A little X-Wing on Labor Day

Greetings once again InterWebs!!! It has been a crazy time lately here in Colorado, my health battles continue with another surgery looming on Thursday this week. I am finding it hard to spend anytime at the painting desk lately but I did manage to sneak in a game of X-Wing over the long Holiday weekend. My buddy Joel and I have played a few games of X-Wing in the past but we had always gone very basic and used just the quick start rules; this time around we both wanted to try the 'full' game with all the added upgrades and rules. I must say the game of X-Wing is awesome, especially with all the added equipment, pilot upgrades, droids, etc. I took a few pictures during the game and here they are:

Me in my special Imperial Academy T-Shirt. I thought it would help but alas it did not....

The Space Map from Maps of Mystery. I have always found his maps to be awesome and love the fact that they fold up and store really well. The maps are double-sided and roughly 2' by 3'. 

The forces of the 'good' guys (Ha!).....the Empire!!! It being the first time we used all of the special cards it was interesting to choose which ships to take with what upgrades. I went with 2 named Tie Fighters, a basic Tie Interceptor, and a named and loaded out Tie Bomber. 

The 'bad' guys, i.e. the Rebels choose to attack the Empire with a couple of Rogue Squadron X-Wings, a rookie Y-Wing, and an A-Wing.

 Boo! The evil Rebel Scum.

Yay!! The Forces of Righteousness!

During the game I kept running into some difficulties that may have been caused by my Chemo treatments, I kept forgetting to use 'action tokens' and the first turn I had a complete 'brain fart' with the Tie Interceptor's movement. Yes the Tie Interceptor is facing completely backwards.

The game continued on with the Rebels gaining the upper hand fairly early on despite their ships hitting every single asteroid at least once.

At the end of the day the Rebel Scum managed to drive off the forces of the Empire killing all but a lone Tie Fighter who flew back to report the Rebel presence in the area. I LOVE Star Wars gaming in all forms and I really enjoy how X-Wing captures the look and feel of spaceship dogfighting in Star Wars. I have to really work out a way to use this game when I run Star Wars Role Playing Games (I have written over 15 SWRPG modules) as I think it really captures the experience. 

I can see how involved list building can get with this game and I am sure there is all sorts of Synergy between certain cards/ships and other cards/ships. I am just a casual player but I am sure there are those out there that really get in depth with their lists. For now I will just enjoy the game and leave the competitive side to others. Thanks for stopping by and taking a look! Take care!

GenCon 2013: Phat Loot

Greetings once again InterWebs!!!!! It is time to wrap up my coverage of GenCon 2013 with a brief look at some of the stuff I brought home from the convention. One of my main reasons for attending GenCon every year is to visit the Dealer's Exhibit Hall. I try to prepare my wallet for the experience every year but every year my wallet feels the pain. Oh so many shiny gaming things I never knew about but must have! There are a couple of Vendors that I look for every year and at this point they recognize me and we have a nice little chat while I am at their booth. I did purchase a few items not shown here that were gifts which have already gone to their new homes. Here is what I ended up with:


The Forgeworld booth (Mk2b Land Raider, Salamander Dred, Sevrin Loth Librarian in Mk IV armor):

Black Library Booth (getting ready for Heresy Salamanders):

The Shadowrun Booth after the 100 minute wait in line (not shown are a Rulebook and card sets):

The Mercs Minis Booth which had all sorts of new stuff (and awesome people to help me):

Above you will see the new FCC House 4 minis, Mercs Token Set (much needed), 7th Member Printed Cards (much needed), and the special GenCon only release of the Texico Eagle Assault Trooper. The GenCon only version of the Texico Eagle has clear resin smoke from his jetpack which is a cool look. All in all I spent about 45 minutes talking with the Mercs folks and of course spending money, funny how nice people can get when they want your money.

I also made it to the Wargames Factory Booth and spent some time talking with the nice folks there. A few years ago I found out that they have a headquarters in a small town not to far from here making us practically neighbors. On top of the local company side of things they are really nice people so I had to stop by and see what new things they had to offer me..........Apocalypse Survivors!!!!

 30 male and 30 female survivors for $18.00 each box, what a deal!

I had a chance to attend Tracy and Laura Hickman's Killer Breakfast and was actually awarded a prize in a random drawing (a little more involved than that, there was a game show and this was the prize) which was an autographed copy of Tracy Hickman's new novel 'Wayne of Gotham':

I stopped by another of my favorite/must see booths which happens to be a Gaming Map Dealer named Maps of Mystery. There is a running joke with my friends that I have a Map buying compulsion which I most certainly do not have! I do love gaming maps though and figure you can never have enough but I could stop buying maps at anytime.......

You will notice in the above picture I managed to pick up a copy of the Infinity Quick Start Rules. I picked these up during a painting class I took which was sponsored by the Infinity game. The painting class was interesting, basically I learned that I am painting in the correct way after all I just need to practice a bit more.

Finally my good friend Mordian 7th picked up the new phase 3 releases for X-Wing from Fantasy Flight Games. That was an awesome gesture which will make our X-Wing games even more fun! Thanks Mordian 7th!

That is the lot, not to bad after all and I somehow managed to fit it all in the luggage coming home. I am looking forward to reading the Heresy Salamander books and trying out the new ships in X-Wing. The Mercs Mini stuff (7th member cards and tokens) will be a huge help in future games. The Apocalypse Survivors will be used as part of a Christmas Gift for a very good friend that is in love with Zombie Survivor games but doesn't have any survivor miniatures to use. Thanks for stopping by and taking a look! Take care!

Origins 2013---A Recap of my Miniature Experiences

Greetings once again InterWebs!!!! Well I am finally back from Columbus, Ohio and the Origins Game Fair where I met up with a bunch of friends who happen to be scattered all over the States. Good times was had by all and I even got to help a good friend propose to his now-fiance! I did manage to snap some pictures while I was there:

First off, especially for Mordian 7th who I know is eagerly awaiting the arrival of OGRE!

The above picture (taken with my phone) is of the special charity game of Ogre with Steve Jackson himself.

 That box is huge!

For me Origins is spent wandering around the various halls and playing roleplaying games with friends. Here are a few random tables that caught my eye during my wanders:

A version of X-Wing played with Star Trek ships instead and played on the floor!

 Note the chair in the picture below, it should give you a sense of scale:

I am not sure what game this was for but it was very cool looking!

 Look at all those rope ladders!

There was a huge game of X-Wing being played across several large tables. The game looked to be the Rebel assault into the Second Death Star. There were a ton of people around this game but I tried to sneak some pictures.

 

 
 There was a neat looking game of BattleTech being played as well:

There was a massive Flames of War landing assault game that needed 4 very long tables to play it all out. It was quite impressive!

The very popular BattleTech Virtual Reality Pods! I so want to try these some day with a group of friends!

For my better-half! A huge Settlers of Catan game played on the floor:

An awesome looking table full of gorgeous 15mm American Civil War miniatures and terrain.

That was a look at the miniature side of Origins 2013. I will talk about my roleplaying experiences and my purchases/loot in the next post. Thanks for stopping by and taking a look through all these pictures. Take care!

May the 4th be with you-----X Wing first impressions

Greetings once again InterWebs!!!! It is May the 4th and several of my friends stopped by to try out the newish game from Fantasy Flight Games called X-Wing, we decided to give this game a try in celebration of May the 4th being the unofficial 'Star Wars Day'. X-Wing is a game of starfighter dog-fighting/ship-to-ship combat which we found really enjoyable.

The first thing to do was assemble the ship models. The models come prepainted and only require attaching to their bases. The whole process did not take long at all and was kind of fun:

The group of friends (including the tall Mordian 7th) getting ready to start the fun:

Some game play pictures (note that Star Wars: A New Hope was playing!):

The super nimble X-Wing rolling 3 'evasion' results to avoid the Imperial firepower:

Movement and turns are measured with special templates:

Mid-space collision!

After getting a few basic games in to learn the rules we all decided to try a team battle which would use the awesome looking YT-1300 model and asteroids!

The YT-1300 model is in scale with the rest of the ships making it look big and impressive!

All in all it was a great time and everyone agreed that X-Wing was a game we were looking forward to playing again soon! The game seems simple and fun but has a ton of tactical possibilities that will keep the game from getting stale/old. The best part of X-Wing was the games went quick (about 20-40 minutes) allowing the group of us to get several games in during the course of a few hours. I will be looking at making some 3D asteroids and other 'space debris' as well as looking into getting some nice outer space/nebula/Death Star maps to play on which should really look awesome! Thanks again for stopping by and taking a look! Take care and May The Force Be With You Always!