Hamburg Tactica 2019 / Sunday

The last couple of years I stayed at the hotel Superbude during the weekend of the Tactica, Germany’s largest wargaming convention.

I like to have enough time to try several participation games without worrying about catching the train at night and the Superbude has very good waffles at the breakfast buffet.

The problem is that there is always a long line in front of the waffle machine and when I’m finally there I usually get scolded for pouring too much dough into the machine. "That’s too much. There are three signs explaining how this works. Here. Here and here." "I’m sorry." This makes me feel like a little schoolboy again. But in a bad way. Not like when you are playing with toy soldiers …

On Sunday we played two games. The first game was a naval game, taking place in 1778 in front of St. Lucia, a Caribbean island. It was presented by two members of the tabletop clubs Dresden and Sachsen. Jörg played the British and had to take three cargo ships to the harbour. They were accompanied by several war ships. The other half of his fleet was coming out of the harbour to meet the French.

I was Admiral d’Estaing, the commander of the French fleet. I had to sink the cargo ships and had to board the British admiral’s ship. One part of my fleet was moving towards the British ships coming out of the harbour, the other part of my fleet was going towards the cargo ships.

The table looked fantastic and the scenario was lots of fun. The only little problem the scenario had in our case was that the starting point of the French ships, moving towards the cargo ships, was a bit too far away, so that they couldn’t possibly reach them.

The game masters had decided to give the French this disadvantage because the French had won all the games before we played. This reminded me how complex scenarios for war games are. Changing a little thing might change the outcome of the game completely. Anyways. I had a lot of fun.

Jörg won. He managed to manoeuvre the cargo ships into the harbour and even defeated the French crew that tried to board the British admiral’s ship.

The last game we played at the Tactica this year had attracted me because of its unusually beautiful terrain. Evi from Team Würfelkrieg had made the colourful landscape of a planet in the Star Trek universe with airbrushed teddy bear fur as base. 

We were four players together in a team. One player controlled a group of scientists in a base that was attacked by Klingons. The other players, including Jörg and myself, played various Star Trek characters, who had landed in the jungle outside the base and were supposed to secure an object in the laboratory.

The rules had many role playing elements. What I enjoyed most about the game were the various ingenious attempts of the player controlling the science lab to get rid of the Klingons. He was playing around with the gravity and air pressure in the section where the Klingons attacked, making them crawl on the floor one turn and fly to the ceiling the other turn, grasping for air.

In the end we beamed the device we were supposed to secure to the Enterprise.