Funderhammer and I set out for Chicago on Thursday. He was in charge of the reservations this year, and I have to say he did an outstanding job - as a former hotel employee, he knew enough to get us an upgrade to a junior suite:
This room was freakin' huge - king size bed, TWO sleeper sofas, and a kitchenette. We're planning on booking one of these next year and just trying to find four other people to split it...
...after looking into it, I think this would even be my preferred faction, so it's definitely going into the "build" pile.
On Friday, we hit the dealer room early. I was hoping to get a Conquest at the show, but nobody had one available. I had been using a too-small, discontinued Reaper bag for my Warmachine army, and had been plagued by broken models - I decided to step up at the Battlefoam booth and by a new Warmachine bag, a P3 bag for my most-used paints & tools, and some extra trays.
(...and no, I'm not going to address all the recent drama regarding Battlefoam in this post. Suffice it to say, the staff at the booth was very helpful, and I like to bag a lot).
Next up was the Forge World booth. They implemented some screwy system this year where they stored pre-orders somewhere else in the building - you had to got to the booth and tell them you were ready to pick up your pre-order, then they would tell you to come back in an hour, and in the meantime a runner would go pick up your order. I was a little miffed about this on my first trip to the booth, but it did seem to put an end to the 3- and 4-hour waits of past years - I was only in line for ten minutes or so each time. I did a pretty small order this year - just some psycannons & Land Raider doors for my Grey Knights, and the new Model Masterclass book:
(I will go into detail about the book in a future post). The rest of Friday was pretty much hanging out, meeting people and seeing what was going on in general.
On Saturday I had a class with Les Bursley from Awesome Paint Job:
This was a very cool class, and I learned a lot. Needless to say, Les has a real talent for making things seem less intimidating, and it comes across in person as well as it does in his videos.
Les was also demoing stuff at the Badger booth during the con, and he gave us a "code word" to give to Ken at the booth - I dropped by and talked with Ken, and the code word got me a free set of Ghost Tints from their new Minitaire paint line:
Funderhammer & I were both trying to keep the food budget under control this year, but that night we headed out for dinner at Claim Jumper:
...and of course Funderhammer harassed the staff until they gave him a bib & crayons:
We headed back to the hotel after dinner - we were both stuffed, so we just hung out in the room for a bit. Funderhammer headed downstairs for a while to check things out, and returned with a birthday gift - a set of Great Bears of Gallowswood:
Later that night, we tried out Bodgermania:
This was actually a lot more fun than I expected - it's a pretty standard "trick-taking" -type of card game, with Privateer Press' kid-friendly "Bodger" theme hung on it, but I actually really liked it.
Another thing we picked up was Dreadball:
I was seriously considering backing the Kickstarter, but never took the plunge - Funderhammer was a huge Blood Bowl fan back in the day, so he was on board. I grabbed the Kick Off box and he grabbed some expansion teams, the Trontek 29'ers & the Void Sirens. Mantic threw in some goodies with purchase at the convention, I'm looking forward to getting them painted up and trying it out.
Sunday was mostly spent packing and making one last lap through the hotel - overall a pretty low-key Adepticon this year, which I think Funderhammer & I both needed. But we're already planning a group outing for next year, with a possible team-tournament appearance...
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