KulbaCon 2016 Convention Report

KublaCon 2016 has come and gone.  This was in my opinion the largest sized convention to date in the bay area - a significant increase in attendees even from last year.  I saw a lot of younger attendees - includes a large number of teenagers - playing games all weekend which is great to see.

I arrived early on Friday and got excellent parking which made carting stuff to and from from car easy.  I also took tons of pictures using my phone.  We played a heck of a lot - on Friday we went from 12:30 to midnight straight through playing multiple games.

I've divided the pictures up below as follows:

• The Red Bear Awakens - Bolt Action Modern (US Army vs Russian Army)
• 28mm Napolenoic Sailing Ships - TFL Kiss Me Hardy
• Raid on Fort William Henry - Muskets & Tomahawks
• Battle of Castalla - Napoleonics us Empires At War
• Hold The Line - Eastern Front Bolt Action WW2
• AWI using Brother Against Brother
• A selection of other games/convention stuff

The Red Bear Awakens

This game has been a long time in the making.  Dan Kerrick form our group has been working on the US and Russian forces for a while now.  This is the first of many games we'll play.  We used the Bolt Action Modern rules I've written up and they worked great.  The Russians pushed hard but suffered terrible dice rolling and eventually the US managed to take out enough Russian units to force a withdrawl.  This was a hypothetical engagement on the French/Belgium border.

This was also the first game where I got to use my newer Crescent Root Studio buildings in a significant way.  They buildings can work for modern --- although we need to add a lot more "modern" look and feel to the tablestop, this is a great start.  We used black tar roofing shingles (the underside) for paved roads.

This also allowed me to get the Russian army list for Bolt Action Modern sorted in my head --- I'll be writing that down and posting it this week.

Kiss Me Hardy - 28mm Napoleonic Sail

Adam Clark is a madman - in all the right ways!  I've been keeping a close eye on his progress on this project and it was great to see it deployed in the convention hall.  Adam bought museum ships, hacked off the bottoms, fixed up the paint, populated them with sailors, and affixed them to rolling stands.  The game used the Kiss Me Hardy rules from Two Fat Lardies.  Each side fielded two ships and Adam even has smaller boats that can be launched with boarding parties.  There was also a stunning French fort model participating in the game.

Raid on Fort William Henry

This game used my revised based for my fort model.  I also added 4 tents to represent the camp.  I'll be adding more tents as I plan to use them for other periods as well (ACW for example).  This scenario was covered in an earlier post - but essentially the French launch a raid on the work parties cutting wood near the fort --- and the British need to rescue those work parties before they are killed or captured.

Battle of Castalla - Napoleonics

Roy Scaife from our group put on the same game we play tested earlier this month (covered in a previous post).  We had a full house and everyone enjoyed the game.  The British manage to win again, but it was a lot closer this time - they managed two break two of the four French brigades - but they had one Brigade already broken and two others almost broke before they managed to pull it off.

We used my Napoleonic variant of my This Hallowed Ground rules called Empires At War --- they rules worked very well and we played through the game in a very reasonable amount of time.

Hold The Line - Eastern Front WW2

John Lantz from our group put on a very fun Bolt Action WW2 game.  I played on the German side and we just barely managed to carry the day thanks to some well planned assaults and terrible Russian artillery.  John does amazing work on his vehicles and this whole setup came together beautifully.

AWI - Brother Against Brother

Matt Hilzendrager from our group put on his normal beautifully done games - this time for AWI.  He had a full crew so I didn't get to play in this game but I did manage to snap some pictures.

Modern Iraq/Afghanistan

I put on my Battle of An Nasiriyah game - which included my two full squads of USMC with a DEVGRU team supporting.  This was a fun game enjoyed by all - I only took one picture since there are many pictures of similar games in my other modern posts.

The second picture was from Dan Kerricks game for Operation Enduring Freedom --- we ran both of these side-by-side on Friday evening with full crews.

Other Con Pictures

Here are a number of random pictures from throughout the weekend.  There was a stunning Sci-Fi game setup that I took a couple of pictures of ... some of the first ones are from Thomas Foss who ran his 54mm wars of imaginations game using laser cut wooden figures ... you can see more of this game on Thomas's blog here.

That should do for now --- recovering but motivated to get on with my projects!