KulbaCon 2013 Report

KublaCon, the San Francisco bay area's largest gaming convention, was held this weekend.  I took Friday off of work and headed over the convention around noon after packing up all my stuff.  The main plan was to play mostly board games throughout the weekend, but I did bring along Muskets and Tomahawks, X-Wing, and my SAGA stuff.

R2D2 ... and Yoda backpack.

Friday was mostly board games, playing lots of games of King of Tokyo, Gloom, and of course the first of the many rounds made through the dealer's room. My favorite dealer at this convention is always ZombieSmith and they did not disappoint.  They had several new releases for their Quar and the much anticipated Shieldwall rulebook for their War of Ashes game. I picked up some newly released Gwynt to compliment my Royalist armies (I love the bicorns on these guys along with their red jackets). For Shieldwall I was able to play in a large demo game and had a blast - it is a truly unique system that focuses on the ebb and flow of large bodies of troops smashed together in a chaotic shieldwall.  I have a 4 banner army for this (after spending some money at their booth) and will post up a review of the system and armies in a separate blog post.  I also picked up some armour for my Coftyran army for Quar.  Pictures below compliments of my phone.

New Quar.

I managed to get the last stretcher bearer.

A mix of whimsical one offs.

Demo armies for Shieldwall.

Various factions from Shieldwall
(of which there are four).

Quar - Royalist Coftyrans.

Quar - new releases for Fidwog, including some
splendid looking new cavalry.

Quar armour options.

Quar stuff.

Shieldwall - the Kuld are a hoard army and my
first army I'll be playing for this system.

Shieldwall - a buddy of mine picked up a 4 banner
Vidaar army - looking forward to playing against him.

A Kuld army for Shieldwall - and the army I used in
the demo game.

The Vidaar army I played against in the demo game.

The Shieldwall demo games photos are below:

Cool game for kids/younger wargamers called Wooden Wars. The Kickstarter for the system just ended (funded). They had a large setup with lots of kids playing.  They move units and roll little bouncy balls to knock over the other sides troops when shooting.  Since I have a 4 year old, I just couldn't resist and picked up some units so I could get him started with wargaming early.  All of the miniatures are laser cut thick MDF and can stand up to a hell of a beating.

Wooden Wars game in progress.

Dan Kerrick, a good friend of mine, ran a regional qualifying X-Wing tournament. John Lantz, another friend, managed to take home first place using his Tie Fighter swarm list.  He won a free ticket to the national tournament in Seattle this year - congratulations John! Even more shocking than that was the rather attractive girl that played in the tournament!  I was heading back home about this time so couldn't play in the tournament myself, but watched a little into the first round.

X-Wing regional qualifying tournament in progress.
(girl in black, third table from the left)

Traffic jam!

Nice trophy!

I brought along my Muskets and Tomahawks stuff. I had just finished basing my new French infantry regiment and my last Indian unit.  I had more than enough to run two game simultaneously so I setup my two 4x4 tables and ran some people through the game.  I was setup in the main hallway to the miniatures rooms, so I had lots of foot traffic and people asking about M&T - so hopefully we'll see new players as a result!

One of the best parts of this was Wargames Illustrated was here and they stopped by to take some pictures and chat.  Being rather camera challenged myself, I spoke with him about taking pictures of miniature battles (he had a Nikon SLR like I have).  He filled me in on how to really capture the clarity and depth of tabletop games in progress!  I look forward to providing much improved pictures of games in progress in my future posts.

My British F&I stuff.

Indians with some civilians (most of them where already
out on the table).

My French F&I stuff.

Getting setup.

Kicking off the first turns.

Josh (head zombie at ZombieSmith) showing
in theme tattoos - sword and musket - nice! 

When I got home my Dead Man's Hand stuff had arrived --- whoot!!!  Oh wait, incomplete order --- for some reason they didn't include any of the card decks (I should have two) and out of the four gangs they only sent two???!!!! I contacted them immediately, the good news is that even over the long weekend they responded within an hour letting me know they'd get the missing stuff in the post on Tuesday.