This year, yet again, my plans for the scratch-built Trains,
Planes and Sky Galleons went sour again. The good thing is that I
did get the armored train and some track sections
finished. Unfortunately, the scratch-built sky galleons went
nowhere... maybe next year.
Fortunately, I realized this early enough and decided to go for something else instead. Moomin trolls were a cool idea! Yes... Ok, so I went to the Official Moomin World to obtain gaming materials and research. Honest!
To ease the pain of transporting the stuff to the Con and back, I
decided to go for a microscale game this time. Besides, 1/300 is the
only scale I could readily obtain landing craft in... Many thanks to
Spirit Games for getting
the stuff for me. The landing craft, planes and infantry figures came
from the Heroics & Ros line. Now, some players scoff at H&R...
yes, the quality is not CinC or GHQ but neither is the price. In my
opinion, they make fine gaming pieces and the occasional miscast you
can mangle into a wreck figure without feeling too bad about it... and
I actually find their infantry more usable than the stiff parade
ground poses CinC offers. Though the stuff from
Hallmark
figures looks good. I need to order some...
Sooo, what was the game about? Why, an American invasion of the
Moomin Valley of course! To stiffen the Moomin defenders, I added a
small German Fallschirmjägerpiratengruppe, complete with a
nearly in-scale sailing ship (I tried to get a destroyer in 1/300 but that
proved to be impossible. Fortunately I had a half-finished 1/350 period
sailing ship lying about...) A couple of 88's spice up anything...
Preparing all the stuff took a little longer than I had planned for. It was Friday night and the Con had already started (at least in theory -- in practice very little of interest happens Friday night) when I started to consider which rules set I should use.
Now, when it comes to convention miniatures games in Finland, there are about three choices for rules:
That Friday night.
In about three hours, total, including unit stats.
And it showed... well, I'm not too proud of the achievement, but
the rules worked reasonably well for the couple of games we managed.
I'm not going to post these rules, they have serious bugs and they're
not fully worded out. On the other hand, the basic rules fit on two A4
sheets without even trying to cram them. Maybe there's something to work
with there...
I set up the game Saturday morning. Miraculously, and for the
first time in convention history, my name does appear on the
worker list the doormen have. Instantly I attract some attention,
which is good. A couple of players are drafted into the first game,
and several others hang by and watch the game.
In the first game American cultural imperialism is repulsed. The American player woves to return. I close shop, have some lunch and go see the guests of honor. This year they had Richard Dansky, formerly of White Wolf. While I have no love for WW, Dansky was actually quite ok. A sad example of gifted people drifting to the computer games industry simply because they like to eat and pay the rent...
The other guest of honor was none other than
Steve Jackson of
Texas himself. Steve was a disappointment, I'm afraid. I remember the
last time he was here, when RoPeCon was just starting and basically
Steve saved the day. He was involved, interesting and spoke on various
subjects.
Not so this time around. All we got was 90 minutes of product promotion and Q&A. I don't know why, but he never seemed to get into anything. Questions were answered as tersely as possible, and lacking questions (Finnish audiences are like that) he just packed up and left.
But I digress. Back to the miniatures event.
After the speeches, I re-set everything for another game. The
American player from the first game really did come back and wanted to
play the Moomin-German coalition. A new player took up the invasion
fleet. This time, after lengthy play, the bugs in the system started
to surface and we called it quits. The Americans were leading and
probably would have won if we had played it out.
Pack up everything and go home. Unfortunately it is not possible to leave the miniatures equipment just lying there, and given the amount of work involved in packing up, transporting the stuff, unpacking again and setting up, I pretty much decided against doing it again on Sunday.
I did show up on Sunday, briefly to check the situation, but the
convention was already dead and smelled the part, so I quickly
left. Now this brings up an interesting question: Since nothing much
happens on Friday night and a large percentage of convention goers are
seriously lacking sleep and showers on Sunday, why would any sane
person bother to purchase a full 3-day pass?
First, the game itself. I used the "playing card initiative" method I've grown to like, but while it did draw positive comments, it didn't really work at this scale. I'm thinking of other variants to try out...
The combat system wasn't quite what I hoped for, but neither was it totally hopeless. Probably due for a complete overhaul, though.
Problem points:
Interesting thing about the miniatures was that it seemed a totally alien concept to many spectators that you might have miniatures that were not directly tied to any particular game line. Shows how deep the GW indoctrination runs...
Now, the interesting question is: Would I do it again? Well,
frankly, it wasn't as much fun as it used to be. I spent 8 hours
running the games, plus maybe 60 hours in setup. For this, I got a
free pass. As a comparison, if I had charged for those hours what I
would charge a client, I'd have covered maybe 20% of the entire
convention budget. Obviously I'm not doing this for the financial lure of
a free ticket.
I'm doing it because it is fun. At least it used to be.
The good thing about these projects is that it forces me to finish painting stuff against a deadline, instead of the endless procrastination I'm prone to.
But the hassle factor is substantial. Unless the convention organizers can provide a lockable and/or constantly supervised gaming area, next year I'm going for a simple one-day event only.
Maybe some sort of non-stop, come-as-you-are game...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Copyright 2003-2021 Mikko Kurki-Suonio
Sucks!
