Adepticon 2016 Recap

Hey all, long time no post, kids work house blah blah blah.  Anyways, even though everyone else covered their Adepticon trip a a few weeks ago, I wanted to get my annual post up here.

This year I headed to Adepticon with Funderhammer & Bill - I had just formally met Bill a couple of weeks earlier despite seeing him around our FLGS, but Funderhammer assured me that he probably wouldn't axe-murder me in my sleep, so we were good to go.  (Just kidding - Bill was a great guy & about as nice a guy as you'd ever meet.  For a 9th Age player, anyway)).

Thursday

We wanted to get to the hotel ASAP, since they were sending emails offering convention goers a $50 credit if you gave up your room - apparently they massively overbooked the hotel.  After a last-minute revision of babysitting/work plans, we got on the road Thursday morning and had a rather uneventful drive.  Funderhammer got us upgraded to a suite, and I have to admit I've had worse rooms:

After getting checked in & picking up our badges and swag bags, we headed over to a Chicago institution, Portillo's, for some dinner:

When we got back, Funderhammer & I headed to our first class, Army Speed Painting 101 with Aaron Lovejoy.  I've taken classes with Aaron at GenCon before, but usually they were geared towards competition painting or basing, not speed painting.  Aaron actually has a pretty interesting approach - were I'd consider working on a squad and doing stuff like "just paint the pants on each miniature, then just paing the boots, etc" as "speed painting" Aaron gets WAY more granular - like "just paint the front left toe of the boot" then move on to the next model in the squad.  Basically, if you're spending more than a few seconds on each "section", then you're not breaking it down far enough.  To demonstrate, Aaron assigned everyone in class a TINY fraction of a model, then started shoving identical minis into our "assembly line":

...the point being, while they weren't going to win any contests, they were definitely of passable "tabletop" quality. Later, due to the copious amounts of coffee I needed to consume to make it through the con, I converted my mini:

Friday

The next day, we headed to the dealer hall and the shopping began in earnest.  One of my first stops was the Secret Weapon Miniatures booth, were I chatted with Justin for a few minutes and picked up some weathering powders & a few of the new paints to try:

Next I stopped by the Ironheart Artisans booth to pick up a custom order that Alex was gracious enough to let me pick up at the con.  I also picked up a new set of brushes to try out:

I had also been thinking about painting a bust, and he had a pretty cool one on sale:

One of the coupons in our swag bags was a postcard to fill out with your email address that said "Bring this to the Privateer Press booth for a prize!" I was expecting a sticker or a cheap trinket, but they were giving out faction books!

(Granted, know we know that they were offloading old stock in preparation for Mk3, but it was still a nice surprise).

Next I stopped by the Battlefront booth and picked up a container of MDF blanks (I'll be doing a write-up using these soon):

Funderhammer was chatting with the guys at the CMON booth, and lamented while he'd like to try Wrath of Kings (VIG's got a starter box in their swag bags), he didn't have anyone to play the game with.  They passed along another starter box for me!

While trying to identify what the "new hotness" would be at Adepticon this year, it quickly became apparent that it was skirmish game Arena Rex.  We all bought a starter and will be trying it out more in depth in the not-too-distant future:

I made so, so many trips to the Reaper booth for paints this year - I don't think this is even close to all of the ones I picked up:

Found a guy tucked away in the corner of the concourse selling homemade chapter banners & purity seals - while I haven't thought about Space Marines in a loooong time, these were too cool to pass up:

That night, Funderhammer & I had a couple of classes, the first of which was Painting Smoother Blends with Rhonda Bender.  This was one of those types of classes that I take every year, swear that I'm going to incorporate it into my painting, then get home and remember that I'm lazy.  But no, it was great info and Rhonda really broke it down into easily understandable steps, and I was fairly pleased with my results.

From here, we went to our next class, Painting Realistic Faces with David Powell.  David had some amazing examples of his work on hand:

Despite being hampered by several, um, "beverages" I made before we left the room, I was pretty pleased with my progress:

Saturday

The next day, my first class was Basic Technique in Finishing, Including Airbrush Technique with Caleb Wissenback.  I really haven;t kept up with my airbrushing, and have resolved to do better in the coming year.  Caleb had a lot of good advice & tips.

My next class was Airbrush 102, Airbrush Cleaning & Maintenance with Ken Schlotfeldt, the president of Badger Airbrush.  I was pleased to learn that I was doing everything (mostly) correct, and afterwards I picked up one of these cool airbrush maintenance kits from the Badger booth:

After my classes were over for the day, Funderhammer, Bill & I headed to the Privateer Press Iron Arena to get some games in:

Oooh, swanky new focus tokens!

After we were done, we realized it was our last night in town to get a "fancy" dinner, so we headed over to the Weber Grill restaurant.  When we got back to the room, Bill broke out a copy of Gloom, which was a lot of fun:

Sunday

Sunday we packed up the car and made a few trips around the convention center, where we bumped into Robe Guy:

...and while waiting for the raffle drawing, we checked out the Crystal Brush entries:

After the drawing (none of us won anything), we headed out, another Adepticon in the bag!

Thoughts on Catan, Asmodee, Fantasy Flight & Origins

Hey all.  Sorry for the lack of bloginess lately, raising a kid and all that.  At any rate, I saw a few articles in the past month and had some thoughts I wanted to get down.

While most of you came here for painting/terrain making tutorials, you know I occasionally feature a board game review.  In reality, for a long, long time, board games were a much bigger part of my gaming than anything else.  In fact, while I was dating my future wife, she introduced me to The Settlers of Catan.  Most of you, even if you don't particularly care for board games, have probably heard of it.  It was the game responsible for introducing most people to the concept of "Eurogames", games that are very different than the type we grew up with (Monopoly, Scrabble, etc).  Although it's been a couple of years since I've played a game of Catan or any of it's variants, it still has a special place in my heart.

It's also no secret that boardgames have exploded in popularity in the past several years, especially among millennials. This trend is so prevalent that my city has had several new stores open that deal almost exclusively in board games, and even supports a dedicated board game parlour. The popularity of Catan means you can even buy gaming tables that are made just for playing Catan.  A few years ago, there was a glut of articles talking about how Silicon Valley had been overtaken by Catan-mania.

So imagine my surprise when I read that Asmodee had acquired the rights for Catan from Mayfair Games.

See, board games are handled similarly to books - the publishing rights can be bought or sold (and in fact are all the time).  And the rights are usually separate for each language/country.

But the English-language rights for Catan are arguably the most valuable cash cow in the entire gaming industry.  This is the board game industry equivalent of J.K. Rowling selling the rights to all the Harry Potter books, or George Lucas selling off Star Wars.

The rights were bought by Asmodee, a french company that also recently merged with one of my favorite publishers, Fantasy Flight, and just a couple of months before that, bought another of my favorite publishers, Days of Wonder.

While this undoubtedly makes Asmodee the new 800-pound-gorilla of the board game industry, what does it mean?  Is it a good deal? Will Mayfair survive?

I don't know.

It's impossible to say without knowing what Asmodee paid for the rights to Catan, and even then, I probably don't know enough to speak with any authority on the subject.

A lot of those articles about the "board game craze" are five or six years old at this point.  One point of view is that Mayfair made a fortune, and was smart to get out before the bubble popped.  The other side could say that Catan is a cash cow that hasn't even begun to be milked, and Asmodee made a smart buy.  Like I said, without in-depth info about the financials, it's all speculation.

One of my main concerns is a bit more personal - Mayfair Games was the premiere sponsor of my favorite annual convention, Origins Game Fair.  Will Mayfair still take this role at Origins?  And will the fans respond to them if they don't have Catan in their portfolio anymore?  This article says:

Catan Studios, Inc. is the name being given to the team that is part of Asmodee. Mayfair isn’t just cutting all ties, though, as they will still help with the coordination of all official events listed for Catan this year, as well as CatanDay, and the Catan World Championship.

This change is part of a management change happening at Mayfair. Such changes include Larry Roznai becoming both President (which he already was) and CEO (formerly held by Pete Fenlon). Alex Yeager will now be the VP of Acquisition & Development, which had been done by S. Coleman Charlton. Various other VP and Director positions have new people in charge of them as well.

A lot of Mayfair's involvement with Origins will probably hinge on Larry Roznai - he's kind of a fixture at Origins.  I have to admit I've talked with him, attended seminars led by him, and always found him to be a pleasant guy.  But, apparently he's been at odds with Origins: a couple of years ago a well-liked member of the GAMA (the company that puts on Origins every year) staff was let go, and he shared a lot of info on Facebook:

(Names and pics obscured to protect the innocent, blah blah blah).  

I'd hate to see Origins move from Columbus, as it's local to me - it's my annual vacation, and I do the bulk of my gaming purchases every year there and at Adepticon.  It's an interesting idea presented by the former employee that Mayfair pulling out of Origins would be a non-issue - I'm not so sure that's true, simply because I don't know who would pick up the slack.  Fantasy Flight hasn't attended Origins in several years.  Rio Grande had a good showing 4 or 5 years ago, but seems to have scaled back their presence in favor of GenCon.  Queen Games has stepped up quite a bit in the past couple of years, but I don't think they have the titles or fan following to be the "major" sponsor.  Looney Labs used to be a major sponsor several years ago but stopped attending due to scheduling issues (and other unspoken but implied reasons). 

Another interesting piece of the puzzle was a recent Asmodee's announcement:

The marketplace has long been distorted by providing one-size-fits-all sales terms to every retail account, regardless of its channel of sale. The growth in demand for games over the last decade, in our view, has been fueled not only by fantastic product, but by the support of specialty retailers who incubate personal connections between players, facilitate tournaments and leagues, provide instant product availability, and increasingly provide a “third place” that is instrumental for so many gamers to enjoy and discover our products. The retailer cost of providing such channel services is significant, and so we’re now making policy changes to ensure that the sales terms provided to those retailers, relative to other channels, are positively reflective of the value they add to our distribution chain. - See more at: http://www.purplepawn.com/2015/12/asmodee-consolidating-operations-in-north-america/#sthash.6SA54g71.dpuf

What does the above marketing-speak mean?  Short short answer: no more cheap online sales of games.  While I'm more willing than a lot of people to spend a little bit more to support my local retailer or vendor at a convention, it's nice to have the option to get stuff online.  What this means as far as going up against Amazon will be an interesting scenario as well.

Jude's Origins 2015 Video Report

Origins Game Fair, Part II

The next morning, we made our way to the board room and started with an old favorite, Dominion:

It had been a while since I'd played, but it didn't take long to get back into the swing of things.  I'd forgotten how groundbreaking Dominion was when it came out, and how many games have copied it's mechanics since then.

After that, we went back to one of favorites from previous years, Wasabi!:

my only complaint about this game is that's it's been out of print for a while - I want a copy for my library!

Enough already:  Shopping time!

I picked up Risk: Godstorm because it's been on my shopping list forever, and I still loves me some Risk.  Plus lots of miniatures!

I also picked up Patchwork from the Mayfair Games booth - it was recommended to me by the guys at my FLGS, but they didn't have any in stock at the time.  It's two players (great for the wife & I) and I'm betting she'll like the theme. 

I neglected to take a picture, but I also picked up Qwirkle - another recommendation from the guys at the FLGS.

I also grabbed the most recent Pandemic expansion, The Cure.  Granted, I haven't played the last two Pandemic expansions I bought, but... hey, who asked you, anyway?

...and no convention shopping trip would be complete without buying some fresh dice - both for me:

...and for the boy:

He already rolls better than his old man: