Saturday, 27Mar10, I attended Recruits, a twice annual wargame convention held in the Kansas City area. I carpooled on over with my friends from my weekly game group and spent most of the time with them. The event is hosted by a local high school that has a wargame club that uses the event as a fund raiser. I’ve heard these kids can even letter in gaming, which is very neat.
The man in the orange “10th Cavalry” shirt is my friend Mike. The move to war gaming is something that’s recent for me (I’m an RPG guy) and Mike is helping me to round out my army. Here he is playing Flames of War, using WWII German armor to assault into a well dug-in British mechanized unit. He had won his first game, but I didn’t get to stick around long enough to see how he fared in this one.
Here are my friends Jon and Damon during our G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. game. It’s skirmish based game with simple rules, and the setting is pretty cool. It’s a tongue-in-cheek Victorian era setting, which appeals to me greatly, and the game is based on the different factions having objectives. So it wasn’t an all out war of slaughter, and my faction, the “British Scientist” faction, hunted for a rare butterfly and assisted the “Waziri Tribesmen” in resisting the “Arab Slavers”. I caught my butterfly, but too many of the tribesmen were captured to earn my secondary goal. The other faction ally, “Tarzan and family” were tied up in a brawl with the “Russian Explorers”, and could neither help us nor stop the “Russian Trophy Hunters” from shooting all the gorillas. It was great fun!
I spent some of the time playing games with my friends and the other part walking around by myself. I am collecting my own Warhammer 40k army, but I haven’t actually played a game yet, so I wanted to see a game in action. I also wanted to check out the other players models and paint jobs. There were a couple of armies that stood out with great paint, but most of them were mixtures of paint, primer and bare plastic models. I also enjoyed checking out the other Chaos Marine players and looking at how the assembled their models. I like Chaos Marines mostly for the models and enjoy the customization aspect that they lend themselves to.
We had been tasked with keeping our friend Damon at the convention until about 1730, because his wife was arranging a surprise birthday party for him. This picture is his Pac Man cake, which had a “child related mishap” before the party started. It was a nice party, and I regret that the lighting in the house seemed to be strategically positioned to make photographs difficult to take. A lot of what would have been good pictures turned out to look like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the aliens are first coming out of the space ship, all extreme back-lighting and unrecognizable. But the food was good, the conversation was good and the times were good.
As usual, I have more pictures from the day available on my Myspace albums here. The whole day was fun, but my feet and back were more than ready for bed when I got home around 2200!
Reviresco!
Romantic Antihero™ 