WAB at Adepticon 2009

Well I finally got the WAB pictures up, now certain people (Hank Edley!) can stop bugging me about it! The first set of pictures are from the Singles event on Saturday. Oh and as a Special request (from Hank) here is a shot of Mike Hortons Celts.

Best General went to Eric Hagen, Best Painted went to Bennett Blalock Doane (Which I did not get photos of!), Best Sportsmen went to Merle Delinger & Time to Start a New Army went to Chris Southard.

Well here is a shot of just how well my dice rolling was going all weekend long. This dice actually landed like this with the one facing me, Mike Bates & I both took pictures of it!

The next shots were taken on Sunday for the Doubles event which Michael Cosentino & Don Perrin won Best Team. Best painted went to Dave Pauwels & Jamie Welling, Best Sportsmen went to Frank Brown, Sean Ramieres & Brent Sinclair (Brent had to leave Saturday night due to a basement flooding) And the I'm in Charge, no I am in charge went to Jay Luehring & Chris Southard.

All in all everyone had a blast and the WAB events and players are growing. Look forward to seeing more folks next year.

TK

Cursed Isle at Adepticon

Well Friday & Saturday night I ran a multi player game of Legends of the High Seas for a few lucky folks. Each person had seven Crewmen & one Captain and each Crew had some skills built into them already. The main objective was to reach the center of the board and escape with some of the Cursed treasure that was there.

So your probably asking what made the treasure Cursed, well it was protected by a whole village of cannibals that would pop up at random places on the board. Throw into the mix that each Crew was not allied with anyone and you had one crazy game on your hands.

A big thanks goes to Rich from Chicago Terrain Factory http://chicagoterrainfactory.wordpress.com/ he built all the terrain seen in the pictures and everyone enjoyed playing on the board. I supplied all the figures which were from Old Glory, Foundry, Crusader, Gamesworkshop and Black Cat Bases. Nice thing is that most of them were all ready painted. I just need to paint up about 40 natives for the game.

Which ever Crew got the closest to their board edge with the treasure would win 8 figures donated by Black Scorpion Miniatures http://www.blackscorpionminiatures.com/ Here are a few pictures from the event.

Next up will be the WAB Stuff I promise!
TK

Lord of the Rings Championships

Alright,

as many know, I am the guy here in Phoenix always organizing Lord of the Rings events & have now run two Gathering in the Deserts and am always trying to get people to play LotR. Well once I heard that the LotR championships would be on friday, I knew I had to play since this was my chance to get to play in an awesome event. So after talking to a few folks at this years GitD, I decided to do a themed Uruk-hai scout force following Ugluk after they capture the hobbits. Well just because I like messing with people I taunted Brent Sinclair into taking his Rohan force to see if he could do what the Rohan boys did in the second movie, wipe out the Uruk-hai. Well below is the mighty Uruk-hai lead by Ugluk on there display board which made the flight from Phoenix.



Now a good friend John Long http://azwargamer.blogspot.com/ came along with me to help with running a few Demos. Now John brought a White Hand Uruk-hai list to try out and here is his board & army.

Now before the event I took a few pictures of some of the other armies, this one is from Jeremy Williams, he did an all Dunland force going with a Viking theme. I gave him crap over how his Viking ship was flying out of the water, must have been a speed boat and how he had a budget ring wraith on board. Didn't ring wraiths hate water??? Hmm I don't know Jeremy!

Here are a few other armies I took pictures of, sorry did not get names or get along to see all of the other armies.

Anyway, with not having time for photos, the first round was announced with the tables. Now since my friend Dean Vuckovich was helping to run the event, I asked if I could get Brent & his Rohan army on the first round. Yeah I will admit it, I used my pull as an organizer to get to Brent! Here is the man, the myth & legend himself, Brent Sinclair setting up his troops. Notice the look of fear on his face? I could see he was worried to face me (that's sarcasm folks!)

Well the first scenario was called "This was the Great Watch Tower of Amon Sul" which was basically a 10 turn game to capture the center hill. Here is my mighty force ready to take on the Rohan boys!

Well I would like to go into great length how the mighty Uruk - hai smashed the proud Rohan warriors, but unfortunately I can't. It seemed that the Dice gods had other plans for me this whole weekend and I suffered a Major Defeat to Brent & his Rohan Warriors. Here are a few shots of Brent's Riders.

Now you will notice in this picture that there is one lone Uruk-hai left on the hill, it was Ugluk and he lasted the whole game. He never took anyone's head, but he was the last one standing at the end.

Oh and since Brent was not able to kill the mighty Ugluk, he was denied 3 bonus points because of it. So I like to think that Ugluk bellowed a mighty roar and slipped off into the night to fight again. Sorry Brent, but you didn't need the extra points anyway since everyone else was killed!

So after round one I was sitting with a major defeat under my belt. Game two was called "He is not Going to Last" and I thought "That must be me that will not last! Well my next opponent was Corey Sapp playing an Easterling force. Nice thing he did not have a Ring Wraith with this army.

This game used our casualty models and we had to rescue them and bring them back off our table edge. Basically Corey was new to LotR and had not played many games, so while we played I helped him out and just had a laid back game. In the end we finished as a Draw, but he had more points in models at the end and got 3 bonus points. This was a great game & I can see Corey being a solid player in the very near future.

Game three say me looking at a major Defeat & a Draw, not too bad but I wanted better. So game three was called "Your Love of the Halfling's Leaf" which was were you had to capture two objective counters in order to win. Each counter started in your Deployment zone in the corner of the board. My Opponent was Abram Krogh playing a Mordor army, now I was not too afraid until I saw his Mordor Troll! Here is Abram setting up,

and here is my deployment behind the hill.

Now the game was pretty straight forward except for my dice rolling! In one memorable fight I had two Uruk-hai scouts on a lone Orc. I roll two 1's and Abram rolls a 1 as well, great I thought, I win by Fight, I then roll two dice to wound and proceed to roll another set of 1's!!!! That's how my dice rolled all weekend long! Needless to say I was frustrated because I was doing everything right, but the dice would not roll over 3's it seemed the whole weekend. So in the end it came down to a Minor Defeat since I broke and could not get his objective, but at least he did not get mine either.

So game 4 saw me sitting pretty far down on points and I was now was in for a tough fight. As I approached the table I would be playing on I meet Josh Balke playing a Gimli list. Now I knew this list since it was a list I have run, Gimli, To Dwarfs with Two Handed Weapons, 10 Dwarfs with Axe & Shield & 1o Dwarven bowmen. Now I did not look forward to this since my Uruk-hai had been slaughtered by Keith up in Colorado only weeks before. So when I read the scenario "That Still Only Counts as One" which was a Modified Contest of Champions scenario.

This scenario had a twist to it though, you had to split your force in half and the rest came on depending on dice rolls after turn two. So I set out to try to stay away from Gimli as much as possible. Luckily for me I was able ot pick off lone dwarves that came in scattered and was able to rake up 5 kills with Ugluk, but Gimli was able to match every kill. It was during the last ten minutes that I decide to act like a Uruk - hai and Run! I was able to just stay out of reach of Gimli for the last ten minutes and the game ended in a draw. I almost picked up 3 bonus points but was not able to kill Gimli or two other dwarfs, that's all poor Josh had but he kept making his Courage tests. Unfortunately I did not take pictures of our game.

So all in all I ended with 1 Major Loss, 1 Minor Loss and 2 draws. All in all I had four great opponents and would gladly play them all again. It's something when you can do as bad as me and still have a great time. So all in all here is my scores and general placing which was 22nd out of 34 players.

Overall Score 101.00, Battle Score 32, Painting 32, Sportsmanship 25, Composition 12.00

Once again this was a great event and here are the winners:

Best Overall - Brent Sinclair, Best General - Hal Stewart, Best Army - Sean Rameriz, Best Sportsman - Josh Leong.

I highly encourage folks to go to Adepticon and play in this great event run by Jamie Welling, he does an outstanding job and has grown this event to be the largest in the United States even surpassing GW's LotR Events.

Next up WAB...

TK

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

Update Tonight

Sorry for the delay, but have been going through about 100 pictures from Adepticon as well as having to write up an article for Wargames Illustrated. So tonight when I get home I will be uploading the pictures and my experiences from Adepticon 2009. So Stay tuned...

TK

I survived..I think!

Well,

Made it back from Adepticon and I think I survived, had about 15 hours of sleep from Thursday until mid Monday morning. I met some friends and fellow blogger's (Sorry John wish I was not so "Out of it" when you came up), and hung out with some great folks all weekend long. Will do a full write up in a few days while I recover from the weekend...

TK

Adepticon, T-Minus 2 days and counting...

Well Adepticon starts for me in little less than 2 days. Thursday morning I board a plane at butt crack early time and fly to Chicago for one of, if not the largest in the USA game event run by players!

As some folks know, I will be rather busy while I am there and I thought I would list what I will be doing this coming weekend.

Thursday April 2nd

Flight leaves at 7:30am, but will be at the airport by 5:30am, so that means leaving my house by 4:30am, which also means getting up at 4:00am! On the way I will be picking up my buddy John ( http://azwargamer.blogspot.com/ ) and traveling with me on the leg out.

We arrive in Chicago around 1:00pm and our good friend Dean will be picking us up at O'Hare airport and taking us to the Westin. Dean then has to turn around and he has to pick up another friend Sean from Midway airport.

During the day we will meet up with the Adepticon crew & help set up this little thing called Adepticon! Sometime after Sean arrives the Phoenix gang (John, Sean Dean & I) are going out to catch dinner. Dean said there is a great place for some Italian beef sandwiches that I more than ready for. Will then head back to help set up and hang out.

Friday, April 3rd

John, Sean & I are all playing in the Lord of the Rings Singles Championship tourney which starts at 10:00am and goes until 6:30pm. I will be taking my Uruk-hai scouts and I think I have a pretty good feeling about them. I have gotten in about a dozen practice games now & feel pretty good about the list. So we shall see how well I do, I hope to make Arizona proud!

Right after the LotR event, I have to get everything set up for the 10 player Legends of the High Seas game that I am running. Each player will control 8 Pirates, Privateers or Royal Navy Crews with unique stats. The objective is to find the Cursed treasure that will be on the island, and to get it back to there starting point. So I had all these ideas of doing Undead pirates, crazy creatures and other cool things, but I ran out of time. Also I struggled with adding these Fantasy elements to the game. So I came up with a unique and real myth of what would cause an island to be "cursed". So if you want to know you will need to either watch the game or wait until I get back on Monday with full coverage!

Any how, this game will last until about 10:00pm but could go longer. Then off to bed to get ready for the next day.

Saturday April 4

Well I am up early again to get the Warhammer Ancients Battle Singles event going by 8:00am. It looks like we will have about 12+ players and this will last until 5:00pm, and we are also playing only three rounds similar to what I did last year. While I am busy doing this all day, John gets to run a few Legends of the High Seas & Old West Demos throughout the day. Then come 6:30 again I have the second game of LotHS group game until 10:00pm or so.

Sunday April 5

Up again early although the WAB Doubles event starts at 7:00am! Three rounds with about 6 teams right now. This ends at 4:00pm and then Adepticon starts winding down & tearing down after 5:00pm I think. Sunday night the Adepticon Crew usually goes out to dinner to unwind, and this year my good buddy Hank Eddley will be covering my dinner! He was going to last year but forgot, so we will see this year.

Monday April 6

Get to the airport early again & fly back home, I think I leave around 7:30am and get to Phoenix around 9:30am. John though has to catch a later flight around 2:00pm, so depending on if I am awake I may go pick him up from the airport, but we will see.

So there you have it, a busy weekend ahead, and after last weeks news, I will need this weekend. Once again I will have coverage from the event here in the coming weeks, so stay tuned...

TK

A Sign of the Times

Okay,

No hobby update today, just some depressing news in a way. Yesterday my office was told we are closing down on July 31, 2009 & everyone, I mean everyone is being let go. Now I work for Semperian which was formerly GMAC Auto Finance. It seems that this economy is taking a toll on the auto industry (well duh!) and Semperian has decided to shut our office down because of it. Not only is our office closing but so is our High Risk collection center here in Phoenix as well as our Hartford Connecticut office.

Now I have been through this before about 3 years ago and surprising I don't feel that bad. In fact I have been being more disgruntled at how the company has been doing things of late. So this closing is actually looking like a good thing. It looks like I will be getting about a 4 month severance package which is better than nothing. Its just sad that there will be a lot of folks loosing out more than me. I have a friend that just needed to make it to the end of the year in order to be able to retire with age & years of service and she will not get anything!

So while it may look like a terrible thing me loosing my job, I have complete trust that God will provide, he has to this point why would he not for the rest? So we shall see what happens, I will continue to work on my Hobby, in fact I may go into the Army painting business, heck I only charge my friends $3.00 per figure, but we will see.

Oh and I am still going to Adepticon, that has already been budgeted and paid for, so I will be looking forward to next weekends gaming extravaganza!

TK