Spartacon 2016 Report

     I attended another Spartacon this year.  It is a convention that I never miss and we have driven in some really crappy weather to even get to the Lansing Civic Center where it is held. 
     I played in a Force on Force game hosted by Chris Maes in the first session. I love this game.  It is a small unit game.  When one uses sound tactics, they are rewarded.  And when one uses poor tactics, they will generally get one in a world of shit.  This the second game of Force on Force hosted by Chris that I have played in.  The first was last year.   He runs a very good game.
     The scenario was as follows; The French went into an Afghan village and got themselves in a world of hurt.  The French begin the game with wounded troopers,   I played part of the French team and let me say the words merde and foutre were ringing out all over the valley.  It was a very hard game for the French to win. I am not saying it was not possible to win, but many things had to go right for the French, Afghan Allies and Americans and it did not.  An example of this, one of the mechanics in Force on Force is when one is rolling for initiative to see who fires first.  If a one is rolled by either player, a Fog of War card is drawn.  I believe eight or nine Fog of War cards were drawn and only two were beneficial to our side.  The Afghan side got reinforcements on several occasions and one card gave an Afghan unit better stats.  Ultimately the French took it in  les sous-vêtement.

The Commander is the figure on the left with white Kepi.

American Special Forces

The Second session had two Bolt Action games.  The first set of photos are of a Japanese vs. Marines run by Jim Wonnacott.  At the end of the game there was a lot of Japanese players yelling Banzai.  My guess is that the Marines did not win.

Apparently a Life magazine photographer was taking photos of the game.  He did not take any photos of the Japanese.  I am sorry about that.
     The second Bolt Action Game was a D Day game.  Basically there were three different battles going on.  One was regular Ally troops attacking Wehrmacht troops.  The middle part of the table was British paras fighting ze Germans over a town.  The last bit of the battle were British Paras on the defensive fight against ze Germans again.

This was a game of Ancients.  It was a homebrew ruleset and it was Normans vs Byzantines.  I heard a lot of positive feed back from this game.

This is a Flames of War Italians vs, Commonwealth Troops in the desert.  It was a nice table and the miniatures were painted very well.

The photos below are of Russian and Japanese, I believe it was Tsushima.  I have no idea of the scale or if these are commercial miniatures. 

 
 This is a game of French retreat from Moscow.  They were home brew rules with very well painted miniatures.

Napoleon is in the middle

 There were two Check Your 6 games, I only managed to get photos of the second session game.  It was run by Dave Winfree of I-94 fame.

I did not take a photo of what battle this was, another oops.  This game of Regimental Fire and Fury was run by Lowell Hamilton.  

The last photos are other games that I did not get specific info on.

In closing I want to thank all those people that made Spartacon possible.  It is a very good convention.

Thanks for reading.

Mike