This past weekend (March 17-19) was the Conquest Avalon game convention in Sacramento, California. Roy Scaife, Dan Kerrick, John Lantz, and myself all piled in my SUV and made the trek up north to attend.
Avalon is a Science Fiction and Fantasy game convention, so I had packed up my Firestorm Armada and several board games, including the excellent Star Trek Ascendancy. Dan brought along his Star Wars miniatures to use for a Galactic Heroes game based on the rebels working to clear out imperial remnants on the forest moon of Endor.
I didn't bring my fancy camera and only snapped a few phone pictures throughout the weekend. The convention is a small convention. While small, the stress factor was extremely low, there was plenty of gaming space, and we could game the whole time without anyone bothering us.
We arrived before the doors had opened on Friday, so we used my suite to play some board games. Fortunately the bar was already open by then :-)
We played our first game of Star Trek Ascendancy. This is an excellent board game and is exactly what I want out of a Star Trek galaxy themed game with a very good balance between economy building and military conquest.
On Saturday I hosted my FSA (Firestorm Armada) game. I pulled out my entire Dindrenzi fleet and it took on a large Alliance of Kurak fleet with an even split of fleets from the Terrans and Sorylians. The Dindrenzi players took the day with superior dice rolling! I continue to love FSA!
After FSA I hosted a 7 player Star Trek Ascendancy game. We had so much fun playing it on Friday we just couldn't wait to play it again. Three of the players had not played before, and the rest of us had only played our first game the night before. One of the best aspects of this game is that if your faction hasn't made first contact (isn't connected to other factions), players can complete their turns at the same time. As a result, this 7 player major space exploration, economy, and military conquest game only took us 4 hours!
The excellent Stuart was running a Star Trek miniatures game - I don't recall the rules but it looked great using custom miniatures (printed form Shapeways I believe) and I know the players all had a blast. Stuart is a great guy and always runs fun games. It was great to see him out at the con.
The picture below is near the end of the large Star Trek Ascendancy game ... little ole me actually won it ... just barely (won on a tie breaker).
Dan's Endor game using Galactic Heroes was excellent. I played Chewy with a few rebel troopers and some Ewoks! Oh, the Ewoks - they did just fine (despite heavy casualties). Rebels managed to take a solid victory on this one.
