Spartacon XXIV The "Why Doesn't Anyone Have A Con In The Winter" Con

Our gaming group went to this con last weekend that takes place at the Lansing Center in downtown Lansing, what a coincidence. If you have never gone, you will not be disappointed.



http://home.comcast.net/~spartacon/site/

A few highlights of the day:

Jim Wonacott who is one of our gaming group. He was coming to my house and I was driving up. I was sitting in my front room, in more gentile times, it would be called the parlor. I was not paying attention because I had my nose in my Kindle tm. I hear all this swearing coming from my driveway. I start to laugh, I know what Jim has done, because I had done the same thing when I put my car in the street. . It had been raining and we had a lot of snow in the past few days. The driveway approach was a small ice filled lake and he stepped into the a fore mentioned lake. We transfer his miniatures, rules and terrain to my car.   We then go get Ted Bender to pick up his items. They are running a Bolt Action game in the afternoon session. The drive there was a bit dicey for about half the trip. With all the snow and warming temperatures, there was a lot of fog.



We park and get out of the car and we are hit with an odd smell or actually a stink. It has an odd bouquet and I really cannot place it, but I know it has a familiar odor. We get upstairs and then I realize, the convention is sharing the space with the Shriners Circus. The odor that we smell is elephant shit and tiger piss. I now know why they sell stinky greasy food at the circus, it covers the smell of elephant shit and tiger piss. As soon as they started cooking that food, the peculiar bouquet disappeared.



The first game we played in was a French and Indian war game, it is not listed. The game was a substitute for another game that was canceled. It was run by Mark and I have to apologize to Mark, but I cannot remember his last name. It was pretty good game, rules were a mix of Johnny Reb (of which I am not a fan of) and Empire. It was a solid game, Jim, Ted , Gene Zoll(one of our group I had not mentioned yet) and I all had a blast. The Americans won, as it should be. I am biased, I played Roger Rangers.

The afternoon session, Jim and Ted were running their Bolt Action game featuring Marines vs. Japanese.

Here is a link to some photos of the play test.

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/33016873@N06/sets/72157638261745303/

There are also some photos of Ted's latest projects.  He is a machine when it comes to painting.



The game was very well received and as I checked in occasionally, a good time was had by all.

 I played in a Check Your Six game. I am a big fan of the rule set and I have a couple of hundred planes, both WWII and modern.  It was run by Dave Winfree the proprietor of I-94 Enterprises. He ran a scenario featuring the actions of James H. Howard.

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/jhoward.htm



It was seventy years ago to the day that he was awarded The Medal of Honor for his actions on January 11, 1944. I flew a couple of Bf-109s and I got a half of a B-17 . The two 109s that I was flying had to disengage because of damage. That was pretty much the typical effort put out by the Luftwaffe that day. It was an American victory.

Then we always go and eat at a restaurant across the street.
I want to thank all the guys that make Spartacon a great convention. I know it is a lot of work and it is much appreciated.

Here is a link to more photos of the convention.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33016873@N06/sets/72157639915583964/


Thank You for reading,



Mike

World Of Tanks Match Maker IS broken.

     I am not going to start this post whining about this or that with WOT match-making (MM) enough of that goes on in matches.  I do think that World of Tanks match making has some definite issues.  I  want to state that I am not a programer nor do I want to be, just the thought of that as a job makes my eyes water and my skin itch.

     I played a game recently and the opposing team had 13 tier X tanks or artillery.  They also had one tier VII tank and a tier VI scout.

    Our team  had 11 tier X tanks or artillery.  We also had 3 tier VII  tanks and one tier VI scout.

     Now I am going to rant a little bit about  the match maker.  My first question is, Was it national tier IX day off?  WOT MM could not have found some tier IXs?  I guess they keep important information like that from the tier VIIs,   I am sure the tier  IXs  are saying, "it is so fun to see the tier VIIs disappointed faces when they see all the tier Xs."   In all seriousness I am going to state this again, WOT MM could not find any tier IXs?  I know MM has come along way.  I know when I was first playing world of tanks, the MM was worse.  I just want it to get even better.

     Is this going to stop me from playing WOT, no.  Does it make certain matches less than enjoyable, yes it does. 

Thank You for reading.

Mike



    

World of Tanks Fail Team

I was playing this game on a wireless keyboard.  The batteries failed at the beginning of an assault game on Siegfried Line and I was defending.  As a side note, never trust a wireless keyboard.  I have taken care of that keyboard, it is now singing with the choir invisible.   So back to the main thrust of this story, I can only move my turret and fire my gun.  I am basically a pillbox sitting in the middle of the spawn point.  So here is the end plate, to be fair the the players on my team that scored higher did what they could, however there are many people on my team that were not so good.  It is sad that I got the third  highest score and I could not move an inch

Sometimes I hate this game.

Thank you for reading.

Mike

Drums at the Rapids

I have the pleasure of playing at this convention every year.  It takes place at Fort Meigs historical site.  It takes place in the visitors center.

Drums has a wide variety of games offered and it is pretty neat to look out the windows and look onto a Fort.  I am not going to post every photo I took, but here is a link to my set on Flickr dedicated to  this years Drums.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33016873@N06/sets/72157633532851732/

I played in two games, the first was a CY6 Jet Age game run by Dan Joyce.  It was India vs. Pakistan and I was on the Indian side.  Let us say that India did not do herself proud on that day.  Dan always puts on a great game.  I always play in his CY6 games.

The final game was a Black Powder Game run by Ted Bender.  It was a war of Spanish Succession, French vs. British.  All the figures were painted by Ted.  I am going to talk about Ted's ability to paint, it makes me sick.  He can paint a 16 man unit in about three hours, that is 13 minutes per figure. They are very well painted too and did I mention that it makes me sick.  In all seriousness it is great to play with such well painted figures.  He also does a lot of commission work .

Now everyone has a weakness, I mean Superman has Kryptonite and all.  Ted has a weakness too, it is dice, they are not his friend at all.  Ted has been known to destroy whole divisions with his poor dice rolling, never mind the divisions are his own. Up until this point, Teds dice were hot, I knew this could not keep up.  In fact in our group, we call poor dice rolling by anybody as "Ted Dice".  Here is an example of Ted's poor dice rolling.   Ted gave orders that his unit should move up and deploy in line.  Ted's first mistake was not to deploy in line and then advance, but I digress.  Ted's second mistake was that he assumed he would get two actions from his order dice roll.  He only received one command, so the unit advanced in column. The following photo is my subsequent turn, I charged into his infantry in column and he could not disengage.  That flanked crumpled in two more turns.  The British were victorious.

In closing if you are in Northwest Ohio in May, check out a great convention.

Thank you for reading and good gaming.


Mike

Khurasan Miniatures' 28mm Federal Army finally painted

Here are some photos of the finished miniatures.  I want to emphasis that I am an average painter at best and not very good at basing.  I also included a couple of photos for comparison of the GZG Japanese Mercenaries  and the Khurasan miniatures. There was a request for that.

Thank you for reading and good gaming.


Mike

Music to paint miniatures by.

I know on many occasions I have seen posts on various forums that ask these two questions, "What music do you listen to when you paint miniatures?"  The other question is, " Any suggestions on what music I should listen to?" 

I generally listen to martial music.  I have made several CDs, here are some of the pieces that are on my CDs

Panzerlied

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEIm3pe5wbA

Erika

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc-DgRO1SrQ

Garry Owen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaaBN4Mm0Ok

The above are on a WWII disc, I have several others, one for Napoleonic marches and another with American Civil War music.  I was painting to my WWII disc and it occured to me that I might be able to listen to more music than I have on these discs. 

I have free versions of Spotify .  I have it on my computer, Kindle and i-Phone. It is a downloadable program that has hundreds of thousands of musical pieces from Heavy Metal to Baroque. The other nice thing is that the artists receive royalties.  One has the capability to create radio stations by artist or song.  It occurred to me that I might have an endless supply of  martial music, I was right.  I do not know if anyone else uses Spotify this way, but I do now.

Thank You for Reading and good gameing.

Mike

Khurasan Miniatures' 28mm Federal Army

In a previous post I mentioned that our group was going to start a RPG campaign using Battlelords of the 23rd Century.  I was in need of some 28mm bad/good guys that I could use for the group to fight against.  The reason I stated bad/good, is that I get to play them as NPCs.  Hence the good and I am sure the group will not like them, so the bad reference.  I was looking for some specific attributes and even asked the question on The Miniature Page where I could find some miniatures that would fit my criteria.

http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=302241

I got a lot of suggestions, but low and behold there was a article in the "Hobby News" on The Miniature Page and these miniatures were what I was looking for.

http://theminiaturespage.com/news/1572166703/

They are the Federal Army range produced by Khurasan miniatures.  I liked the poses, I liked the equipment and I especially liked the price.  So I ordered them the evening of May 1st and they arrived May 6th.  I was very pleased with the turn around.  I presume it is a very small company or even a one man show.  They were all well packed, virtually flash free and free of mold lines.  The only thing I had to do to prep them was a few guns had flash at the end of the muzzles and I had to trim a little flash off the base to let them stand flat.  I am glad, because prepping a miniature is one of the aspects of this hobby that I loathe.

They are now primed, sorry for the photo is not very good. I always prime in black.  The reason for this, I used to use white.  Of course when I was painting and then saw white where white should not be. Of course I missed a spot and I am sure you all have never done that.  Now if I miss a spot and black is showing, it looks like shadow.

  I did not realize that it was poor or I would have taken a better one.  It is too late now to take another photo, because I have given them their first coat of paint.

I will make periodic updates on the progress of the painting and basing.  I do not know how much painting I will get done in the next two weeks.  This week I am moving my Mother into different living arrangments.  And the next weekend I have to move my daughter back from her apartment at CMU.

Thank you for reading and good gaming.


Mike