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Craig

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Adepticon 2013 – Day 5 – Shenanigans

Posted on April 27, 2013

Went downstairs after saying bye to all of my Blood Bowl opponents and walked into the Fantasy tournament room. It was completely empty of people, except for a small gaggle of organizers playing a game of Guillotine. In stark contrast to the thriving, overflowing room that I’d seen for the few days beforehand. I must have seemed lost, because one of them asked if they could help me, and then directed me towards the main room where the awards ceremony was being held.

One giant event to cover all of the championships didn’t work out well with my group. When I walked in, there was some 40k award being given away and no one around me was paying attention. I couldn’t tell you any of the awards that were given away during the 40 minutes that I sat there because it was a bunch of events that we had no attachment to, we didn’t know the players nor the in-jokes that the MC made, nor any of the awesome things that they had done to win said award. If there was a Fantasy award in the mix somewhere, I couldn’t have told you.

One sweet thing – as I walked in someone pointed at my shirt and said CHOP! which I naturally turned around to. Turns out that I was being hailed by the hosts of the Deployment Zone, a west-coast podcast which I’ve never listened to. (I have ears only for Peter :P)

We hummed and hawed over food and who to eat with for a bit, before starvation and people forced us to go to McDonald’s…second time in 8 hours…

Back at the Westin, some folks were playing board games in a back room that once contained tournaments. I surveyed the game table and noted that there was only a single game on it that I had even heard of. Very, very strange. I play a lot of board games and to have Alien Frontiers be the only one I knew is shocking!

We pulled a random game out and I set about reading the rules when a fellow walked past and asked if he could play, and that he’d played once or twice. His name was Kevin, and he was a joy to speak with. I later described him as the sort of conversationalist that makes you feel good to talk with, and I’m very glad that even after our first game fell apart that he pulled out Pandemic and we found two more people and set about trying to save the world from biological disaster.

There was another table of board games to give away. Partway through the night someone from D6 Generation pulled a game out and gave the folks in the room a task – act out a Colonial Marine. I’ve attached Dale’s rendition for your enjoyment.

Hours go by before another game is given away, and he machine guns a whole slew of theatre-sports based competitions before deciding to raffle the rest. I won a game called Milestones in the raffle, and after having read the rules I think that it is a low-to-medium complexity game that might suit for my household. Looking forward to playing it!

Once again, sleep that night came very quickly after my head hit the pillow.

Tournaments

Adepticon 2013 – Day 5 – Moar Blood Bowl

Posted on April 26, 2013

Felt a lot better this morning, had a decent sleep and no alcohol the day before. Still off by 2 hours, but not bad.

My first game was against another skaven player. He was pretty good, and had a good grasp of certain positional plays that helped him a lot. At one point he had “no way” of scoring a touchdown, but saw a push-surfing method of moving his ball carrier one extra square, and got the kick-off result that moved his guys one more square and pulled it off! Was very exciting to see, even as he pushed a solid win for me into a draw with it. Minutes later he had scored again, and I blame the fact that we were rushing to finish, since I didn’t have enough time to really protect the ballcarrier to create a draw.

After that game, I asked the primary organizer if models were going to be set up in the other room for paint judging, to which he replied that paint judging was only yesterday.

…

He apologized and I said it was ok, but I was crushed.

I went downstairs and stood at the base of the elevator wondering whether I wanted to quit the tournament or not. Randomly ran into Patrick and we went for food and I told him what had happened. After losing 4 games in a row, and then having my dreams broken, I kind of just wanted to do something else instead of losing another 2 games badly. Patrick told me he wanted me to go upstairs and yell CHOP and stand on a chair and win that tournament, but I didn’t have it in me.

I went back upstairs anyway, in the theory that I could still go play some demos during the last game and I could decide if it was worth continuing. My second game was against a Wood Elf player. He was ok at the game, but for the most part my dice continued to fail me. A hitting team that can’t take models off the table is really just a useless team – and I’d even replaced my dice the day before! Towards the end things picked up a bit – my continued perserverance in trying to take the S6 A10 treeman off the board paid off when my Mighty Blow Saurus casualtied him! Followed by no less than 3 skull/double-down rolls in a row for my opponent (who was out of re-rolls at this point) made me the victor of this game.

A win felt good, so I decided to stick with it. Last game was against an orc team, and finally I got to the kind of BB I remember playing – standing around hitting each other until someone won!! It helped that we rolled the rain again, so the ball was hard to pick up.

My opponent picked up the ball and made a standard orc cage. I put some saurus in front of it, put the skinks behind the saurus for block assists and then knocked off and/or stunned most of his models. I think my dice were feeling sorry for me, as at one turn I stunned all 4 of his Black Orcs. I won this game as well.

Lastly, I won the only award that team CHOP brought home from Adepticon — the Salter something award for most touchdowns scored in day 2. It came with a little certificate and my choice of models – I took home John Doe, the Faceless MVP from Dreadball. 🙂

Blood Bowl Impressions
I left that tournament thinking that Blood Bowl is actually not a good game, as modern games go. There are two sides to it. The amazingly tactical, positional side which is tons of fun and is a great game. You have to think hard about where to put your model, how best to support and push your opponents models around, and what risks to take in what order. This is a game worthy of being played by a large community 25 years later.

Then there is the game where if you can’t break armour, ever, you fail. Or when your opponent breaks your armor and kills 5 of you guys, such that you have no models to even try to succeed with. Or when you roll 3 double-skulls in a row and lose 3 full turns. This is a horrific game. When your opponent gets a streaky roll of failures, no one can feel good about that. When (as in my first game) your opponent gets a lucky roll, that allows him to make a deeply positional play that nets him a goal – that’s amazing. But when 2 dice consistently screw your game over, all you have left is “I’m sorry” and to keep playing and keep trying to smile. Blood Bowl is absolutely brutal and it hates you.

I’ll still play it, and I still have a beautiful team of models to use with it, but I think I want to try to squeeze some more of the first game out of Dreadball. It could have within it the same sort of tactical play, but the dice are much less brutal – you have to do some crazy things to lose your turn or fail a non-opposed roll.

Tournaments

Adepticon 2013 – Day 4 – “Interlude”

Posted on April 26, 2013

James Wappel posted a photo of my skirmisher movement tray on his blog!

*swoon*

Technique Tournaments

Adepticon 2013 – Day 4 – Glazing

Posted on April 25, 2013

Glazing was a good class. I didn’t learn a whole lot, for reasons we’ll get into, but I left feeling energized, which was a feat considering the absolute exhaustion I went into the class with!

I can’t remember or Google the teacher’s name, but he was originally a student of Mathieu Fontaine, whom I’ve written about before. “Glazing”, it turns out, is a technique I’ve learned already. Start with a mid-tone and apply successive layers of darker mixes to the shaded portion of an area, layers of lighter mixes to the highlighted area. Nothing new there.

What was new, was that I’d played with a bunch of this stuff and looked into different ways of applying the methods Mathieu taught. So I asked a bunch of questions. I asked about how James Wappel does his stuff, I asked about using the artists matte medium as a pigment thinner and generally just had the confidence to have a conversation about this stuff.

The downside…they have no idea how Wappel does what he does, and they recommend against the matte medium.

One thing I really did re-learn, is that I really should figure out how to include a wet palette into my painting workflow. I learned it with Fontaine, but neglected it, and it’s really kind of useful to do. >.<

I think it was mostly invigorating because I felt like I was a part of the conversation. Like I could paint something, and potentially be able to speak knowledgeably about how and why I did what I did. Like I could put something together that would look decent in that competition shelving out front.

I’m still going to use the medium, because I’ve loved what I’ve done with it so far. 😛

Edit: I believe that the teacher was Alex Akers. He runs Battleroad Games and his (defunct) hobby blog is at http://akersminis.blogspot.ca/.

Tournaments

AdeptiCon 2013 – Day 4 – Shenanigans

Posted on April 25, 2013

After the photography class I had about 3 hours to spend wisely before my glazing class. When I arranged my schedule I was cursing this chunk of unused time, but when it came I was glad to have a few hours to rest. The timezone change, late nights, early mornings and jam packed days had started to beat me down.

I went to find my friends and they were all in the Fantasy room talking. If you follow my blog, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of James Wappel – he’s directly inspired most of my recent hobby activity and he was playing in the Fantasy tournament. I kept looking over at him, but he had a constant stream of fans around him and I didn’t want to interrupt with my useless fanboyism. (I’m miserably shy around celebrities I admire).

Patrick sees me looking over and says I should go say hello. He uses the words “this is about taking it to far”, grabs a sharpie and tells me to get one of my movement trays (the design for them came from James blog). I waved, James waved and says “I didn’t think I brought my trays with me!” He was happy to autograph my tray, and I’m stoked to have had a small conversation with my hobby-idol!

Peter had ordered 3 of a particular type of deep-dish pizza. Everyone we spoke with said “You know that you can only eat a single slice of that, right?” I had 1 and 3/4 and it was intense. We ended up giving away pizza to anyone who wandered past us. 🙂

After food, everyone slowly wandered off to head to a pub and have some drinks. I had another class, and was absolutely exhausted to boot so I stayed at the con and wandered around a bit.

Another shot of the giant gargant.

This guy is so badass.Want!

The “on display” of this thing is awesome. That’s an ork army rocking out to a concert. The bright thing in the middle is a TV screen showing a music video. They had music playing and were selling CDs. Yeah!!

A Tau and Necron alliance.

After that (actually, during that) I was done. I contemplated going back to the hotel, I was so tired. Instead, I found a couch and slouched down into it. My phone was low on power, but it didn’t matter – I was either going to make it, or I wasn’t and I was bored then and desperately needed something. Every time I looked at the clock it had only moved another minute, this was a damn long hour of waiting!

While slouching I saw these 3 fellows climb onto another couch, and then onto each other and do a triple-layer piggy-back.

Somehow I made it to class.

Photography Tournaments

Adepticon 2013 – Day 4 – Photography

Posted on April 24, 2013

Sharply after my day of Blood Bowl, I had a photography class to go to. This was one of the things I was most excited about! My photography reading and research has not been specifically about the topic of taking pictures of models. You read about macro, and they’re talking about bugs and other small things usually. And miniature bloggers don’t write much about their photography. Probably because, rightly so, they believe that their readers are there to read about models, rather than the finer points of focal lengths and depth of field!

At the end, this class wasn’t 2 hours of learning for me, simply because I have done so much research on my own. However, it had more than enough information that I didn’t have already, to make it a terrific class.

The class was held on the 13th floor of the hotel, in another hotel room converted into a gaming room. It had rows of desks with hobby lamps on them, and the previous class had left little piles of green stuff all over the place (man, I wish I’d been able to take that class…)

Here’s a summary of the things I took out of this class, that I didn’t know before:

White Balance
The white balance is apparently the most important thing to correct for. This makes sense, as without proper white balance, your colours will come out an entirely different shade or temperature (cool colours, warm colours) than the “actual model”. But even the words “actual model” are some what strange. I paint and mix and glaze under a florescent “daylight” light, which means that when my models are under another light, they aren’t the same colour I painted on!

You have to make sure that all of the lights you are using are the same temperature, otherwise you can’t possibly white balance. Some of the model will be lit by a warm light, some by a cool light, and there is no balance that can correct for that.

You should use a white card to set your camera’s definition of “white” before you start taking photos. This can be easily done with most prosumer cameras. (including mine) Look for “custom white balance”.

Softbox
He showed us how to make a simple softbox, using some frames, some vellum, and a few Home Depot lights. I have a white box already, but he added a simple white piece of paper in the front of it. This is used to bounce light up from the bottom of the box, which can fill in shadows from underneath the model. It was subtle when he showed us, but still noticeable if you looked. You can use a front light if you want, but you have to use the vellum (or other) to diffuse the light. Otherwise the light looks sharp and harsh on the model.

He used a gradient backdrop to create a simple background that didn’t draw the viewers attention away from the model. You can buy these, our just get one printed out. Most are a blue gradient to white.

I’ll save the step-by-step on creating a softbox, but if you’re interested please ask.

Setup
The human eye has vision equivalent to a 50mm lens (35mm equiv), which means that is the focal length you should shoot at. Don’t use the zoom to bring the model closer or further away, move your camera.

He doesn’t use RAW. Tends to think that it is a lot of memory, and that JPG is good enough since we’re mostly only making photos for display on the internet, rather than a magazine.

Shoot from above or at level with the model, never from below. From below is a horrible angle (insert sidebar about never shooting portrait photos from below). Ideally focus on the face. This follows the advice from my Masterclass painting to highlight the face more than the rest, since that’s where the viewers attention will be at.

Lastly, the best advice of the night: “if your subject isn’t moving, use a tripod”.

Sorry there are no photos in this photography post, we didn’t actually take any!

Tournaments

Adepticon 2013 – Day 4 – Blood Bowl!

Posted on April 24, 2013

I haven’t really played Blood Bowl in a few years. We once had a strong, thriving league happening in our old GW store, but it fell apart at one point and I hadn’t played since. When I decided to go to Adepticon, I wasn’t feeling in the Fantasy mood so I thought I’d played a number of different games to make up for it. Blood Bowl was available for a 2 day tournament and I leapt on the chance! I converted a whole new team, one which I’d wanted to do for while and applied all of my latest painting techniques to it, to create something that I thought was pretty cool.

The people there were as hardcore as the people downstairs! Many of them had custom boards made, which were very cool looking.

My first game was against a super nice guy, playing Undead. Watch out for the S5, Mighty Blow mummies! He’d obviously played a lot of BB and knew the rules and tactics inside and out, but wasn’t at all rules lawyery. He killed a skink early on. Then he killed a saurus (that requires two 2d6 in a row to roll 10+). His comment “that was game changing”. Then he killed another saurus. My comment “and that kind of seals it…”. I was having a good game, and he was nice, so even though I was horribly outmatched in both tactics and in dice rolling, this was a good time.

In this game, I was shown part of why people still love Blood Bowl. It is an incredibly tactical game. I watched some of his positions, and they reminded me of people studying Chess positions.

I was pretty hung over from the night before, something that I deeply regret at this point. I’m not a BB wizard, but I feel like I have a solid grasp of the basic tactics of the game and how to move models to achieve my goals, but in this game everything was sluggish. He felt sorry for me, and I felt like I needed a drink and something to eat.

I came back after the break to find out that the painting competition had happened in my absence.

Consider a sentence above, wherein I claimed that these models are the pinnacle of my current skill. Several people over the rest of the weekend mentioned that they’d seen them, and were looking for them during the paint judging. And I missed it, because I was hungry and thirsty and hungover and hadn’t paid attention to when the judging was. Frustration.

My second game was against skaven. I knew at this point, since I’d been crushed absolutely in my first game, that I was now playing someone who had also probably lost quite badly. He was great, but his knowledge of the rules was about mine. We had a good game, and I saw him numerous more times over the weekend, and it was nice to meet and talk with someone who I hadn’t traveled with. He won that one.

My third game was against a goblin player. I’ve never played against goblins, but I would do so again in a heartbeat. My opponent was pretty gruff at first, but he warmed up as the game went on. I like to think he got more friendly, the more that his fanatic, chainsaw wielder, pogoer and bomb-thrower did random things. I laughed my ass off that game! We had rolled -1 to pick up the ball for weather, so most of the game was spent trying to pick it up, and hitting each other. Highlight of the game was when his bombardier thew a bomb at my krox. It stuns the person hit by it, and stuns people adjacent on a 4+, a brutal weapon. But my krox…rolled a 6 and caught the bomb. This meant that he got to throw it back! So I tossed it at one of his trolls. I thought I needed an accurate pass to hit, so I used a re-roll when it failed. When the re-roll failed as well, it scattered 3 times and finally came to rest in a clumping of 3 of my guys. Bad spot, but hilarious to watch!

I had to run very quickly after this last game as I had a photography class at 5, so we called the game when he had scored a touchdown and it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to score any back. My third loss of the day.

I wasn’t disappointed about 3 losses, but I was surprised. As I said above, I feel like I have a solid grasp of how to play basic BB. But at the same time, my hitting team couldn’t remove players from the pitch at all. BB is about managing risk, and I got a ton of solid 2 dice blocks every turn, but I couldn’t roll an armour break except rarely, and when I did, it was rarely more than a stunned result with very few models being taken off. I’m not certain what I would do different, except that certain skills might be necessary to put on my team to deal with dodgy teams like skaven and elves.

Before I left, I asked if there was any other opportunity for paint judging. One of the two judges said that the two days were two separate tournaments and that there would be tomorrow. I left feeling like a fool, but ok since I’d have another chance.

The next few posts will be about the two classes I took in the evening, as well as some general commentary. Later!

Tournaments

AdeptiCon 2013 – Day 3 – Shenanigans

Posted on April 24, 2013

This is a photo of one of the tournament rooms, the larger one that had the 40k team tournament in it all weekend long. Add another room about 4/5ths of the size for Fantasy, another two for Warmahordes and Malifaux, a couple rooms upstairs for Blood Bowl and some of the hobby seminars, a room full of every vendor you can reasonably imagine, and a random amount of people wandering and demoing games in the halls and you have AdeptiCon. Not nearly as large as PAX, but certainly much larger than any tournament I’ve ever been to!

We wandered the vendor hall during our breaks. I wish now that I’d had a shopping list before we went, as I continuously browsed their wares, desperately searching for something I wanted to buy now that the smörgåsbord was in front of me. I left with multiple Dreadball teams, only one for myself. (Somehow I’ve been overcome with a desire to play the rats…)

That afternoon Dale and Chris arrived in the hall with a loud CHOP! and it was nice to know that they were successful in their flights. That evening we walked for a half hour to a local pub (…nothing is walking distance away…) and there we were met with a great surprise – Peter had flown to the con as well! Last we’d heard he wasn’t coming, but apparently the night before he had a change of mind and bought a plane ticket. He hadn’t brought his army and was going to hang out, drink, talk with people and try to record for the Chumphammer podcast.

I got pretty drunk in celebration. 🙂

Tomorrow is the Blood Bowl tournament!

Tournaments

AdeptiCon 2013 – Day 3 – Fantasy Team Tournament!

Posted on April 23, 2013

An 8am tournament start comes early when you’re 2 hours ahead of your own timezone…

The continental breakfast in our hotel was sparse, but not terrible. Instant oatmeal, an orange and an overly sugared muffin later I’m good to go. The tea was a horrible proposition, but I solved that problem tomorrow.

This event was my favourite at the con. I had so much fun practicing my games with Patrick, playing against two other people. It didn’t feel painful in the way that normal multi-player games of Fantasy feel.

As well, our fluff, such as it was, was hilarious. I should get Patrick to send me a photo of the ransom letter he scribbled out with a black jiffy that says “Dear lizardmen, we have your slann. We’ll give him back if you fight 3 battles for us. Promise! Love, Ajani”.

Our first game was fun, but not the sort of Warhammer I usually play. It was against a brotherly team of Dwarves and High Elves. One of the brothers was much much more into Warhammer than the other, and he pretty much ran the game for the two of them. They stood back and fired war machines until our stuff was dead. We had a chance part-way through the game to salvage it, but a sequence of failed charge rolls left us high and dry. Not even our savior, the Comet of Cassendora, could help us from the deadly dwarven war machines.

Our second opponents.

Our second game was better, in my opinion, and our opponents had a great theme going on. They played skaven and nurgle warriors and had a few conversions in their army that brought the alliance together – dragon rat ogres, for example. Also, because one of the allies was skaven, they rolled to see what their alliance actually was (suspicious, desperate) and played it up pretty well. These guys got our “Favourite Theme” and “Best Opponent” votes. We won this game due to double dimensional cascade on the second to last turn. Skillhammer!

Our third game was against 2 high elf brothers. One of them was so drunk that he didn’t recognize me the next day. The team rules gave bonus points for having different races in the alliance, so these guys lost a ton of points for having dual high elves.

Here are a selection of the most awesome armies around this tournament.

These guys won some award, but I was pretty tired and I forget which one. They were playing undead and orcs and their fluff was that the orc warboss had died and no one had noticed. “Which way should we go boss?” “urrrrrrrrrr…” “Sounds good, boss.” Their display tray was simple, but very well done. I wouldn’t have really noticed much of it, except that when he picked it up to walk past me, I saw the back of it, which had a cave carved into the back. Love it!

These next guys were playing chaos dwarves and ogres, and their display tray was phenomenal. An idyllic fishing village at the top and a gapping hole and massive door underneath. During the Fantasy Championships, one of the guys had built up a massive 3x2x2 treasure chest with an incredible pirate ship on top of it. (Stupidly, I didn’t get any photos of it. >.<)

This was another of my favourite setups, which is saying a lot since it was Empire and Wood Elves and I think they are both silly armies. 😛 It was a large wood on a hill and the Empire were crossing a bridge in a marching formation. Simple, but fantastic looking.

A few Fire Elementals on one of the Chaos Dwarves lists. A surprising number of Chaos Dwarves at the tournament.

This was simultaneously one of the coolest and silliest (in a bad way) armies there. These guys had spent hours converting a Despicable Me army, which was super fun and looked great. The problem was, that it’s very hard to tell what it was – Chaos Dwarves and Skaven – and it looked to much like a 40k army for my tastes. Lots of industrial piping, big guns, rivets, etc. It was a great conversion and great idea, but it left me with a doubt in my mind when I walked away.

Patrick and I were energized by this tournament, and we spent most of the drive back to Vancouver talking about what we think we should do for next year. More on that when we get to it.

(Apologies to those people who saw these photos early – my tablet Published the article while I was still writing it!)

Tournaments

Adepticon 2013 – Day 1/2 – Getting to the Con

Posted on April 23, 2013

Have a moment at work to spare, so here’s the start.

We left Vancouver around 5pm on Wednesday, to head to Seattle for the night. The con started at 4pm on Thursday, and all flights that got there before 5pm were leaving at 6am from Vancouver (or Seattle), so we saved time and some money by leaving from Seattle instead. We saved about $200 each with this plan, mainly because we got a great deal on a hotel in Seattle because some family members of Patrick’s own a hotel that is about 10 minutes drive from the airport. Pretty awesome!

Getting down there was pretty uneventful, which is nice since the border wait can be lengthy at times. Patrick didn’t kill either of us while driving. We had some great conversation, and we checked in and got to sleep pretty easily. The next morning, we woke up at 4am. We ate leftover fried chicken for breakfast and it was glorious!

Get to Seatac, and because of excessive weather problems in Chicago, our flight was delayed by 3 hours. …I would have loved to have slept in for 3 hours. That 4 hour sleep was the beginning of con exhaustion for me. I tend to need 8 hours a night or I get a little wonky, and being at a gaming convention means that you prioritize the event over everything else (we’ll come back to this topic later). I managed to get an hour of sleep on the flight there so I’m almost human by the time we land.

I had a Necromunda tournament scheduled for 4pm that I had to miss, sine we landed around 5pm. Sucks, but we got to wander around and check things out instead. Lots of big rooms that were vibrating with gaming potential. A few smaller tournaments were running already. There was a vendor in one of the halls with big bins of bitz. Some people were playing the X-Wing with Star Trek models…and flying stands that were as tall as I am. We found some guys building a giant gargant. “Taking it to far” is the watchword for this event, and we had only just shown up with our naive smiles and wide eyes.

These guys were “taking it to far”. The center piece is a mini-TV that will be playing a music video. They were selling CDs done by the ork band.

WAAAGH!!

This place doesn’t have alcohol in their gas stations, unlike in Washington state, so we had a 15 minute walk to a liquor store, followed by a 15 minute walk back carrying a wine box full of beer. Heavy, but important to the weekend. I got an “Angry Orchard” cidar, which was delicious.

Back to our hotel and went to sleep – we have a Team Tournament to play in the morning!

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