The weekend of April 21-24 (ok, the long weekend) was the annual Little Wars historical miniatures convention in Chicago. It has started to expand a bit, with some fantasy and sci-fi games as well now. Mantic had a small booth there last year, and asked Blake and I to run some tournaments and his big game for Kings of War and Armada. So a few short weeks after Adepticon I packed up my stuff again and headed back up to the windy city.
The unfortunate thing was that with the very short timing of this, no one registered for the tournaments :-(. Plus their event submission system didn't understand one person putting in multiple events at the same time (so for my sixteen person tournament on Saturday I had 1 table. They also didn't quite get what Blake needed for his 22,000 points per side big game (which was a single 6' x 24' long table). But we made due, and had a pretty successful event after all.
It did turn out that we had 3 6'x6' tables all weekend, so we combined them to make a single 6' x 18' table, which Blake set up leaving out two of his panels. On Friday, we had 3 more tables, so I set up demos of Armada and Kings of War.
These weren't quite like my learn to p!ay sessions being just two people at a time (so they would get started quicker and I could explain as they went). I did four Armada demos that afternoon, and one for Kings of War, and the players all really enjoyed it, and most of them headed back to the booth to buy miniatures.
A couple of guys were very interested as I was showing the game, and asked if I was doing it later.
I had the one Kings of War game with Goblins v. Salamanders, and though I started off killing his Tyrants before they could get I to combat, he came back and pretty much wiped out the rest of the goblins.
Meanwhile, Blake got his first big game off and running!
The two guys that had been watching came back with a friend and asked to do a 3 way battle, so each started in a corner, with the goal to claim the island in the other corner. The wind started from the target island, so the Orc player ended up in the back as the Basileans and Kingdoms of Men players encountered each other first, but in the end he was able to take advantage of them beating on each other to finish off most of the other fleets and win the game.
For Saturday, we only had the three tables that were being used for the big game, so one of the players from Friday came back and we did an armada scenario on the water end of the table. It was all six of my demo fleets - Orcs/Empire of Dust/Twilight Kin vs Basileans/Dwarves/Kingdoms of Men. Each side had to cross the board and land on the beach on the other side to deliver reinforcements behind enemy lines.
The evil forces put up a good fight, and managed to get two small ships through, delivering a regiment of mummies from the Empire of Dust, and troops of Gargoyles and Shadow Hounds from the Twilight Kin. No Orcs made it through though.
However this left the rest of the nearly intact 'good' fleet to arrive the next two turns, first dropping a large contingent of Dwarves, followed by Basilians and Kingdoms of Men landing the turn after (though none of the heavy knights from either force made it ( horses and heavy armor not being so great at sea)).
On Sunday I did one more Armada demo to finish off a great weekend.
We hope that with a bit more lead time we can have an even bigger event next year, so if you are in the Chicagoland area, mark your calendars for Late April for some more Little Wars!
Because it is all fun and games. . .
the idea to tie the Armada game into KoW one is excellent, did you just do the turns separately for each game or keep them in sync?
ReplyDeleteIt's been a concept for a while, since I made that water board. We let each game go by itself, with the idea that no reinforcements could land before turn 3 of big game. As it was it started at turn 4, and wind change in the Armada game had a lot of affect. The rest of the reinforcements on good side arrived at turn 5 of big game. And to be honest, the Abyssals were already thin on the ground. It was great way to tie them in, and get both games running. It was a blast to look up and see troops landing! All only possible because of Mike's armies and demo sets!
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