Cold Wars 2012 Report Part 1

Hi Kids,  Once again we play our dangerous games....   John and I made the pilgrimage to Lancaster PA to grab life by the throat and live the life other wannabe gamers only dream of!!!  And to top it all off, my record for the show was an absolutely unprecedented 4:1!  Who would've thought the local lad nicknamed "Point Cow" would ever have a winning record, especially at the Big Show?!?!?  Will wonders never cease?  Once again the HMGS Gamemasters have pulled out all the stops and tied the valves closed to put on an amazing bucket of games; everything from Gnome Wars to Zombie Survival, with Napoleonics, AWI, Colonials, WW2, WW1, Arab-Israeli, Victorian Sci-Fi and everything else!  But I digress....  The first two pictures are of a huge Gnome Wars game on Saturday, all sorts of fighting sail engaged in storming the beaches!

Here we have one of my fav aircraft of all time, the Mi-24.  They just look mean!  It's on a gunrun above the 25mm "Wolverines" game, based on the movie, you guessed it,  "Red Dawn."  Rumor has it the movie is being made again.  Maybe they'll have more dancing.  Two more shots of the action....

 The Commies move down Main Street USA in this 25mm game!

Red blooded Americans blast the Commies on the other side of the river.  More dice, dammit!  Here they come!!!

The 1/2400 Turkish fleet sorties out to take on the Greeks in 1912, eastern Med.  This game was the one loss I suffered, and it was absolutely CRUSHING.  The Greek dice were Posidon's own, they were averaging 5 hits on four dice! Three of them critical hits!  I'm still not sure how it happened; extreme range, overconcentration, evasive manuevers, it all resulted in Turkish ships flying through the air!  It was all over before we got with 10,000 yards.  If Beatty had witnessed it those British Battlecrusiers would have been refitted way before Jutland!  In retaliation I think I took out a Greek Secondary gun.

Check Your Six is the name of the ruleset used in this WW2 aviation game.  Holy Cow, I don't think I've ever seen a Mavis flying boat in a game before now!

Got 25mm?  Great Big Check!  The line up before one of the dozens of Horse & Musket games.

WW1 pilots duke it out in "Aerodrome"!

15mm WW2, masses of Hun Armor pile up outside a Russian village.  Maybe they're all on their way to church?  Yeah, to burn it down!

Frank Chadwick's 20mm WW2 game, Northwest Europe.  Lots of the stuff turned out to be dummies!  Frank's a sly one!

25mm Nappies?  Massive check!  If all the guys combined their armies, they could do the whole 15 years in 1:1 scale!

A fistful of shots of a 25mm Victorian Sci-Fi game, steam powered warmachines!  From the terrain it must be Mars!

Two more shots of the opposing forces.  VSF is gaining popularity by leaps and bounds!  Even the local lads have been known to get in on the action.

 More of The Emporer's Finest; 25mm Nappies, and lots of 'em!  Lots of green, those might be the Russians facing off against the Frogs.  "Shako" provides the rules.

Rome vs. the Barbarian Horde.  Must be a taxation dispute. There goes the neighborhood.

Just one of the dozens of 25mm Ancients games, this one in the tournament room.  How can you not dig elephants?  To Crush your enemies, to see them flee before you.....  what better way than on 10,000 pounds of bad attitude?

Great War action in 25mm, for the first time anywhere they had a tournament in this time period, using GW Historical's "Great War" 600 point armies.  Looks like early war, with German pickle helms surging across the fields into the guns of the Old Contemptibles.

 Gnome Wars ever expanding range now includes Zulus and witch doctor looking dudes!  Please, no native cures!

One of the Raleigh lads puts it all on the table in a Carnage & Glory game of Nappies.  Bonk's 25mm troops made more than one appearance during the weekend.  I think one of the games was so big it took all honking day!  Looks like Russian Grenadiers.

 The long view on Bonk's table.

Larry Bond  (yeah, the guy who wrote all those books) throws down some naval action in a game of "Harpoon".  Those might be 1/2400 ships.

Looks like Ft. Zindenuff of French Foreign Legion fame, reduced to 25mm.

The biggest game of the whole show, at least if you measure by surface area.  The 1690 Battle of Beachy Head; Anglo-Dutch vs. French.  The table was about 35 feet long.  Fighting Sail in a big way!  They ran this one a couple times IIRC. "Victory Under Sail" were the rules.

 A few of the local fauna hang out in the Sarengeti in Howard Whitehouse's "The Lion Eats Tonight" game in 25mm.  In fact, those two Jumbo were under my control!  They don't look all that impressive right now, but in a turn or two one of them got gutshot and became, to use standard british understatement "mildly irked" and ended up killing three folks.

 Wildebeast, gazelle, hippos, crocs, lions, and even a ninja rhino lurk out there somewhere.

Sir Percival takes a potshot at a hippo, managing to infuriate it.  It then chased him and his party around one of the kopjis, crushing whomever was slowest.  Percival ended up losing his entire party,  his pants, and one shoe.  He did manage to hold onto his flask, however.

 Sir Percy heads for the hills, while Agatha Wellington, faithful bearer, zigs when he should have zagged.

 Still trying to escape, Percy heads uphill.  The hippo's low center of gravity and low gearing provide surprising cross country speed!

Meanwhile across the board, another fearless adventurer is mobbed by cheetahs and hippos!  Another bearer goes down!

 Larry the Lion, awoken by Allen Watermain's passage, attacks!  Waterman remained calm, cool, and collected and blasts him stone dead.

 Larry's family takes offense, and takes the offensive, but somehow managed to get killed off one by one by Watermain, a Gentleman in the truest sense of the word.  The bag was about 4 lions, all killed by a single shot!

A gutshot Jumbo registers a complaint about the shooting ability (or lack thereof) of Lady Carmelia.  Hey, that's a really nice parasol you've got there buddy......

Mesmorized by something as amazing as mobile shade from the Tsavo sun, Jumbo decides the parasol might be something worth having.  Mom and the kid are not so distracted, and another bearer becomes one with the soil.  Lady Carmelia considers her options.

Another planeload of happy gamers comes in to the brand new 12,000ft runway at Lancaster Airport, only 2 miles from the hotel.  Sorry folks, if only it were true! 

Guess that's about it for this installment of the life & times of the Chuckster.  Stay tuned for another report or two about the latest Cold War convention.  Don't forget the next one is Spring Fever, April, Raleigh, NC!!  Be there or be square!  Don't make me come looking for you!