Cold Wars 2015: My Report

 Another Cold Wars has come and gone.  Overall, I had a great time but something shocking, troubling and just plain odd happened - I didn't buy anything from either the vendor hall or the flea market! (Insert sinister music hear).

Despite not adding to my lead pile, which has been severely depleted during the Painting Challenge, I did have a fantastic two days.  I participated in two Bolt Action tournaments (6 games total) one on Friday and the other on Saturday.  The evenings consisted of board games with the WWPD crew - essentially it was an all around geek fest.

I only took one picture (the first one in this post) and it was midway through the game I played with Judson on Friday - which we ended up as a tie.

I do want to thank the two people who organized the BA tournaments - Mike P on Friday and John B on Saturday.  Both events were a lot of fun and it's a lot of work hauling around 10-12 tables worth of terrain to put one of these things on.

For the BA tournaments I ran a DAK armored list which was centered around 3 Panzer III's.  You've seen a lot of post of the previous months of my painting up this force and the tournaments were the first time I got them on the table!

Fridays tournament was 1,250 points and I had a good showing for a first time with the force going 1-1-1 (Win, Loss, Tie).  The first game against Mike P  and his Brits was a narrow loss - Mike P is a great opponent and is a real challenge to beat - currently I have 2 losses and 1 tie to Mike in tournaments.  The next game against Eric.  Eric was a new player and was running a borrowed tank list ( 3 Shermans).  I managed to beat him to notch my only win for the day.  The last game was a classic against Judson and his Panzer I list.  Playing Judson is a real treat as he's a crafty player but one who puts fun before winning.  We played a tense game that ended in a tie.

Saturday's tournament was 1,000 points and I just paired my list back by removing the Brandenburger squad and the Sig assault gun (neither of which did anything on Friday).  This tournament went well as I went 2-0-1 and won the event on "Hanoswag" points.  This was my second tournament win and was very hard fought.  My first game was a very nice gentlemen (whose name I forget - I'm horrible with names)  against a Russian list with those giant T-35 tanks.  The scenario was Point Defense and I was lucky to win the initial die roll and choose to attack.  I managed to get a win by eliminating the few Russian infantry squads in his list so my opponent couldn't re-take the objective once I seized it.

Game two was against "Mustache Matt", who rivals Mike P for nicest "guy in gaming" and another Russian list - this time more infantry focused and with air support.  We used the new air plane rules for BA (these replace the air observer with a model that can come on the board up to 3 times).  I found the new air rules much better than the observer and a lot more "cinematic"/fun.  I managed to eek out a win.

The final game was against Gordon and his Finns - Finns are tough, real tough.  Gordon was a pleasure to play against and we had a great game.  To be honest he should have won and would have if the game ended after turn six.  Yet again, I got lucky and rolled a six to force a seventh turn and was able to take back two objectives to force a tie.  This game went down to the last die roll!

Gordon was such a nice guy that I decided to give him the prizes for first place as he really deserved them.

I also won the best Axis General award for the two day performance so, all in all, it was a good outing.

The other big news in our household belongs to my son, who competed with some friends in a major Hackathon - HackIllinois during the weekend before Cold Wars.  This event had over 180 college teams and some major corporate sponsors - Google paid for the charter bus to drive Sean's team from Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh) to the Univ of Illinois.  He had a fantastic experience at the event and his team won the Goldman Sachs Innovation award for their project.  The project involved a hack of an X-Box Kinect to use it to teach Sign language by being able to see and correct a users hand gestures for each letter.  Pretty amazing stuff as the project needed to be started and completed in just 36 hours (no sleep!).  A link to the project's page provides a better description than I can: Kinect-ASL.  Sean kind of stands out from his team mates as he's the one who looks like a offensive lineman for a football team.  He's still a tech crazy kid.  We've got him home this week for spring break and for fun he's rebuilding an old PC to operate as a server and backup unit for our house.  He'll also use it to run multiplayer games and thinks it will generate some cash to help fund whatever summer internship he gets.