SpikeyCon 2014, part 1

We just got back from a great weekend at FTW Games in Richmond, celebrating the store's birthday at SpikeyCon. To begin, if you are remotely in the area of Richmond, VA, I cannot recommend the store enough, Rob has put together a store with great people, great tables and terrain available for gaming, regular events, plenty of products for your hobby of choice, and generally a utopia of gaming, so check it out. It's over a three hour drive for Chandler and I, but well worth it.

I will preface the post with two warnings: I am still recovering from lack of sleep from the Iron Man tournament Saturday night, but it was a great time, no regrets, and more on the games and missions later. Also, I was so caught up in hanging out with fellow gamers, trying out new games, and generally having a good time that I failed to take a single picture all weekend.

That's not to say there's no evidence we were actually at SpikeyCon - check out the Forge the Narrative Hangout from SpikeyCon, and thanks to Kenny for the shoutout and for bringing us on to plug the blog (around the 3:24:00 mark) as well as get in a demo game of Boss Monster.

In addition to hanging out at the awesome store and meeting some cool dudes, I also finally got a demo game of Malifaux. I've been eyeing this game ever since we had Mike Brandt from NOVA on our podcast and he was raving about the game. While I don't see the game becoming my main hobby focus, it seems like a fun change of pace game with a low entry cost (picked up the rules and a starter faction kit for less than 7th Ed). In my demo, I played with some Gremlins, who have some pretty entertaining rules, and hit surprisingly hard for little guys.

With Crews being generally in the single digits, I hope to spend a good bit of time with each of the minis, and really work on some techniques I tend to rush through when batch painting, so look for some painting posts in the future highlighting my attempts at some advanced techniques.

The end of the day was just the beginning of the action, as Chandler and I signed up for the SpikeyCon Iron Man Tournament, with the first round beginning at 8:00pm and the final round ending around 5:00am. The three games would use Missions 1-3 of FTN's The People's Missions. I'll get into those and the games themselves a bit more in the next post.

As a quick summary, I started off Game 1 against Josh's Necrons, which included the only Lord of War at the event, a Trancendent C'Tan. A combination of good luck and progressive objectives was enough to get me a slim win. Game 2 was kill points based against Justin's Imperial Guard, and the game was an utter slugfest, with both of us down to around a third of our army by the time the dust settled. Again, a wrinkle in Mission 2 of closing out Force Org slots got me a slim victory. In round 3, beginning after 2am, I was matched up with Kenny and his double Nurgle CSM list. My Dark Eldar allies showed up the most in this game, which was a brawl in the middle of the board, with Typhus holding the Relic at the end of the game on a single wound.

Each game was a lot of fun, and so far I've been having more fun in 7th edition than I did in 6th. It feels like the rules have been streamlined a bit, and work really well when applied to missions designed to increase the interaction of the two armies.

After about 17 hours at FTW, Chandler and I came away with a great experience and a good amount of sleep deprivation. It's still very early, but I'm already penciling in next year's SpikeyCon.