Adepticon 2019 Part 2... rolling hot at Adpeticon on Saturday

In my first report "Adepticon 2019 Part 1" I quickly went over the events that happened on Friday, the day we arrived. What I didn't mention was that I got up at 4:30AM to be on the road with Rob at 6AM. It's a 4 and a half hour drive (on a good day, depending on traffic) to get out there. Chicago is an hour behind us so we got there around 930AM Chicago time. I must say the day went by in a blur. We were on our feet until midnight and I was exhausted by the time I hit the sack.

But the initial adrenaline rush (or so I thought) was survived so that when we got up to head back over on Saturday morning we could take our time and take it all in at a slower pace. Yeah right!

The night before Rob mentioned he wanted to show me a company that makes custom display/carrying cases. So when the vendor area opened I reminded him and we went straight over to tackle it. The company is called "Active minds Games"  The owner gave us a really good demonstration and the product seemed solid and inexpensive so Rob and I bought two each of the white cases, along with the metal inserts you have to buy separately. They have a sticky on the back so you can glue them down in the cases, then place your miniatures (with magnets on their bases) in the case. I think they will be super handy for transporting my Infinity figures or Malifaux to game events.

What's cool about them is their inter locking features. You can lock more than one as a stack, side by side, or both as you see in picture above. Kind of like legos, and it has a pretty solid carrying handle you can securely attach to the top.

So with our newly collected treasure, Rob suggested he take them out to the car and stow them while I was going to walk back over to the Arena Rex booth to decide if I wanted to buy that Lion or Tiger I saw the day before. But it was a hard choice as I also had seen some very, very cool Mythic Japanese figures from the game "Bushido New Dawn" and I had an idea about using one of them for my Samurai army for Saga as my General.

So Rob went on his way and I hadn't taken a dozen steps when he had come back and tapped me on my shoulder to get me out of my stupor and said he wanted to show me something and that it was a surprise. I said okay and turned around to follow him. I was like "what(?), did he arrange for my wife to show up or something with a handful of cash?", yes I really do have an awesome imagination!

So as we are headed out toward the entrance to the vendor hall he suddenly slows up and side steps to the right and nods over to my left and....................

OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!!!! Were the words that came out of my mouth very loudly as I bent over in disbelief! One of my FAVORITE Youtube personalities was standing there with another of my favorite Youtube personalities, smiling back at me, and all were a little surprised by my reaction. Yes I am a man in my elderly years, no I have never acted like this before... like a 16 year old girl seeing the Beatles in real life for the first time. But it did happen and it even surprised me.

It was Ash from Guerrilla Miniature Games, and Owen, who to my utter shame kept calling Collin (no idea where that even came from), from Gaming with the Cooler. I was blushing, stuttering, and practically froze up. You see I had no idea they were going to be there and I was taken completely by surprise. Ash and Owen often show Infinity battle reports, among many other cool games, on their channels and I have yet to find better production value from anyone else on Youtube. Not to mention they are super cool! So another check mark on things that I wanted to achieve at Adepticon, and this was THE highlight of the event for me.

From left to right looking at the picture is Ash, me, and Owen (NOT Collin). Also notice the shirt I am wearing, truly an excellent pick for the day!

When Rob came back after dropping off our miniature cases, and I had recovered from my near heart attack, we started roaming the vendor area only to come upon another favorite Youtube personality in Uncle Atom form Table Top Minions. The day only partially begun, had it ended right there and we had to go home, I would have been completely satisfied. Just wow.

Okay back to looking at miniatures. I couldn't make up my mind about getting a Lion or Tiger from Arena Rex guys, so I ended up getting a pack of miniatures from GCT Studios from their Bushido New Dawn line. Bushido is an oriental fantasy tabletop miniature battle game for two players. I wanted to get the following guy but they had sold out the day before.

This is Hokibo, Kurama Samurai (above, the sold out one) and using him as my General in my historical Saga game, I know my buddy Skip's troops would have pooped their miniature toy soldier pants in fear of him. But oh well, I instead got a pack of these mighty fine bird men (below picture) which I will sprinkle among my Samurai. I think it will have the same effect.

This is the Tengu Descension Starter Set, the front row of five figures, and they look pretty sweet.

Here are a few more photos of the Japanese mythical creatures from Bushido New Dawn line.

After that we came up to the Mantic Games booth where they had brand new copies of their soon to be released "Hellboy game", could this day get any better! I have all of the Graphic Novels for Hellboy and I had no idea this was coming out and was quite excited (you may have noticed I've been excited the entire time, but hey). Rob and I dived into a demo game, and had it not been for the fact that I had already gone through half of my resupplied food money for the day I would have bought the entire collection! If I go next year I will simply have to start saving up from this day forward. Hellboy is a tile placement, card flipping, solve a mystery, shoot'em up type of game.

Here are some painted up samples for the game.

Just wow, I am sooo glad that I had the opportunity to come to this event.

Our next Demo game we played before we went to sit in the lounge area for a bit to rest up and have a glass of much needed whiskey (thank you Rob!!!), we tried a game of Freeblades from the company DGS Games. A skirmish fantasy game that had some cool mechanics and we liked the character cards and the idea that you campaign and build your character up like role playing (just don't get them killed or there will be some heavy sobbing).

In our demo game Rob got to be the Amazon like tribe/clan, and I got to be Roman like legionaries riding dinosaurs. Yes you heard that right, freaking dinosaurs! The game simply rocks just for that reason. How could you not love Roman Legionaries and Dinosaurs combined! Here is a few shots of our demo play.

Now here are a few shots of some of their painted mini line for the game.

Our last demo game of the day before we had to go to our actual signed up game of "Witchborn", was back over at Corvus Belli's booth and we jumped in on trying out their game called Aristeia!, this is like futuristic gladiator combat, or like arena football on drugs. Something like that. Had Rob and I not already been totally immersed in their Infinity game system we might have bought it. We had fun playing it though and the low miniature count and small area required for play are both pluses for us old dudes.

After this we had a bit of time to walk around before our Witchborn game started. I will make one final post in the next day or so where I will dump and tag the photos of all the events, and other interesting things we saw.

The Witchborn game started at 6 and finished up around 10 oclock. It was a lot more complicated than we thought it would be for a skirmish/role playing game, though the game did have some merits to it, but we agreed it wasn't something our meta would pick up on and want to play. We did have fun playing, and "Snake Eye's" Rob had the most amazing dice for a change and actually won the game! It came down to him and another player each having only one figure left, neither one of them able to finish the other off. When it came time for Rob to do something with an NPC (Non Player Character that was this giant beast bouncer type guy) he had him pick up a table and whip it at the other player and rolled spot on and crunch went the Dwarf, and the last standing Elf danced a little jig as he had escaped the very same treatment when the Dwarf player had the NPC whip a table at him on the previous turn! Ah, those Elf's are quick on their feet.

Thus ended our Saturday at Adepticon.

Cheers

Kevin

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

Gremlin's, Goblin's, and pigs

On the painting table I have Sammy LaCroix and three stuffed pigs (they are on the left of the photo below) to finish by this weekend as I need them for Adepticon next week. I will be playing in a Malifaux tournament and have only played a practice game or two and completely expect to have my collective butt handed to me. But my friend who I am going with and playing in said tournament says we will have fun. I am holding him to it.

I was at my local brick and mortar this past Saturday with a couple of friends before we headed off to the local pub, and we came across Games Workshops "Shadespire", a cross between a boardgame and miniatures. Age of Sigmar like, but you only have around seven models to push around on game board. It's a card deck building game, and I have heard good things about it on other blogs here, and from a friend overseas, amongst other sources. An add on stand alone game just came out this past fall called "Nightvault". It introduces magic. Also a few warbands or crews have come out for it. One crew or warband is called Zarbag's Gitz, a night goblin horde. I am a huge fan of Games Workshops old Night Goblins with all the wacky stuff they could do. A friend of mine’s birthday was St. Patty's day. He was with me at the shop and the luck of the Irish was with him because the boxes are in a green tone, and I started the whispering in his ear about how cool it would be for him to buy himself a birthday present right there and then. The next thing I know he not only grabs the Nightvault game, but the add on boards, and the objective packs and I was like whoa dude you are the greatest. Now to be honest I didn't have to work that hard on getting him to do it. I just knew he wanted to and gave him a little push.

Sooooo, it gave me the opportunity and reason to get Zarbag's cool warband, which you see on the right of picture below.

I know what your all thinking, it isn't about me, it was his birthday and should have been about him. But they where "NIGHT GOBLINS", I had to do it;)

As always thanks for looking

Cheers
Kevin