Chicago Skirmish and Bedroom Battlefields Mini Con!

I'm a listener to the "Tabletop Miniature Hobby Podcast" put on by Bedroom Battlefields. It's delightful show with a variety of interviews, musings, reviews, etc revolving around indie wargaming, oldhammer, miniature painting, etc.  On the show's discord various in-person gatherings have been organized.  I threw my hat into the ring and hosted a little event at my home on November second.

I organized it like a Mini Convention for Discord Participants and CSW members including what I saw as the  traditional wargame convention elements of community, hobby, selling and gaming.  The proposed schedule was:

-Doors open at 9:30 for the Morning Terrain Make and Take. Materials provided by Chicago Skirmish Wargames club.

-Lunch around 12:00 (Chicago Style Deep Dish maybe ...) paired with a mini swap meet. Bring your extras to trade and sell!

-1:30-4:30 Afternoon Grimdark Future Mega battle. Bring your own army or use one of mine. 1500 points per player.

5 PM finish.

In addition to myself there were 2 CSW Members, 2 Discord Members and 2 of their friends.  One attendee came all the way from South Bend Indiana!

Event 1 Wargames Terrain Make-And-Take.

Upon arrival, participants were taken to my garage where they found my workspace arrayed with a variety of bins, boxes and drawers filled with toy parts, educational supplies, model parts, vintage Robotix elements (proved very popular), terrain building parts, and much more.

They filled a box with pieces and headed down to my basement to begin construction.

The smell of solvent and CA+ filled the air and they came with some remarkable creations.

Chemical Plant based on a Hot Wheels Garage.

 

Chem Tanks and Bridge.

I don't recall whether this is a crashed spaceship or a giant weapon, but it's great looking!

A Fortified Bunker.

Tower, Tank and Barricade.

Less excitingly, I plugged away building more bridges for what I hope to be a table of Necromunda-style tower terrain large enough to host multiplayer games of Grimdark Future at Adepticon 2024.   Lots more bridges yet to build....

Event 2 Lunch and Swap Meet

I failed to photograph this part of the day.  Lunch was delicious local pizza from Trianos.  As for the Swap meet, a good deal was on offer, much of it folks offering figures for a buck or two a piece.

I really cleaned up. Here's what I came away with.

Some BfM Genestealers.

Assassins and Homing Beacons

Watchers in the Dark, Grey Knights Grand Master Voldus and an inquisitorial member of somesuch.

Event 2a  Big Battle Setup.

Due to space and weather, we had to use the same table for the Terrain Building as for the big battle. So, the evening before the event I set out all the terrain that would be needed for the mega battle on a side table.

I'm rather proud of this spread.  It's a buffet of terrain options.

The group were quite helpful and in short order we had the table toppers down, and the table arranged.

This was my first time covering the table in these great looking Warhammer 40k boards.  Earlier this year I found a stack of copies of the "Space Marine" board game on clearance at Target. I bought them all mostly for the boards. Combined with one I had lying around, I had more than enough to cover the 8x4 surface we were playing on.

Event 3b The Big Game.

The game ended up being Dark Angels, Imperials Guard and Ork Mercenaries vs  Tyranids and 2 Chaos forces. To keep the sides equal (and keep working on my bridges) I sat the battle out but we had 6 players each fielding 1500 points. What follows is not a Battle Report or even necessarily in chronological order, but it is big fun gallery of a big fun game!

The one army I got good pics of was this very cool Tyranid-style army.  It's "Alien Hives" from One Page Armies. Like their Robot Legions (a very well done mashup of Separatist Droid and Necron styles)  the Alien Hives is a really effective set of designs that sits in for 40k units clearly enough to be recognized and to work well in that setting, but is also differentiated enough to be very much it's own thing and not a bland copy.

The Ork Riding a Dragon ("Burna Bommer" I think?) was my favorite unit on the table.

At the end of allotted time, the Forces of the Imperium and it's Ork Mercenaries had won the battle as the Chaos Flank collapsed.  There was some discussion that if the game had been able to carry on to it's final turn, the forces of Chaos and Destruction might have forced a tie, but such was not to be.

Conclusion:

In the end the event was a smashing success.  I am already thinking seriously about hosting another event like this.   I think a warmer month may be better though.  With milder weather and the ability to go longer into the evening, we could build and paint terrain outside, have the terrain setup ahead of time and swap and game longer.

The 4 new gamers I met were great folks that I'd be happy to game with anytime.  We didn't have alot of time to chat at the end as I had an evening but everyone seemed to have had alot of fun and folks expressed interest in doing this again.

Until Next time!

Karl


4 responses to “Chicago Skirmish and Bedroom Battlefields Mini Con!

  1. Very impressive! That terrain looks amazing and it seems like there was plenty of fun to be had!

  2. Thanks!
    It was a really fun event to run.

  3. Karl, this looks incredible! I particularly love the idea of starting the day with some sort of craft or hobby experience, just to get the creative juices flowing. I’ll be stealing that idea for sure!

  4. Thanks Pat.
    The terrain building was allot of fun. Really neat to see what great stuff people made from the bins-o-junk.


Log in to leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.


Archives

Categories

Recent Board Topics

Support CSW!