Adepticon 2009

Well it has now been one week since Adepticon 2009 and I am finely getting to updating my blog. First off what a weekend! This was my second year going to Adepticon and it was just as awesome as last year with one exception, the new venue. The Westin was a bit further from O'Hara airport, but with everything being so close to it, this was a trade off I would make for a better venue.

Once again Adepticon saw huge crowds and when pre-registration closed they were well over what they had last year in attendance. Below is a shot on Friday morning of the folks that had preregistered. I was about in the middle of the line when I took this picture and there had to be about 300 people ahead of me and another 100+ behind me at 7:30am.



In the Grand Ballroom you could find registration, the vendors and all the 40K & Fantasy events for the weekend. I think they had well over 96 tables for 40K and about the same number of tables for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Here are two shots of the Grand Ballroom.

The Specialist area was housed in the Lilac room and that's were I spent most of my time playing Lord of the Rings, and running the Warhammer Ancients Battles tournaments. Also you could find the Epic Challenge, Battle Fleet Gothic Tournament, Lord of the Rings Tourneys, WAB Tourneys and the Necromunda tourney. Also this room hosted all the demos for the weekend from Necromunda to Trafalgar. Here is a shot of the Lilac room.

Also Adepticon hosted a Blood Bowl tourney: Stupor Bowl II which was in their own room in Magnolia A on Friday & Saturday. Sadly I was not able to make it over to see the crazed Blood Bowl action taking place, but everyone that I talked too said they were having a blast playing in there.

Another thing that was expanded was the Vendor area, this year there was a variety of companies there that also focused on other games rather than the GW product line. The Last Square, Armorcast, Sabol Designs & Black Sun Games just to name a few. I know I was hard pressed to not go nuts with all the cool vendors that were there! From talking to folks they were glad to see the diversity of products that were on sale.

Another highlight is the free swag that you get for attending, it had everything from Rare earth magnets to cool miniatures from folks like Mark Simms at Crusader to the figure from Avatars of War. Also in the bag was two Black Library books, one dealing with 40k & the other with WHFB. One thing that I loved was the deployment markers that Gail Force 9 donated, man I should have gotten another set!

Now last year one of the cool things that I loved was walking around and looking at the display bases that folks and clubs brought. Sadly I did not have the time to walk around and snap off pictures since I was in the Lilac room all weekend. But one thing that caught my attention was the huge 14 foot Red Orktober that Sabol Designs brought. On one side it looked like a typical Ork Hulk from Battle Fleet Gothic but in 28mm! The other side had sections of the ship so that games could be played on. It reminded me of an old Revell kit I had a s a kid of a Polaris Submarine. All weekend they had games going on inside of this beast. Along with that they had a sort of "Find this" scavenger hunt on the model. The used items from everything from Star Wars toys to household items and every time I saw this thing it had folks all around it! Here are a few pictures of the Red Orktober, First up looking from the engine side.

Here is a partial side shot.

Here is the mighty prow of the Red Orktober.

Here is a shot of the Bridge.

Here are a few other compartments of this thing.

The cool thing that you can't see is that this beast had lights all over it and looked cool! Yeah I know I am a geek Rob!

Well up next will be the Lord of the Rings Tournament that I got to play in...

TK