Thursday 16 October 2014

Blast-Tastic!

I recently had the pleasure of attending Blast-Tastic! (yes, the exclamation mark is compulsory), a small sci-fi specific wargaming show in Bristol, for it's very first event. Considering it was an entirely new venture I have to say it was very smoothly run by Michael of Angel Barracks.

I signed up to run demonstration games of Infinity throughout the day using scenery kindly provided by Ian from The Wargaming Trader.

The show itself was a success, although I did bemoan the lack of a bring-and-buy which is normally a great draw for me, and I even picked up some new bits of scenery to take back to my local club.

The main hall with traders and participation games


For me the day was definitely a success as I introduced a fair few people to the Infinity system - despite Seb's best efforts to sabotage me!

Myself and Ian were room with the Lincombe Barn club and I was glad to find out that some of them had picked the game up after I ran demos for them a couple of months ago, which was very gratifying. It's always good to find out that running events has paid off, I'll be looking forward to heading over there more often and playing some games with them soon.

The scenery we had set up looked excellent and was a big draw with lots of people giving positive feedback.

The demo table for the day.

The demo games were played using a mash-up of 2nd edition, Icestorm and what we knew of the N3 rules at that point. Everyone got the hang of the rules really quickly and there were some great plays and mad dashes for objectives made on the day.

A firefight in progress across the central objective

Of course, I wasn't the only person running a game, there were lots of others there too including a Pod Racing game, Gruntz, Lincombe Barn's 6mm Alien Squad Leader, OGRE and more besides!

A sweet looking Pod Racing game all converted out of GW bits.

OGRE with a full compliment of miniatures - very impressive looking!

Overall it was a fun little show, even if I did spend most of it in a small side-room instead of th emain hall and I'm looking forward to the next event being bigger and better. The next Blast-Tastic! will be on September 26th or October 3rd next year (to be confirmed) and I hope to see you there.

4 comments:

  1. Looks cool. I hope I can make it next year. Nice to see a table that's not cliché battle-damaged city too... are those petrol pumps? Genius!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, one of the things I like about the setting is that it's not a grim-dark war-torn dystopian future. I think the petrol pumps you are referring to are clear dice boxes with printed out adverts put inside them. :)

      Hopefully the show will be back bigger and better next year. Might be a good place to run your game too!

      Delete
    2. I see what they are now! Yes, I was confused by the circular posters on the bottoms, they looked like those old petrol pumps with the 'head' on top! :)

      Delete
    3. Now you mention it though, it would be quite nice to have some on scale petrol pumps and the like. With sufficiently explosive rules of course!

      Delete