My day at MayDay

I arrived in Edmonton Friday night, driving through a snowstorm. At one point I called Brenda and told her that it was no longer raining, it was now snowing! When I did finally arrive in Edmonton, I discovered there must have either been a convention or no one willing to drive in Edmonton as many of the hotels were full. I ended up driving around for about an hour before finding a room at the Rest Skeezy Arms, the first room they put me in was never cleaned…

Since this is a gaming website I better put something about games into this article. I arrived at MayDay fresh from a nights sleep and immediately ran into people I only see once a year, we talked as Tim set up the game of Savage Worlds, a miniatures game with a slight taste of RPG. Tim’s game was a continuation of the game he runs in Saskatoon. I once again played Marcus Andre and the valiant crew of the Persephone, whom I first played in the Gwong Island Rescue.

The game started with us creeping up on the village and I got unlucky and one of my crew tripped over a root in the desert, alerting the guards. There was a small firefight with Force Six wiping most of them out. The crew and Marcus focused primarily on trying to get into the village to find the work the Nazis were doing and to “liberate” a few scientists. In our haste to work our way around the buildings we dropped some of our ammo and the crew was all on “last shots” level of ammo.

Marcus did show off his Colt .45 sharpshooter skills again, nailing Ilsa with it from across the village and shooting a scientist in the head that was in a building.

The crew discovered the robot man and the explosives to blow him up at about the same time, with one half running into the robot and the other into a storage room with the lone German speaker on the ship.

We ran out of time then so we stopped the game after the first explosion went off, but I think that we could have defeated the robot, but it would take some deaths.

My second game was the one I ran, Commands and Colors: Ancients. I never played any of the games but with the help of Brent Lloyd )who did play) we taught it to 3 other players, all of whom expressed an interest in both playing it again and purchasing it. I won’t recount there names, as I forget them, but two of them were from Fort St John, BC. In the time we had allotted there were 5 total games played.

I ran one scenario from the Greek and Eastern Kingdoms Expansion and one from the bonus pack from the P500 list.

About 30 minutes before the Vimy Ridge scenario that Tim ran was about to start, Brent pulled out a copy of Axis and Allies Naval Miniatures which he taught to Lee, an ancients and ASL buff. I watched them setup for a few moments before I went to Tim’s game. Tim’s game was a modified version of Contemptible Little Armies or as I call it CLA. Tim has already written up an excellent coverage of the game here so I will spend a few minutes elaborating on them from my PoV.

I had the 38th and the 78th as well as the weight of being Divisional Commander… One thing that I was considering, especially since this was a WWI scenario, was to send the Nova Scotians to up the same place that the 87th and the 75th, after all, this was WWI and bad decisions were made all the time.

The march for the 38th was relatively easy, I lost two men in hand to hand combat but always killed them with the second attacker. The reached their objective and since the 72nd took out the pillbox that could have really damaged my units, it was pretty much a cakewalk for the 38th.

The 78th had a harder row to hoe; they were in front of the pillbox when both the barrage ended and both the 75th and the 87th were done. All of their losses came at the guns of the pillbox sitting in the middle of the board. The 78th were at half strength and had a morale marker against them when the last German on their half of the board was killed (by them, with bayonets).

I was also racing the Divisional Commander up the hill to try and remove some of the morale markers, unfortunately he was an officer and a gentleman, and therefore strolled.

All in all it was a good game day and I will be back again next year, I am just not sure whether I will run anything, or will just play.