Adepticon 2008 Part I

Adepticon 2008- Crown Plaza Hotel, Rosemont IL.

In a new venue and bigger and better than last year I was pretty psyched about Adepticon 2008. I arrived a bit before noon on friday and checked as a pre-register in less than five minutes. I got my nice swag bag and saw the tables were action filled though out the gigantic ballroom where the 40K Gladiator, Fantasy Escalation, Fantasy Devastation and Lord of the Rings tournaments where taking place. I hooked up with my pal Felix and we made the rounds checking out all there was to see, the biggest thing that immediately caught your eye was this awesome display for saturdays team tourney by club 300, set up right in the center of the ballroom.






My photos just can not do this display justice, In fact anything I took pictures of in the ballroom with its overload of diffuse fluorescent lighting came out kind of crappy, It was really screwing with my photos. On the other hand all the pictures I took in the Atrium, where the demo tables were located, came out great. My photo results overall where pretty disappointing as I couldn't tell how they were really coming out until I got home and could download them. The facilities at the hotel were somewhat limited, so I did not have the kind of net access I was hoping for since I do not have a laptop. Anyway this display was purely awesome and in the end it deservedly won a "best of" award.

I spend the first couple hours hanging around checking out the fantasy tourneys and just talking to various folks. After having an stupidly overpriced lunch, I moved over to demo room to check some Warhammer Ancient Battles and my new favorite game Legend of the High Seas.


The ancients demo army was Macedonians and it was a killer looking army, I am pretty excited about playing ancients myself and plan on picking up an army this year.

I spend allot of time that afternoon talking to Tim K who wrote the LotHS book about the game. Tim was actually running the Ancients demo, while his pal Ed ran the High Seas demo that I was playing in. Already having played the game once I was psyched to jump into a 4 player scenario I hadn't played yet. That scenario is called "X marks the spot"



Above is shot of the board, nice..however the table was different saturday and was the same scenario in a small port town which was an even better looking board, stupidly I didn't take a picture of it on saturday.


I ran the Royal Marines (above)..which where fun as I playing against three pirate crews so even thou I didnt get the "life is cheap" which is rule that allows pirates to always fire into melee because they just don't give a damn. I could still shoot into all the melee battles I wasn't involved in because "they" were all pirates. "X marks the spot" is a scenario where you move around to various objective markers. reaching a marker you spend a full turn 'digging" in the spot and then flip the marker over to see if it is the treasure chest or not. Once you find the chest your crew needs to move it over to your deployment zone, all the while each crew is trying to kill each other
it was a fun game and ended with the guy whose crew found the chest successfully moving it off the board, I was the last team trying to stop him as the other two routed after taking heavy losses in close combat. Smartly my opponent sacrificed his captain to duel with mine, while his men made off with the treasure chest. While my Captain slew his, my men firing muskets and pistols at the fleeing chest missed and his surviving crew escaped!..a great game.



the winning crew...Pirates win the day!

I followed up my Pirates demo with the Hirst Arts terrain building seminar taught by Rich whose great blog, Chicago Terrain Factory I visit daily. Rich went over casting techniques for using the Hirst molds with both plaster and resin, while it seems easy enough there is a pretty stiff learning curve with both the casting and building process. Expect to put just as much time in as you do with your models to get similar results. After making some good casts myself, I spent an hour trying to construct a sample building , while I did get it built, my piece wasn't remotely square or flush and I could have easily have spent 4+ hours getting that thing right by sanding individual blocks and fitting every piece square and tight, that is before even thinking about painting. My guess is that an average sized beginner Hirst arts piece is 20-30 hour project not to mention it will cost you in the neighborhood of $100.00 with molds and materials. I am going to pick up a couple molds myself and give something a try. Big thanks to Rich, and check out the cool stuff at Hirst Arts when you have time.




After the class it was time to find some chow...the bar in the hotel was actually better priced for what you got than the deli which was outrageous and mediocre ( I ate in the bar on Saturday and wish I had done Friday night, as my food was really good, a solid portion and I got beer and for only 3 bucks more than I got a crappy sandwich and coke in the lunch court ) Food choices are pretty limited without driving a few miles. You are in cluster of airport hotels with nothing but overpriced totally mediocre crap, so we headed out to try find something decent, it being friday night at 8pm had little luck so we ended at a local fast food joint, it wasn't bad...but other than the company-hardly worth going out of way for to save a few bucks. After that I went up to my room and crashed. If you read my previous post I had mentioned I was running my army short at exactly 101 points..well with encouragement from friends and a scheduled practice game on thursday to try it out- I decided I was going to bust out an extra 100 point unit in one day...I started around noon thursday choosing some 6th edition hand gunners I had on sprues. I even did a conversion giving the marksman a Repeater handgun. By the time my practice game came up at 5pm -I had them built and primed. I took time off for a 3 hour game and some dinner. I painting around 9pm by 4 AM...I had the unit about done, 5 models pretty well done to my normal standard and 5 at 5 at minimum table top standard while overall not at the same level at the rest of my army..they were painted, based, all the right colors and what not. Anyway I couldn't do anymore so I crashed for about 4 hours before getting up to watch my daughter for a few hours before our nanny showed up and I headed out to Adepticon, so by friday at 9pm and couple beers I was ready to pass out.

Saturday was the Warhammer Fantasy Championships., I had my army list filled out with that extra 100 points and was unpacking and setting up my models by 7:30am. It was a long day of not breaking my personal goal of trying to not go 0-4, but that is what ended up happening. I lost all 4 games, and was pretty disappointed as three of my games were razor tight, sometimes it really seems like I couldn't buy luck if it was being given away for free. On the positive side I lost my middle two games by a single die role, and all my games except the last were by a few hundred points. I am going to wait a few days until they release the final scores as it seemed to me my 'soft scores" painting, comp and sportsmanship were very solid, I saw my score was bumped up 18 points between the third and fourth round, I assume that's because the painting scores got thrown in meaning I got a 18 out of 20 for painting...I am pretty sure I got close to maximum on sports and comp, which should put me somewhere close 100 points for the tourney overall and if 2007's score are any indication that would put me near the top of the bottom third of players which is more than I could hope for given my battle points. I want to wait to write my saturday recap until I see exactly how I did overall, but I can say I had some great fun, saw some awesome armies and met some great new people...so until then.