5150Well, MilleniumCon was a mixed bag this year.
I thoroughly enjoyed staying with my friends, as did my family. I really need to get over there more than once a year.
The Con itself was, as I said, a mixed bag. It was great to catch up with a lot of the convention goers I've met over the years. The two 5150 games I played were sadly lacking though. It's not the system (which I've played many times), but rather the scenarios.
The first one was a huge "battle royale" scenario, and that suffered from the usual problems of a really huge game. There were too many figures crammed into too tight a spot, and the unique flavor of 5150 was almost completely lost in an almost Warhammer 40k-ish slug fest. Sigh.
The second one suffered only because of a very bad deployment choice. The best way to describe it is to compare it to another un-fun game I played once, where the enemy was given two mines to place along a road, and the goal of ambushing us. Well, my opponent put both mines right in my deployment hex, which pretty much ended the game on turn 1. (Note: it would have been a better game to put the mines half way along the road, so I could get my whole supply train on the board, and he could have actually attacked the column!)
The gamemaster really should have called the game after the first round, and reset everything. It was obvious that we were going to get chewed up and spit out even before the rolling started. It's a pity, because the scenario really looked like it would have been fun.
About the only fun thing that happened in the 5150 games was that the "Monkey" forces (think Planet of the Apes, but smaller) betrayed our alliance and blew up our "Jawas" (Not really Jawas, but similar in size and fondness for salvage and repair). The one remaining Jawa forged a quick alliance with them, claiming he could hot-wire a spaceship they were trying to steal.
I also played in an All Things Zombie game, which was fun as usual.
The flea market was as chaotic as you'd expect, but I got an unbelievably fantastic deal on a BUNCH (200+) of figures. I swear it must be 20lbs of metal! The box is large enough to actually be hard to lift.
I got around 60 Norman knights, 100 Irish warriors, and a few dozen Vikings, Saxons and Norman foot soldiers, all for $50. When I got home and identified everything, it turned out to be well over $400 worth of stuff! Holy crap!
There are enough Normans in the collection that I can consider converting some of them into Spanish Knights for use with my Andalusians. I'll need a lot more Norman infantry to do an army, but this is a TREMENDOUS starting point.
Now, I was mostly interested in the Normans, and $50 for around $200 worth of stuff is fantastic enough, but to get a VERY good start on an Irish army was an unexpected bonus. The Irish are a "horde" army which in general will need twice the number of figures that a more professional force would have, and even 100 figures is only "a good start", but the more I read up on the Dark Ages Irish, the more interesting they become. They'll definitely go into the queue after the Vikings (who invaded Ireland in a big way), and maybe even before the Normans.
