Fallcon 20, in words, no pictures

Well Fallcon 20 was upon us already and I had a great time.

Tim from Saskatoon came down for some miniatures games at the tournament. You can read his report on his blog, so I will let him talk about the miniatures games that he played.

I was signed up for every session but one of the games got cancelled so I played an open game in it's place, but I get ahead of myself...

Friday night was the Railroad Tycoon tournament, and I was in the same group as my friend Alex. I told everyone at the table they should be prepared to lose (because he is very good) and he just laughed. The game was surprisingly high scoring for a five player game with the winner, neither Alex nor me, I did finish second though, which put me in the finals. The winner had a score of 101, whereas I had 94, but I made almost 40 points in the last two turns including completing my Tycoon Objective.
The finals was a tough game, at one point I commented that "I feel like a minnow." because I was probably the only person with less than ten games played. The map was a messed up one too, it had red cubes in Chicago, Charleston and New York and precious few outside it. The high score for the tournament was ~85, and I only scored 70, good enough for fourth only.

Saturday morning was RoboRally, a game I am not particularly fond of, and I was slightly surprised I had signed up for it. I did poorly, worse then the previous year, and scored only 12 points (last year I got 17). I ended up second last. It is an ok game, just not one I am good at, or enjoying playing too much. I find the game a little too mechanical.

Saturday afternoon I was invited to go play a pickup game of Roads & Boats, something I had played the previous year for the first time and loved. This time it was a four player game and I still finished last. The game is a tremendous logistics game, there is some screw you mentality, but very little. It is about being as efficient as possible.

Saturday evening was the auction, it was a bittersweet event for me, for one it was a chance to buy some new games, for the other it was the last of Ken's games being auctioned off.
I ended up purchasing 2 games, one was The Really, Nasty Horseracing Game for 6 bucks, the other was 221B Baker Street for another 2. Ken's games sold for over 700 dollars to the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

I finished the night with a game of Savage Worlds a quasi rpg that uses miniatures rules. Tim was the ref for this game and we had 4 players that all worked together to find and recover the Golden Idol, Billy Idol is the silver one...
I ran Marcus Andres, fearless first mate of the SS Persephone as well as the crew. Will ran Jock MacDonald, the drunken brawler from Scotland, Jerry was Nathaniel Smith, a rugged adventure and the guy whose name I forgot played Professor Donald K Stephenson. Tim played the evil Nazis as our opponent. The crew found the idol and we had to slug our way out to the boats. Tim's blog will give a better explanation of the game (with pictures!) so all I will say is Marcus is still working on his plan to create the SBS... He never did anything outstanding, but he was calm cool and efficient at killing the Nazis, almost as if he enjoyed it...

Sunday was the BattleLore tournament that I was running. I had 18 players sign up for it, with 8 dropping out before the tournament (including me) with 4 more signing up for a total of 14 players. We played only two scenarios in the six hour time slot. The scoring went as I mentioned in an earlier post. The winner won both his games, his second by 7 points to finish at +9 and in first place. I was surprised that some of the players that played had never used Lore, really the biggest difference between it and Commands & Colors: Ancients. The game did have some interesting twists, with some players I expected to win, but did not. New players did ok, with them winning some games, losing others.

Preparing for Fallcon, in less than a week.

I am running the BattleLore tournament at FallCon and I have been playtesting my scenarios, created using the BattleLore Scenario Editor and I must admit that the scenario editor is pretty cool.
My current plan is a set of five scenarios, with each player playing 4 (or 5) of them and the best record winning. I have 6 hours so I figure I might as well try to keep everyone entertained for the full 6 hours. The way I am planning on doing the tourney is you get points for winning and points for your margin of victory. As an example, if you win your first half 5-3 and lose the second half 5-1, your record is 0-1-0 and -2. If you win your second game 5-3 and 5-3 you are 1 win and +4 for that game, which makes your record 1-1-0 +2.