Mantic Open day.

Well, it's taken me a while to get round to writing this post considering the Mantic Open day was back on the 11th of May. But don't worry about it too much as I have lots of pretty pictures to show you (and a couple of my friend Richard too).
Mantic, for those of you that don't know, are a wargames company. They currently have three games out, Warpath, a 28mm science fiction tabletop wargame, Kings Of War, a 28mm fantasy tabletop Wargame, and DreadBall, a sci-fi sportsgame, also with 28mm figures. (There is also the forthcoming Deadzone, a sci-fi skirmisher set in the Warpath universe, the Kickstarter of which has just finished. More on that later.) It was DreadBall that took me to the open day as there was to be the first ever Mantic Bowl.

This was the set up for the first of my four DreadBall games of the day. My team, the Plecostomus Knights (in grey and purple) faced off against my best friend Richard's team, Beer Money.

Here he is also taking a picture of the set up. Now I had only ever beaten Richard once, at another tournament. It wasn't a great victory as he was attempting to gain the "Most Violent Team" award and was forsaking scoring for beating up his opponent's teams. It was an award that he did indeed get that day. At the end of the game pictured, I had lost by a landslide. Richard scored seven points in a very short time. In fact, we were the first pair to finish.

In my second game of the day I played against the only female coach in the tournament. I was lucky to win that game by a landslide. I had lost my first game but after winning this one, it meant that I might not be placed very low in the eventual rankings for the tournament.

In my third and fourth games, I was drawn against the same coach. He had a very nicely painted robot team. This is them in the above picture at the start of my third game. In DreadBall, each player usually fulfills one of three roles, striker, jack or guard. The coach of a robot team can spend an action to shift the role of a player from one to another, thus changing what it is able to do on the pitch. As all the models in a DreadBall team have to be numbered and there are different models for each role, a coach of a robot team could end up buying several packs of models. Quite a few coaches, including my opponent, have gotten around this by gluing magnets to the bases of their models then sticking player numbers to those magnets which can then be removed and stuck onto a different model of an appropriate type when that player's role changes. A few have even done what my opponent had and written the numbers in binary. A very nice touch I thought.
This third game was very to-and-fro, with neither of us really gaining the upper hand for most of it. One of us would score followed by our opponent pulling the points back his way. We ran out of time to complete all the rushes of the game. There was one rush left at the end and it was my turn. I was ahead in points, only needing three more for a landslide victory. I was confident that I would have gotten it if only I had had two minutes more to complete the rush. Thwarted.
My fourth and final game in the tournament as I have already mentioned was against the same coach. Somehow, this time, I managed to get a landslide victory quite early on.

Other than the Mantic Bowl, there were several other things going on. There was a huge Warpath game, a shop, previews of forthcoming models, alpha-testing of Deadzone and the above pictured massive game of Kings Of War.

Talking of Kings Of War and previews of unreleased models, her is a picture of a trio of werewolves. These creatures will become part of the undead army for the game.

And these models at the front in blue seem to be a type of nun flagellant. They are for the as yet unreleased human army for Kings Of War. On the right in the same colours are Human knights.

Keeping on with the Kings Of War previews for the moment, this steam-powered, choppy, grindy wagon thingy is to be crewed by goblins for the greenskins army. It reminds me of the thing that chased Sarah through a tunnel in Labyrinth.

More previews? Why not? These guys are the Terratons, a Season Three team for DreadBall. They are based on Ankylosaurus, which happen to be my favorite dinosaurs.

One more from the display cabinet now. This guy is from the Rebs faction for Deadzone.

And talking of which...

This is a second generation for the Plague faction. This and the next two pictures are from the lovely looking Deadzone diorama the Mantic had provided for us to dribble over.

This fellow here is an Enforcer, one of the Co-Prosperity Sphere's finest soldiers.

Two Enforcers take cover behind a barricade while their captain strides towards a first generation and three third generations from the Plague faction.

After a fairly tiring day (we'd had to get up around 4am to get the train to Nottingham), Richard and I had to decide what we were going to do for dinner. Being in Nottingham, we thought, "Why not go to Warhammer World?"
The restaurant wasn't open to the general public (it had been set up as a buffet for players of a Warhammer tournament that was happening in the gaming hall) so we got food in Bugmans, Warhammer World's dwarf themed pub.

In the carpark at Warhammer World, they have a lifesize Rhino APC. Apparently, it even drives. Very cool.

And they have huge Imperial Aquilla on a couple of their buildings.

After a hard day geeking out, Richard falls asleep on the train home.

TableTop Day at Tabletop Nation.

I'll start by saying that I intended to write this post a couple of weeks ago, a day or two after Tabletop Day itself. However, due to a technology failure (my phone's micro SD card going kaput), I had lost most of the pictures and all of the video that I took on the day. These included some stills of great looking gaming tables, and a video of an absolutely beautiful 4' X 4' Carnivale table. I did though manage to retrieve, from my phone's messages folder, the pictures that I had been sending to friends throughout the day. (For those, see below with details of exactly what they are.)

For those that don't know, Tabletop Day was an international event on March 30th 2013 created by Geek And Sundry which commemorated the first anniversary of their You Tube show TableTop, presented by Will Wheaton.  It was also supported and promoted by geek queen Felicia Day. It was to promote tabletop gaming in all it's forms. Here's a link that explains much more accurately and succinctly than I, what it was all about. http://www.tabletopday.com/index.php/about
The idea was quickly taken up by the gaming community with events happening all over the world.

And where better to go than to Tabletop Nation to help celebrate and play a few games.


I will now go back to the aforementioned game, Carnivale. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to get an intro game of this skirmisher set in a post-cataclysm Venice in 1793. In the setting, most of Italy has been swallowed up by a risen Mediterranean Sea and Venice itself sits on the northern edge of a great magical rent in the sky.
There are four factions to play. These are:

The Patricians, the corrupt, decadent rulers of the city;

The Guild, thieves and roughians;

The Rashaar, sea monsters;

And The Ospedale, madmen and the doctors that keep them.

There are also The Gifted, independent special characters such as The Abomination and Harlequin.

My favourite of the four factions is The Ospedal. The doctors of which use their madmen charges as psychic batteries to power their arcane weapons. And they can get a rhino, what's not to love about that.

I took the five pictures above at a previous visit to Tabletop Nation. The models in them are the actual ones that appear in the Carnivale rulebook. Neat huh?

Here's a link to the official Carnivale site: http://vesper-on.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=6&Itemid=12&lang=en


The game that I played most at TTN on TableTop Day (and invested in) was X-Wing from Fantasy Flight Games.
I had heard that it was based on the Wings Of War games system. I have an old copy of Wings Of War from before it was re-released with lovely little aircraft models. The planes in my version of the game are simply pictures on cards. If my version of Wings Of War was version 1.0, then I'd describe X-Wing as Wings Of War version 3.0 but in space and Star Wars. An idea that is shared by a friend that I introduced to the game shortly after the 30th.
As with most stuff from Fantasy Flight, the quality of the models and components are first class. The litle X-Wings and TIE's, not to mention the Millennium Falcon are a joy.

Here are some pics: Unfortunately, the gaming mat makes it a little hard to see the models in the first two.

Luke Skywalker and Biggs Darklighter engage two TIE Fighters while Darth Vader in his TIE Advance lurks in the background.

A lone surviving X-wing and the Falcon take on a squadron of TIEs and Slave 1.

If you need to ask what this is...Well shame on you.

The rules are really simple but fun. The game plays quickly and smoothly. There are various pilots that you can assign to each ship which change their abilities and points costs along with upgrade cards to give you an edge. And there are custom dice...I love custom dice.
I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a Y-Wing, A-Wing, X-Wing expansion pack (which comes with, I'm informed, a Wedge Antilles pilot card) and a TIE Interceptor. Hopefully I'll be able to pick them up at Salute (Europe's biggest wargames fair) on Saturday 20th of April, as they were out of stock at Wayland Games (who share space with Tabletop Nation) on TableTop Day.


I want to make a clarification to something that I posted earlier on this blog. I had stated, that in the DreadBall tournaments that I attended earlier this year, I narrowly missed out on qualifying for the SuperBall (national championship). It turns out that I missed it by a much wider margin than I thought, as the events were not actually qualifiers for the SuperBall. Still a lot of fun though.

What I beleive was wrong with the ending of the Watchmen movie.

Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' masterpiece is my favorite graphic novel of all time. And I have read a lot of graphic novels by some truly great writers and artists. With this in mind, you might be forgiven in thinking that no matter how good the film was, that it would never be good enough for me. You'd be wrong. Going into the cinema, I was willing and happy to find that in a couple of hours time I had a new favourite film. It didn't happen. It really didn't.

Okay, now, spoiler alert. If you havn't read the graphic novel, don't read on. If you havn't seen the film, don't. Read the graphic novel instead.

In Watchmen, the world is on the brink of nuclear war. Ozymandias, the worlds most intelligent man, comes up with a plan to avert this. Along with a group of scientists and artists (who he later kills to keep the secret), he creates a giant "extra-dimensional" being which, when it materialises in New York City, kills off the city's entire population with it's psychic "death" scream. With the perceived threat of a very dangerous and powerful potential enemy from somewhere other that Earth, the planets population will hopefully unite, their previous squabbles paling in comparison.

In the movie, the psychic alien is completely written out. Instead, the threat to the world come from faked (by Ozymandias) manifestations of the ever increasing power of Dr. Manhattan, one of the former Watchmen. The problem with that ending is this. In the original, the countries of the world can unite against a common enemy. Dr. Manhattan however, is not only an American but an American soldier. His powers being an american asset have  further pushed the world toward mutually assured destruction. Seeing a greater destructive threat coming from that source would further galvanise America's allies and may even gain it new ones. The world would be even more divided that before it had happened. Somehow in the movie, the human race unites instead of being further pushed apart which is the effect that I believe the manifestations would have had on the psychology of the people of the Watchmen world.

I really don't see any reason, other than time and financial factors, why the ending was changed. Putting in the creation of the alien would have added maybe another 30 minutes to the length of the film. The arrogance of the Hollywood script writers at the belief that they could write as good a, or better ending that the great Alan Moore exasperates me.

Boycot the film. Buy the graphic novel and experience one of the greatest stories ever written.

Warhammer World.

It's only February and I've already been to four games tournaments this year!

The first, which I talked about  in my last post was a DreadBall tournament, as were the two that followed it, one at Hammerhead (a wargames convention held Kelham, Nottinghamshire), the other at Wargames Workshop in Milton Keynes. I managed to come joint 5th out of 10 at Hammerhead and 4th out of 10 in Milton Keynes.

My fourth tournament of the year saw me awaken (after only two hours sleep) at the stupidly early time of 5a.m.. It had to be this early as the coach from outside Games Workshop's Chiswick store was due to leave at 6:15. Yes, the tournament was at Warhammer World, Games Workshop's Nottingham H.Q.. The tournament was called "Invasion", was a Warhammer 40,000 event and consisted of patrons of some of London's Games Workshops. It was a doubles event with each player taking a 600 point force which must be legal as per a standard  force organisation chart. I took a force of Necrons lead by a Destroyer Lord with Sempiternal Weave, a squad of six Wraiths with whip coils, two squads of five Necron Warriors and four bases of Scarabs. My partner took Grey Knights. He had Castellan Crowe as his H.Q. choice supported by two squads of five Purifiers and a Dreadnought.

The day consisted of three games. The first saw us facing a father and son team who had a combined force consisting of Space Wolves and Chaos Space marines. We managed to beat them quite considerably. My proudest moment was when my close combat contingent (my Wraiths lead by my Destroyer Lord), after dispatching a squad of Thunderwolf Cavalry, took out a squad of Terminators lead by non-other than Logan Grimnar.
After lunch, in our second game, we fought against a two guys using Slaaneshi Deamons and Tzeenchi Daemons respectively. This pair turned out to be the overall tournament winners. They beat us too. They were good players who knew their armies well. The Tzeench player had two squads of Flamers. It is the general consensus of 40K players that for their in game points cost, these daemons are way, way over-powered (the guy they belonged to even said nearly as much). I honestly don't know that if these models had not been on the table whether my partner and I would have won or not. We certainly would have stood a much better chance and it would have been a very close game indeed. One thing that I thought was a mistake by Matt Ward (the guy that wrote Codex: Grey Knights), was that despite the Warhammer 40,000 universe fiction, The army (at least the options that my partner took) had nothing special that was particuarly effective against Daemons. In the stories, the Grey Knights are the most elite of all Space marines, a specialised chapter whose job it is to destroy daemons.
Our third and last game saw us facing off against a couple of young lads who were using Necrons and Tyranids. The Necron player took, for his force, a special character, Illuminor Szeras, plus two squads of 19 warriors. The Tyranid player took a big monstrosity the name of which I don't know plus loads, and I mean loads, of Hormagaunts. They went for strength in numbers. It didn't work. We beat them, but it was close.

They day, which included a hot meal and coach travel there and back, cost £30. I thought it was good value for money, a change to the usually inflated prices that games Workshop charge.

Now how about some pretty pictures and a bit of video?

This video is of the gaming hall at Warhammer World, to show the scale of it.

Warhammer World includes a very nice Dwarf themed pub called Bugman's.
This is a pic of the Bugman's fireplace which even has fake glowing wood.

Some of the wall art in the pub. An orc's head on a shield.

Bugman's, along with it's fake fire, even has fake stained glass on the doors to its balcony. They are just stickers but do look rather good with the sun streaming through them though. The orc head is fake too by the way.

The front of the pub is actually in the gaming hall. here's a picture of it.

Here's a closer look at the pub sign.

DreadBall Copper cup and Tabletop nation.

On Sunday, I went to Tabletop Nation (my second visit there) to play in the DreadBall Copper Cup.

DreadBall is a Sci-Fi sports game produced by Mantic. It has the flavour of games such as Speedball 2 and Rollerball.

The tournament was run, extremely well by Rich J from Enfield Gamers, a wargames club based in Ponders End, North London that meet on Tuesday evenings. Due to the distance between where I live and Ponders End, I rarely get the chance to go down there now unfortunately, so it was good to see many members of the club at the event. Here's the address of the Enfield Gamers web page. http://www.enfieldgamers.co.uk/ New members are always welcome.

I managed to come 4th out of 20 players in the tournament. I was very pleased with my performance but gutted that I narrowly missed out on third place. It wasn't the fact that I missed out on getting a voucher for more "toys" but that the first three placed players got an invitation to the DreadBall Super Bowl later in the year. There will however be other DreadBall events this year that I believe will give players the chance to get a ticket for the Super Bowl so I may enter one of those and try my luck again.


Tabletop Nation itself is a wonderful gaming facility coupled with Wayland Games' bricks and mortar store. It has the most beautifully constructed gaming tables that I have ever seen, so much so that I couldn't help taking some (jerky) videos of them. I thought Id share them with you.

The first is a table designed to play Infinity (a 28mm Sci-Fi skirmish game) on. It features a brilliant ruined elevated roadway.

 

This second table is made for Bolt Action (a WWII 28mm game). This is a really beautiful table.

This third one seems to be for a 6mm skirmish game. I think that, partly due to the scale of the scenery and partly because there is not enough room on the board for large formations of troops.

This last video features a table that I think would be great for Warhammer 40,000. I can just imagine an Imperial Guard force on the raised paved area, Basilisks shelling no mans land while Chaos cultists skulk in the trenches.

Here's the second of tonight's posts, another story. This time with a Warhammer 40,000 flavour.

 

Trooper Merrick slid the output control on his lasgun to maximum. He could still hear the words of the quartermaster when his platoon were issued with the Sibian VI Pattern weapons: “Keep the output slider set at standard. Any more and you're likely to burn out the emitter assembly.” He didn't care. Any moment now a force of Traitor Marines were going to be cresting the hill that his trench overlooked and if he had any chance at all of breaching their armour he needed to increase the power of his weapon.

In the last few minutes the ambient temperature had increased by twenty degrees. If Merrick had for one moment taken his eyes off of the ridge of the hill, he would have seen that the sky had clouded over. With a crash of thunder the rain started to fall. So heavy was it, that view of the guardsmen's targeted area became indistinct.

Minutes passed and the rain didn't ease. Then they came. Slowly. Heads rising above the hilltop, then shoulders, chests and legs. Walking, not charging, the blue and gold armoured Chaos Marines approached the trench. With the traitors moving this slowly, Merrick thought, he and his fellows may just stand a chance. Lasfire erupted from the trench. Trained guardsmen aimed at the weak points on their enemy's armour, visors and joints. Then the Archenemy opened fire.

The poor visibility didn't seem to be hampering the accuracy of the Chaos Marines. By the time their first volley was done, fully half of the guardsmen in Merrick's section of the trench were dead. Guardsmen began diving for the bottom of the trench to avoid the withering bolter fire. Merrick wasn't the first to hit the dirt but he certainly wasn't the last. He needed more firepower. He switched his lasgun to full auto. More shots in a shorter length of time meant he didn't have to expose himself to enemy fire for as long. He steeled himself ready to stand up and fight. As he looked up he saw the monster. The Traitor Marine loomed over him. It slowly raised it's boltgun to meet Merrick's face. The guardsman rammed the end of his weapon up under the Marine's chin and fired.

The top of the Thousand Sons Marine's helmet exploded outwards and with it a coarse black dust. The dust fell and settled on Merrick. All of a sudden, the trooper could see all the failures he had ever made in his life. He saw all the people who had ever loved him and how he had hurt them beyond words. He saw how due to his weakness, his comrades would all die, suffering horribly. He saw through time how his actions on this day would lead to the fall of the Imperium itself. There was only one way to save mankind and that was to end his own life.

He raised the muzzle of his las to his forehead and pulled the trigger. However, the last spurt of fire from his gun had burned out it's workings and rendered it useless. Culim, the guardsman to Merrick's left and his long-time friend, tackled him to the ground. He tore the affected trooper's weapon from his hands and tossed it aside. He took his canteen from his webbing and used the water within to wash the dust from Merrick's face and hair.

Merrick looked at his friend realising how close death had just been. Then he remembered the battle and how if he was going to live, he must re-join it and continue to fight. But without a weapon, how was he going to do this. Then, on the lip of the trench, he saw it, the fallen Traitor's boltgun. He grabbed it. It was old, but seemed to be in working order and loaded. Merrick stood up to his full height, looking down the boltgun's sights over the trench. Immediately he found his target. He aimed at the Chaos Marine's throat and pulled the trigger. With a sound of tearing metal the muzzle and barrel of the boltgun folded in on themselves. Merrick could only stare as the components that had previously been at the front of the weapon emerged from the back. The boltgun fired. The shell entered Merrick's cheek. Then his head exploded.

Trooper Culim wiped his friends brain and skull off of his face and continued to fire.

Here's a short story I wrote at a creative writing class a few years ago. The brief was vague, I remember it being something along the lines of "someone remembering something whilst walking". Very vague, though probably not quite as vague as I remember it. Anyway, here it is.

Marcus reflexively looked down at his wrists as his watches beeped their alarms. He always wore two. 6:42, one hour to sun rise and time he should be getting home.

He'd been out all night again at his gentlemens club. A special place for like fellows. After leaving, he had walked through Soho, up Wardour Street and into Leicester Square.

He exited the square on the South-East side. He hadn't taken this particular route for years. Then he remembered why. He stopped suddenly as the restaurant came into view. Her smell was the first thing he remembered. Jessica, white musk, always white musk. Then her hair, soft, the fringe that half covered her eyes. He used to joke that she could see about as well as an Old English Sheepdog. He scolded himself for being so soft. He couldn't allow himself to have these feelings. That life was dead to him now.

He walked on quickly. He turned right on to the Charing Cross Road striding past the National Portrait gallery. He had resided in London all his years but only once been inside. It was on a school trip. Most of the pictures had been much of a muchness to his young uneducated eyes. All except for one. It had been a painting of a man in a purple velvet suit standing in a dark room. Marcus remembered thinking how distinguished he had looked. The man in the painting had an aire of danger about him, a fierce glint in the eye. Marcus had wanted to be him.

On now through Trafalgar Square. Glancing up at the lions guarding Nelson's Column, an even earlier memory came. Strong arms lifting him onto the back of one of the lions. His father. His mother was at street level in front of the lion, taking his picture, bright sunlight glinted off of the camera's lens. He had thought his father so strong. True strength was what Marcus now possessed.

A few minutes more and he had arrived at the door of his basement apartment. Beautifully furnished and this close to the centre of London, it had cost a lot of money. He hadn't payed for it of course. His fellows in The Brotherhood had acquired it for him. He opened the door and walked through the hallway. He entered his bedroom. He disrobed and lifted the lid on his coffin. It was a clichéd thing for those of his ilk to sleep in, but practical. He ran his tongue under his fangs, tasting the blood he had, had earlier in the evening. To bed now, the sun would be up soon.