Thursday 5 March 2015

Hamburg Tactica 2015 / Day One

On the 21st of February I went to the wargaming convention Tactica with Krüger, Jörg, Sven and Andi. On the train to Hamburg Jörg read a coffee table book about Brian May’s guitar. We later had a discussion if the Perry twins are the Brian May of the tabletop hobby or not.

Around 1pm we played Conan, a game run by the club Kurpfalz Feldherren, using SAGA as a rule engine. They had an impressive gaming table with an oriental castle, adobe buildings and excellent palm trees. The castle had been built by one of the organisers of the Tactica a couple of years ago. He had actually cast every single brick in plaster, using Hirst Arts forms. Amazing. The scenario was about Conan having to rescue a princess while some bedouin snake conjurers attacked the castle. Conan won, of course.


conan

conan

In the afternoon we split up. Sven, Andi and Jörg played White Death, a skirmish game by Bernhard Hennen, presented by his club THS. I had played the game last year and had enjoyed it a lot. What Sven has to say about it, you can read here.


bernhard hennen

Krüger and I went to another room in a section of the Tactica, which was dedicated to Napoleon and his battles, and played Wavre 1815, Prussians vs. French. The gaming table had attracted us, a board made of wooden tiles. The game used blocks with 20mm miniatures as units and had a card-driven control mechanism. When I had difficulties telling one unit from the other, the author of the game suggested I should take a close look at the uniforms. We had lots of fun with this mix between a tabletop game and a board game.


krüger

wavre 1815

wavre 1815

At night, we went to a Greek restaurant. I have recently started to learn Greek, so I kept repeating ευχαριστώ, thank you, the only Greek word I have learned so far.

Sven has suggested we should start a blog network for our ancient imagi-nations project and I wanted to talk about a name for it. Beyond the Pillars of Heracles? The Imaginary Ancient Islands Blog Network? Karubi Islands? When I mentioned it, Jörg just said: „blogs are dead“ and thus ended the discussion.

We got drunk on three liters of Imiglykos wine. A couple of hours later, around 1am in the lounge of the hotel Superbude, Krüger tried to explain Einstein's relativity theory to us. He said something about a ball falling into a blanket.

4 comments:

  1. Maybe you're right that the Perry Twins are equal to Brian May, because you didn't know Mr.May before und I didn't know Alan and Michel Perry before. I must allways think about Perry the Platypus when I hear the name Perry!

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    1. Ich hab grad Brian May gegoogelt. Der ist ja Astrophysiker.

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  2. Great looking games, this castle is fantastic!

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    1. Yes, I think so too. The first time I saw the castle was at the Tactica 2008. It was featured in an El Cid WAB game. I'm glad they showed it again this year.

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