Saturday I wake up at 4:15am and get ready. I get a text from mike around 4:20 that Jay is picking him up. At this point it takes me 5 more minutes but them in all ready to roll out. I get another at 4:30 saying they are stopping ot get get drinks for the road. All in all I could have slept another half hour, but oh well who cares, they arrive right aroung 5 and we hit the road. Traffic was a breeze we actually got the Hotel before 9am. Which is great since we thought it would be like 5 hours, but it was less then 4.
I don't want to knock on Jersey too much here, but I gotta say, the whole it smells like butt in Jersey thing is totally true, we got out of the car and BAM, ass stink!
Check in isn't for a few hours so we roll into the hotel empty handed ready to demo some games. So the whole thing was laid out in 4 big ballrooms in the Hotel. Room 1 was paint and take, room 2 was mini games, room 3 was the shop, and then there was a room about twice the size of the others where they held what looked like the flames of war, 40k, and PP tournaments. When we arrived, the warstore store hadn't opened yet so we went to each room and scoped them out. In the largest room there was a demo of Heavy Gear.
So we all took about an hour and learned the game. here are the basics, you have a couple minis, roll some dice, use way way way way too much math, and see what happens. Then we demoed their gladiator style combat game, wbich used the same system, but added even more math. So we were looking over the minis and the guy who ran the demo let it slip that our little 5v5 game was two $45 box sets. These models are all metal, but they are about the size of a space marine. So thats $9 piece for small mechs. They did give us free tape measurers so it wasn't a total loss. Also they gave us there little raffel tickets, which I kinda rolled my eyes at, since I basiclly didn't want their stuff even if was free. But what I found out was way better. You could trade the tickets in to Warstore for Swag. That made me a happy Panda.
The demo ended and we strolled over to the warstore store. Hoping to find some cool stuff. The selection was very limited, and I wasn't able to find any heavy crusiers or gunships for my Firestorm fleet. What was awesome was that if you got 40 tickets you could get a free box set from any of Spartans lines. So I set my eyes on the Ralgard Uncharted Seas box set. As we left the store Mike and I realized we had lost Jay. but its not usually hard to find a wookie, and we found him looking for us. The malifaux tournament was trying to get under way, but only 2 people had shown up. So we grabbed our models and joined in.
It was a pretty fun time. I decided to take Kirai all 3 games, since I didn't want to bother thinking of list ideas. I got to play 2 random guys, and then met mike at the final table. My first game was going very well for me, but my opponent was a really slow player. Time ran out as I was in the middle of my 6th turn. It annoyed me because I had only activated 1 model. Had I gotten a full turn, then and 8 point game would have been likely. Instead I got 5. My second game I slaughtered my opponent. He was new, and I tried to hold back, but I just ended up crushing him.
For the last game I ended up facing Mike, and we were pretty tired and didn't want a hyper competative game so we both decided to try something new. I made his list and he made mine. I gave him a swamp theme list: Zorida, JuJu, 2 Slurids, 2 Waldegeitst, and a Terror Tot. He gave me Nicodem, Kill Joy, 2 vultures, a punk zombie, and some dogs. High lights went like this. Zorida obeys punk zombie to hit Nico, he cheats red jocker for damge, and adds a moderatore for 9 damage, I prevention flip and get the red joker stopping all damage. Next turn Kill Joy kills Nicodem off another Obey. The Hanged killed off both slurids and the terror tot. Kill Joy took out a Waldegiest and JuJu. We were playing get to the other side of the board as our onbjective, and ended up with Zorida, a Waldegiest, and JuJu (he came back) in my deployment zone and Killjoy and a hanged in his. He won on scenario and got an extra scheme on me so he won 8-4. Tournament shook out like this - Mike won with 22 points. Some guy who I didn;t play took 21, Jay had 20, and I had 17. So grats to Mike on a big time win. We each got 5 tickets for playing, and Mike got 5 bonus tickets for winning, Jay got 1 bonus for 3rd place. Mike also recieved a pretty sweet metal mini case, with room to hold 200 infantry figs.
After the game, we checked in, dropped out stuff off and grabbed dinner. I just want to say that people in New Jersey are crazy drivers. The food was good though, I got a pot roast.
We got back to the Hotel, grabbed our gear and went back to the minis room for the Firestorm Armada mega battle.
We were hoping for a nice turnout, but it ended up being just the three of us. Around turn 4 another guy jumped in with half a fleet, but he was really just trying to learn the game. So they scored the battle on kill points. 1 for a frigate, 2 for a cruiser, 4 for a battleship, and 4 for holding a planet. We each had 2 deployment zones and set up half our fleet in each. I then proceeded to Whomp their asses. Not really, but I did really well. I can't really remember any of it, since we played for like 4-5 hours, but damn was it a blast. I ended up with a strong victory with 38 points. Jay took 25 and Mike took 21. I really do love that game. I got a $30 gift certificate to an NJ game store for the win. I was preplexed by the prize, but we also got a ton of tickets. 5 for playing, and again 5 for first, 3 for second and 1 for third.
As this ended around midnight, we decided to call it a day. We made it back to the room and then i found I couldn't sleep. I was still a bit wired, and then there some snoring issues, but either way I was still awake. So I stumbled back down to watch some games. I caught the end of a midnight madness Warmachine tournament. The top tables spoke volumes about the games balance issues. 2 skorne, 2 Khador, and 2 Menother players made up the top three tables. The tournament before also had a Skorne Khador finale. But it was a fun time. I chatted with random guys about Wyrd and Privateer, and eventually went upstairs around 4-4:30 I had been up for 24 hours by that point and passed out.
We woke up and got breakfast the next morning and decided our next test game would be, Uncharted Seas. The night before we pooled our tickets and they said it was Ok for me to get the Ralgard box set. We set up our ships I was using the Bone Griffons. About 5 minutes into the first turn the shop opened up, So I ran over and grabbed the Ralgard. I then found out they had reduced the tickets needed to get the box sets to 30. So I gave the 10 spares back to mike, so that he could get a set too. I subbed out the Griffons for the Ralgard and we played a 4 player free for all. I was winning early, then got hammered. the 4th guy was eliminted when Jay blew away his battle ship. As the game wore down it looked like this. Jay had his battleship. I had 2 cruisers, one of which had only 1 life left. Mike and a wounded Frigate and his battle ship. So Mike rammed Jay battleship to battleship, and they beat the crap out of each other. Jay ended up taking mike down, but in the process took a heavy beating leaving with only crew point. I tried to get my last cruiser close enough to board Jay and take out his last guy, But I was killed trying to close the gap. So jay took 1st, me 2nd, and Mike 3rd. With that we got another like 20 tickets and Mike got himself a box set of the Imperial Navy for U.S.
We hung around a bit longer after the game in the Shop. Mike and Jay grabbed some really sweet terrain pieces, and I got a Soda Pop mini. I have wanted to get this one for a while, so even if I never play the game im glad I bought her model.
After that we went to the game store the cash in my certificate. I ended up getting the U.S rule book, since they didn't have any FSA stuff I needed.
It was a really great trip all in all. Im very glad we all decided to it. I look forward to maybe going again in 2012.
4 comments:
Awesome weekend - good times. Looking forward to the next one.
It was good to see you guys. Looking forward to seeing y'all next year with even more goodness to be had!
Having grown up in CT, I could have told how rancid NJ is. But that would have taken the fun out of it for you. Wish I could have gone, but Halloween is the evil time of year for my company. SOunds like you guys had fun though. One of these days one of you will have to demo FSA for me.
Aboslutely. Jay mentioned you might have some free weekends or nights in the near future. You should swing down to Sterling for some space ship on space ship action.
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