Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Skirmish Trays

Ok, maybe not the most exciting topic to be covered in a miniature gaming blog but its the current task at hand.

Skirmish trays for units with 8, 5 and 3 figures.  There are also a handful of four figure trays because, well, there just should be.  It will be interesting to see how these really work in a skirmish type game like DAK & Dragons.  The trays will definitely speed up play but will they detract from the visual appeal as players tried to position there figures for maximum cover etc.

I need to paint these Iraqi Sand - I had a half gallon mixed up to match the vallejo color at my local hardware store.  Once that's dry, I'll add some texture in the form of fine sand but need to careful not to get any in the sabots or the figure bases will not fit.

I did take a look at the reservation system for Historicon and was very pleasantly surprised to see 3 of my 6 scheduled games are already full up - all 3 DAK & Dragons games are full.  There still some room in the SOCOM and Sorcery games, which are essentially the same game but using modern figures rather than WW2.

Having the indoor terrain workbench is great, by the way.

There is one glitch with Historicon.  I always get a table reserved for the entire con because I bring some much stuff/crap to put on a game.  In return, I commit to running game 8-9 times so the table is fully used.  This year there was a bit of a mix up and the my table D26 was allocated to another game to be run each evening.  I don't schedule an evening game to ensure I've got openings to run a version for the vendors who often don't get to play a lot of games.  If we can't make a change it means taking down the game each night which is a proposition I'm not excited about at all.  I've pinged the volunteers at Historicon to see if we can find a solution and am waiting to hear back.

Please note the comments above are not meant as a criticism of the convention staff - they are doing their best trying to manage a large / complicated event with zero compensation.  I mention it more to point out some of the things one needs to prepare for when putting on a game.

2 comments:

Ray Rousell said...

I've been thinking about buying some of these trays myself for my Donnybrook games, if I ever do a game that is?

Joe Procopio said...

Yeah, I registered for Historicon last night and was disappointed to see that all of your DAK and Dragons slots were already full! I've learned my lesson. I went ahead and registered for SOCOM and Sorcery, and am excited to play it! I was pleased to see that my Conan skirmish game based on the story "Beyond the Black River" is also filled via pre-registrants. Being my first time running a game at a con, I'm both excited and nervous. Like you, I've been blogging about my prep work on my blog, Scrum in Miniature:

https://miniaturescrum.blogspot.com/2018/06/up-black-river-without-paddle.html