From: Dean Gundberg <dean.gundberg@n...>
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 17:28:01 -0500
Subject: GenCon '99 (long)
Once again I survived GenCon and the drive home (though I did not drive until 4am like last year). Thanks to Mark Siefert for putting up the pictures from Thursday. http://www.uwm.edu/~cthulhu/FT/gcthurs.htm He has the disks with Friday's pics on them so they should be up soon. I have the pics from Saturday and Sunday and will email them to him when I can. There is a pic of a Helm, Full Thrust! demo game on Andon's Virtual GenCon site under Thursday then miniatures. New miniatures and games. Holistic Design's Noble Armada has some new miniatures out. There are some pics up on Thursday's page. They are pretty nice but the large dreadnoughts don't have much if any detail on the bottom. I picked up the boxed sets since HD usually discounts heavily late Saturday and Sunday so they don't have to ship the stuff home. The next box of church ships is due later this year. They Symbiots supplement and minis have been delayed until next year though their computer game of Noble Armada will be out this year. Agents of Gaming displayed their Poseidon carrier mini (maxi) and it is HUGE! 7" long and at least 3" wide. They had a gold one on top of their B5 Wars Tourney Trophy and had another one on display later. I got a pic of this on next to a few Omegas and Novas and it dwarfs them. Expect a price tag of around $35 on this one. They also had their 'Fleet Action' scale fighters and a few capital ships for sale. The Thunderbolt fighters looked very good, but the rest were just OK (the GZG not-versions were as good or better). The FA scale ships varied. The minis of the smaller ships (Olympus and Vorchan) are pretty good and could work as an in-scale versions with their regular minis. The Primus and the Hyperion looked a bit angular and not quite right to me. I did see some of their Fleet Action game demo and saw some rejected Omega and Nova FA minis but their detail was hard to see. The FA game is on a much larger scale than FT. Each Squadron of ships is controlled as a unit with a squadron being as big as 5-10 large ships and all associated fighters. There were about 300 fighters between the demo fleets. Movement uses a basic template of possible moves, kinda like Space Fleet, but the actual move is up to the player. I was not able to stay for the combat phase. They said a prior playtest indicated some needed changes in the rules but they had not updated the rules yet. AoG also had some of the new Star Fleet Battles minis for sale (I got pics somewhere). A Federation War Destroyer (3 nacelles with 1 below and 2 on sides of saucer), Kzinti Medium Cruiser, Klingon D7 Heavy Battlecruiser, Gorn Battle Destroyer (like a Gorn Cruiser but smaller), and an Advanced Gorn Destroyer (like the BDD but with a circular texture that bugged me) Last Unicorn Games 'Engage!' starship combat game for their Star Trek RPG. I asked them about this since there is no mention of it on their webpage any longer. They did say it would be out later this year (November) and the minis would be out about the same time. We will have to wait and see. Gaming The arena in Bruce Hall was a bit better place than last year. The rest of the convention center should be done by the end of this year so next year the miniature gaming should be connected to the rest of the con. I did not play anything but I watched a lot and ran some FT games. There was a big demand for the GeoHex sponsored games with most if not all being full before the con started. Some of the games (my Sci-Fi Crossover and Mark's Severed Dreams for example) were duplicate in the pre-reg books and both sets filled or almost filled. The DSII games had some hooks this year and filled better than in the past (Falkenburg vs Slammers, Battletech vs Warhammer, and Blitzkrieg a GZG universe game based on WW2) The SGII games seemed pretty full this year too with Allan's Enemy Mine game set in GeoHexes cavernscape looking pretty cool. People seemed to pick up the vector and FB rules pretty well when I ran a game (watching Schoon run one the night before helped a lot). They blew each other up and had fun. Allan was to bring the vector markers and showed up with these colored swizzle sticks which worked out great indicating the ship's vector (there is a pic on Thursday's page). Now I have to pick up a bunch. Mark's Demo Derby had the cheeziest ships I had seen (all C bats, all submunition packs, etc) and Schoon was able to use his wave gun a couple time. My Sci-Fi Crossover game went pretty well after I added about 4 players to the game that I had not planed on (split fleets, etc) and the fighters were everywhere. It drew a good crowd of gawkers and I had to answer lots of questions on where I got all the minis. The Star Wars Empire did not escape but most players had fun. Most of the players stayed past the end time of the game to finish the game. The Empire players would have liked to have all of their fighters out at the start, this would have helped them defend against attacking fighers better plus their should wouldn't have had the movement restrictions when launching fighters. Mark's Severed Dreams game went on at the same time and had its share of onlookers. The jumpgate minis that Allan got from Jon and GZG were very nice. I had heard that AoG stopped by and saw all of the 'Star Tiger' fighter minis and made some noise about them having the license. Saturday morning was the 2nd Annual FT Tourney. 10 players started off in a prelim round with the highest scores moving on. Surprisingly last year's champ Schoon did not make the cut. Hobie was the other one to get knocked out right away. The next round saw 8 players battling to advance when the list's own Rick Rutherford had destroyed all of the escorts in the NSL carrier fleet but when we added points, we found out there was a problem with that fleet. We worked out a compromise between him and his opponent and the game went on with Rick emerging victorious. In the end, it was down to Rick and Carl, last year's runner up. Rick ran the ESU SDN fleet he had all tourney and Carl use the FSE Light Carrier fleet. In the end it was Carl's fighters that won him the championship. Thanks a lot to KR and GeoHex for donating the fleets of minis as prizes. Next year we may start at noon instead of 8am and I am thinking about having 2 rounds of random play and then seeding the top 4 instead. Later was my Galactic 500, vectored thrust racing game. I added a bunch of players and there were about 9-10 at the starting line Most had never played FT and signed up for the game due to the racing spaceship theme. I ended up doing all of the movement for the players to save time and confusion. They accelerated off to the first beacon, with some ships at a velocity of 22 and little planning of their next move. Once they hit the first beacon, they could fire at each other and boy did they. My ships were overgunned for racers and after a couple turns, most ships had major damage, except for the young kid who was almost off the table. It was at this point the game changed to one of fun and the racing goal was forgotten. They had a lot of fun in moving and then firing at each other with threshold rolls and damage control rolls being big events. It was a great example of changing the rules to make the game fun. It was getting late, to they all asked that they be allowed to destroy each other, so I turned off the safeties and made sure every one had some thrust, and at least one fire con and working weapon. The then destroyed each other and had more fun. Then I talked FT and demoed vector movement for a couple guys who were busy earlier. It was a long day, but not as long as the guys in the finals for AoG's B5 Wars tourney which took 10 hours to complete. That is enough for now, I'll add some more thoughts later.