from the weekend.

We did Russian Civil War + Zombies using the All Things Zombies rules on Friday evening, but Martin didn’t have his camera with him. I’ve got some photos of that session – running over zombies with a light tank was a lot of fun…

We did modern air warfare Saturday morning and afternoon, using Martin’s great papercraft jet fighter models.

Air War C:21 - Top Gun

Air War C:21 - Gulf of Sidra Incident

Air War C:21 - Gulf of Sidra Incident

Saturday evening was my Russian Civil War game using Chain of Command/Mud & Blood rules. Four players total, two Red & two White, each side running a platoon plus supporting troops. It ended in a narrow Red victory but was close several times!

Chain of Command - Comrades & Cossacks

Chain of Command - Comrades & Cossacks

Sunday I played in a LEGO Junkyard Race which was a ton of fun; Martin was able to get into Thomas’ spectacular Battle of Kursk WW2 game, with an amazing table filled with great models.

Battlegroup Kursk - First Charge at Hill 252.2

Battlegroup Kursk - First Charge at Hill 252.2

I’ll get my own Trumpeter Salute photos sorted out over the next couple of days and posted here!

Conventions

Back from Trumpeter Salute 2015

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Just got back this evening from a fantastic weekend over in Vancouver for the Trumpeter Salute 2015 convention. Lots of great games, I got 2nd Place Best in Show for the Saturday evening time slot for my Chain of Command-powered Russian Civil War game, which was awesome.

Didn’t do a lot of shopping, just a couple of Osprey books related to the RCW and a couple of small packs of figures – except for the 40+ fully painted and based WW1 Turks I bought from a friend who has moved over to Vancouver and is downsizing his figure collection! He gave me a fantastic deal on them, too, and I’ll get some photos up shortly. I’ve had a group of British infantry in tropical kit for several years now that are terribly underutilized due to a lack of a proper opponent for them, so the Turks will provide that. I’m sure they’ll also appear in various pulp games, too.

Photos and a proper writeup in a day or three, tonight I need sleep!

Conventions

Another GottaCon Gone

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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!

Conventions

Eight Days to GottaCon 2015!

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Just over a week until our local convention, GottaCon 2015 starts! I’ve got a ticket already, and I’m doing something I’ve never done before, which is enter a tournament – namely the Blood Bowl tourney with my Crocs. The BB Tourney is morning & afternoon both Saturday & Sunday, so I have Friday evening and Saturday evening free from the rigours of having my ambulatory handbags pounded into the pitch by other teams.

Friday evening I’ve put in to run a Pulp Alley pulp adventure skirmish game. We really haven’t been doing much pulp gaming lately but PA is a nice system and easy to introduce people to.

Saturday evening I’ve put in to run a Chain of Command/Mud & Blood Russian Civil War game. This one is going to require the most prep this weekend and over next week, as I need a batch of new Quick Reference cards for CoC/M&B hybrid and some other gaming aids that I’ve been putting off, mostly because I’ve been distracted by Infinity recently.

I’ll run a fairly simple scenario, and my RCW project is at a nice mature point where it doesn’t really need any new scenery or figures to work as a good-looking convention game. That said, I’m thinking of bashing another Russian-flavoured building or two together after GottaCon to show off at Trumpeter Salute 2015 over in Vancouver at the end of March, which is always the high point of my personal gaming calendar each year.