Adepticon 2019 Part 1 Arena Rex and Misc. stuff

This past weekend I participated in my first ever Adepticon. It would not have been my first unless my friend Rob had not coaxed me into going. I am so glad that he did. I had a blast. I've gone to a whole bunch of conventions but this was the first big venue where historical miniatures did not dominate the menu. Fantasy and Science fiction reigned supreme. Adepticon, over the years, has grown into one of the Midwest's go to conventions. This convention began back in 2002 with an attendance number of 110 people, to today (2019 numbers) 5,600 people attended!

I have to say I have never been to a convention with that number of people before and was floored by how efficiently and smoothly it was run. The staff was great, the vendors, and attendees were all polite. It was amazing.

Okay, I had three goals that I had to accomplish going to my first Adepticon. First was to buy some of Corvus Belli latest Infinity releases. Second was to get some photos of my favorite Youtube personalities. Third was to play in as many demo games and scout out as much as I could that I had interest in. I am happy to report I not only checked off these missions, but it went even better than I hoped. My only sadness was not being rich so I could buy every single thing I saw!

On Friday (my first day) I trudged right up to the Corvus Belli booth to buy the new releases I had planned to get and to my joy one of my Youtube personalities happened to be standing there. Carlos is the spokes person for Corvus Belli and has a great sense of humor, coupled with his thick accent (he is from Spain) the combination can not be resisted.

He is no different in real life than he is watching his vids. Like most of us in the hobby, our bodies may be growing older, but our hearts are still kids.

After a quick chat with Carlos, and getting my stuff, Rob and I had a moment to scout around a bit before having to go to the Corvus Belli seminar we signed up for. You know, to get the company pitch and find out what was ahead for new releases and stuff. We wandered over to the Infinity tournament area and as they were between games I took the opportunity to take some snapshots of the game table setups.

We then perused the vendor area quickly and I came across a company called Arena Rex which makes 35mm figures for Gladiator combat in a Mythic Age. I immediately fell in love with the figures, they are absolutely beautiful sculpts. They had mouse pad mats of an Arena for sale which I quickly bought as I had looked everywhere for this mat on internet and it had seemed to vanish. I bought some gladiators and the rules Sons of Mars a while back but had no play area.

We then bustled off to the Corvus Belli Seminar with me dreaming of those beautiful figures from Arena Rex.

Here we are (and if I may mess around with a movie quote from Larry Crown) two guys, who are guys, being guys watching a seminar about miniature toy soldiers of the future:)

After the seminar we went back down to the vendor hall. On each wing of the vendor hall are massive tournaments going on. When the vendor area closes they have these giant sliding partitions they can close. Then you have to access the lobby doors to go from one tournament hall to the other. But we were there while vendors were open so it was easy to access everything we wanted to see. We saw Star War Legion tournament, Infinity, Batman (Knights models along with DC universe), along with 40K, Age of Sigmar, etc.

We walked through the vendor area again and I was like a little kid wandering off when I saw something shiny with Rob having to double back to find me.

Somehow we made it back to the Arena Rex booth and I got a chance to play a demo game. The Arena is a Playmobile set that they painted and built up on foam board and made pits (you can see the trap doors) that have stakes in them. If you push your opponent into one of these he is a goner.

I had an absolute riot. It's a pretty simple game with a very cool combat system. You have character cards with a damage tree on it. Pretty typical stat line, Attack, Defense, etc. You roll so many dice and get successes on a roll of 4 or more on six sided dice. The defender gets so many defense dice again getting successes on a roll of 4 or more. Defender successes cancel out the attacker successes, and anything left over for attacker you then look at their card and follow the damage tree. The results are pretty cool, and every character has something different about them. The game is meant to be played with anywhere form 3 to 8 figures per side. The only thing holding me back was the expense of the figures. They start out at like 17 US Dollars and up. Yikes! But after playing the demo game I was hooked. I looked at Rob with what must have been puppy dog eyes and said I'll get some if you do. The saving grace is that they have a three figure starter boxes for 40 bucks. Rob bought into it and I quickly picked out my figures.

Now if you go to the Area Rex website by clicking my link "Arena Rex" you'll learn all you need to know about this cool company and see all the figures available fully painted on their website (they do not come painted and are resin figures that need to be assembled. These figures are really meant for someone who has modeling skills). In the meantime I took quite a few pictures of them in their display cases with my Ipad camera. The lighting wasn't the greatest, and I took them through the glass of the display case so you may see some reflections, but I think they came out pretty good.

Oh and even if I had ten life times I will never be able to paint this good.

 [The figures below are Greek inspired and are called "Helleniki" which of course are the ones I fell in love with and bought]

 Of course I spent all my money, including my food money for weekend which caused me to have to transfer some money over from my bank to my credit card for the next day so I would be able to eat!

We closed out the day playing in a demo game of Wyrd's Malifaux 3rd Edition demo which is coming out this early summer. Rob and I played against each other and having been teaching ourselves Malifaux 2nd edition helped us to see the changes that are coming. We had great fun and we are really looking forward to the new edition. Here are a few shots of some of the new models and what the new character cards will look like. A Wendigo, and Snow Storm for the Arcanists.

Well that's about it for now, I'll post some more stuff tomorrow, in the meantime......

HAVE YOU NOT BEEN ENTERTAINED!!!!!!!

Cheers
Kevin