The Fest - 2016

The Fest... a gathering of nerds, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, a chance to fit in more games in 18 hours than most people play in a year.  This is the 24th iteration of this private, friends-only event, and it was excellent.

First up: X-Wing.  Got in two solid games (capitol ships just for show) of x-wing, playing Imperials.

Brian's extensive collection is shown below.  He had a program which created three semi-random 100point lists that we could chose between.  Saved a LOT of time.

Game 1:

Game 2:

The final shot for game 2:  All four of my fighters crammed into the enemy's blindspot. Very one-sided battle!

Also played "Passcode" which I would say "pass" on, but then we moved on to "Secret Hitler".  Our host, Brian, was in on the kickstarter and had a beautifully produced special edition of the game (sorry, no pics).  It was LOTs of fun, highly recommended, but it is basically Avalon with better production value and Nazis.

Then, probably my favorite game of the evening, "Captain Sonar".  Two teams, each representing a submarine, hunting each other in real time (not turn based!), with each player taking on either the Captain, 1st Mate, Engineering and Sonar positions.  It's all about team work and communication and was crazy fun, and relatively quick playing.  Well, two of the games we played of it lasted 15-20 mins, but one epic game lasted about 40 somehow. If you have opportunities to game with 6-8 players, I very highly recommend this game.

Hats are of course optional (that's my opposing Captain and host, Brian).

Anime Fest 2015

Anime Fest is a mini-con run by a friend of mine for 23 years this August.  Nowadays, there's no real anime to be seen, but that doesn't make it any less fun (especially as I don't really watch anime anymore), as the anime has been replaced with GAMES.  And this year, the main table was all mine for some games of All Quiet on the Martian Front.

I worked pretty hard to get my table looking good for this - who doesn't want to impress old friends a little, especially when exposing them to something for the first time?  We played two really fun games, and I got to introduce my favorite game to lots of folks.

We did multi-player versions of the Defend the Rail Line scenario (and used the long edge for the first time), and an Occupation (hold the victory points) scenario, and both games the American Forces dominated, at least in part due to Marcel's superb ability to roll dice.

No battle report this time (too busy running/teaching the game) but I did get some pictures.

Welcome to "the Fest".

Assembling the forces before the game. I broke them up into "companies" for each player, along with cheat-sheets, to make things easier.  Worked very well.

The table: