6 Pictures from the Tactica 2022

This is me playing Saga at the Tactica in Hamburg last year. I look tired because the night before, in a Portuguese restaurant, I had talked for hours with Krüger and Jörg about Tolkien and Brecht. Don’t ask me why …

The first game we played was presented by the club Kurpfalz Feldherren. They used the ruleset Pikeman’s Lament and had a very beautiful table of a port.

A picture of Krüger playing Warmaster. High elves vs dwarves. It was the first time I saw a Warmaster game. To my surprise troop movement was very fast and there were strong domino effects. A lot more action on the table than I had expected.

Mario Cart. This table looked like so much fun. Unfortunately I couldn’t try it, but I hope the game will be presented at another convention.

Der Schnitter von Hanau. A vampire game presented by two members of the Tabletop Club Rhein Main. They used the rule set The Silver Bayonet and created such a great atmosphere that I believed for a second that the two game masters actually were vampires …

Dingstown at Mel Bel Con

This summer I went to the gaming convention Mel Bel Con in Welver-Dinker with a friend and my kids. We played the Wild West skirmish game Dingstown by Axel Jansen.

I have already played Dingstown three times at different conventions and actually went to Welver-Dinker to play it again. I’m a Dingstown fan boy.

At one point my friend Krüger made such a complicated move that the author of the game had to consult his own rule book.

We had a very patient game master.

Mel Bel Con is the first gaming convention I have been to after two years. It was great fun. 🤠

CONflict 2019

On the 22nd of June Krüger and I took the train to Langenfeld to go to the wargaming convention CONflict. The train was filled with visitors of the Kirchentag, the German Protestant Church Assembly, that took place in Dortmund that week.

We were picked up by my cousin at a forsaken train station. He drove us to a building at the edge of the city, next to some fields.

On the parking lot we met Alex, a friend from Wesel, an amazing painter and very relaxed gamer. He was smoking a cigarette. There was a strange picture on the package, looking like an illustration from the Call of Cthulhu monster manual. I made a bad joke. I said that in a year Alex would look like the thing on his cigarette package, a piece of meat with a hole in it, if he wouldn’t quit smoking. "In a year?", he asked.

The CONflict is mostly about presentation games. There were a lot of excellent tables and maybe three vendors. More Terrain, GeBoom and somebody selling books. I already knew some people from the Tactica in Hamburg and other gaming conventions.

I think we were the only visitors. We played three games.

The first game was Shootout in Dingstown. It's a game I had played in Hamburg with Jörg earlier this year. A German skirmish game by Axel Jansen. It’s great fun. I wrote about it here. In February we had to rob a bank. Now the scenario was about kidnaping a doctor.

When my cousin almost managed to do so with his gang of gunslinging women, one of Alex's lawmen accidentally shot the doctor and thus ended the game.

About 20 years ago my cousin and I came across a website called The Dortmund Amateur Wargamers when we started to search the internet for 28mm miniatures and strategy games like DBA and HotT.

We are from Dortmund and were surprised that such a club existed in our home town. The question came up: what is a professional wargaming club? My cousin sent them an email, but they never responded. To my surprise the table next to the Dingstown table was run by members of The Dortmund Amateur Wargamers.

They were preparing a large ECW game using paper miniatures and rules from the book 'Wargame the English Civil War' by Peter Dennis. We asked if we could join the game for an hour.

A friendly man in his 60s explained what kind of scissors he had used to cut out the 2000 paper soldiers on the table. Tailor’s scissors, if I remember well. We also found out that the Dortmund Amateur Wargamers lost access to their website and that most of them had moved away from Dortmund, but not too far away. We slowly moved around some units on the table, rolled some dice and then left for a lunch break …

In the afternoon we played a 40K game which was presented by a member of the club Kurpfalz Feldherren. He had recycled parts of a Frostgrave table, I had seen at the Tactica in Hamburg this year, to make a beautiful table looking like the scenery common in the 90s. He used the second edition of Warhammer 40K as a ruleset.

Alex and my cousin played the forces of the emperor, space marines and imperial army, Krüger and I played tyranids. They had to take a scientist out of a frozen fortress and we had to prevent this. There was a lot of power gaming going on in our group. At one point Alex said: guys, this is a convention game, not a tournament!

The last turn was a battle of PSI abilities. Nevertheless I enjoyed the game.

I hope to visit the CONflict again next year, maybe I can even go for two days, to try out more gaming tables.

And maybe one day I will meet the guys responsible for the excellent website Major General Tremorden Rederring’s Colonial-era Wargames Page, but I think I have to travel to Texas for that …

Hamburg Tactica 2019 / more pictures

I like to go around the Bürgerhaus Wilhelmsburg during the weekend of the Tactica and take pictures of things that interest me. I like to do this with a Leica R4 my father left me, when he died, but last year my father’s camera failed me and I haven’t found the time to repair it yet. So this year I borrowed a tablet from my children to take the pictures. It worked fine. That’s technical progress, I guess.

Castle Grayskull
Tabletopkiosk

Najewitz Modellbau

Shifting Lands by GeBoom

Somewhere in Tennessee 1862

The Attack on Fort Henry

THS

paper soldiers by Peter Dennis

tin soldiers by Aly Morrison

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.

Hamburg Tactica 2019 / Saturday

When Jörg and I arrived at the Bürgerhaus Wilhelmsburg on Saturday morning, there was a long line of people waiting in front of the doors to get a ticket for the Tactica, Germany’s biggest wargaming convention with about 2500 visitors this year.

To my surprise, Jörg ignored all those waiting and somehow entered without lining up.

I walked towards the parking lot, trying to find the end of the line, and met Alex and Michael, two wargamers from around Wesel, with whom I had played a couple of games last year. They told me about their latest project of building a western town and two gangs for "Dead Man’s Hand".

Inside the Bürgerhaus Wilhelmsburg I met Jörg again and we went around looking for participation games to play. The friends from Wesel had sparked my interest in the Wild West, so the first game Jörg and I played on Saturday was "Shootout in Dingstown".

It’s a skirmish game written by Axel Jansen, available in German through the website: www.dingstown.de

The author presented the game himself. We were four players. Axel Jansen had prepared several scenarios and about ten gangs with six figures each, including Daleks and gunslinger women. 

We chose a scenario where two rivaling groups of bandits had to rob a bank and the representatives of the law - Jörg and another gentleman - had to stop them.

I played a gang of Mexicans which gave me the chance to practice swearing in Spanish. Chinga tu madre. Puto. Pendejo.

Initiative was going from figure to figure until every figure had moved and was managed using a set of playing cards.

The Mexicans were entering the town through a cemetery close to the bank. My first move was stupid. I only had one bandit with a gun, able to shoot well enough at long distance. After he missed his first shot, I became nervous and moved him out on the street, where he was shot down immediately.

I needed some kind of plan and asked Axel Jansen if I had access to dynamite. He allowed me to equip the youngest member of my gang with dynamite.

I moved the bandits to the back of the bank, using a water mill as cover. Señor Rodríguez, the boss, even managed to shoot a guard inside the bank through a window. Then I blew away the back wall, which also opened the safe and killed the bank director, and I could get away with the gold through the graveyard.

"Shootout in Dingstown" has a focus on simple rules and doesn’t need many figures to play. Axel Jansen had prepared a beautiful Wild West town and gave us many choices. I was lucky to play the game with a fun group of people, so it was a good start to my weekend at the Tactica.

I looked around and about half the visitors of the Tactica had already left. Maybe a lot of people only come to the Tactica to buy things at the flea market?

The second game we played was a dungeon crawler run by a member of the club Kurpfalz Feldherren, using the ruleset Frostgrave. Each year this club presents one or two fantastic tables at the Tactica. I’m always amazed how they do it …

We were four players, playing in teams of two. Each team had a wizard, his apprentice and a couple of henchmen. The two wizards and their followers entered the dungeon from different sides and had the same objectives: take out some treasure chests, kill big monsters and the overlord of the dungeon. There were traps, random monsters and secret passages …

Although the other team was very competitive and had a strong barbarian, Jörg and I won in the end. I guess we were just lucky.

After eating some potato salad with sausages in the main hall, we played a third game in the afternoon, "Ghostbusters", presented by the club Asgard Aschaffenburg.

Their table was impressive. It had large buildings and a part of the New York canalization hidden in a drawer, with ghost crocodiles and a giant worm.

I was very curious about 7TV, the ruleset they used, which I had wanted to try for a long time. Our game masters didn’t have so much experience with the rules though. Nevertheless, the game was fascinating.

The gameplay of 7TV is structured by the metaphor of a film set. You imagine two things at the same time: the action itself and a film crew making a movie. This creates a certain distance and adds a layer of irony to the game.

I wonder how entertaining this game can be, if you are more familiar with the rules. And I would like to know if playing something like "Clash of the Titans" or "Pirates of the Carribean" could be fun.

While I enjoyed the two layers of imagination the game creates, Jörg found it overly complicated. I want to try the game again. Is anybody in Berlin playing this?

At night we went to our favourite Turkish restaurant in St. Pauli and had a glass of wine in the hotel bar. Around 11 PM I was so tired, I fell asleep playing Hearthstone on the iPad, a card game I have been playing too much last year. (If you want to add me as a friend, my BattleTag is: zinnling #2975.)

Hamburg Tactica 2018 / more pictures

Here are more pictures of the wargaming convention Tactica. 

My last blog post was more about my father and his SLR camera than what I originally planned to write about: "Take the Pass!", the game we played at the Tactica on Sunday morning. So my friend Krüger suggested I should start a photography blog instead of Herr Zinnlings Arbeitszimmer. I will try to stick to the subject of wargaming now …

This year the theme room of the Tactica was called "brennender Sand". There you could see all kinds of desert related games, miniatures and terrain pieces.

The French foreign legion was one of the more popular subjects.

Saturday afternoon we played "Dune", a game organised by the wargaming club WCH – Massaka from Hamburg.

Sven enjoyed this a lot because he had always wanted to try the ruleset Bolt Action.

On Sunday I walked around to take pictures and found these beautiful ancient ships manufactured in the scale 1/72 by Cryns Miniatures.

The last game we played on Sunday was Zama, a large DBA 3.0 battle. It was really a sequence of four DBA games, one game for each battleline.

A very enthusiastic man from Denmark or Sweden and I played the Carthaginians. He was very lucky rolling the dice. Unfortunately he had to leave early and we lost.

Our defeat was discussed by the other players in great length afterwards.

Hamburg Tactica 2018 / Take the Pass!

One thing I enjoy about going to the wargaming convention Tactica in Hamburg is to take pictures with the camera my father left me when he died, a Leica R4s.

My father and my uncle were obsessed with photography, especially with the technical aspects of it. As in other fields of interest, there was a strong competition going on between them. They both had large collections of cameras and many coffee table books on the subject of travel photography. They had rather limited ideas about what is a good picture and what is not and would put great effort into avoiding technical mistakes. They argued a lot and then stopped talking to each other for a couple of years.

Because of all this, I had access to photographic equipment as a child and ended up studying cinematography in Dortmund and San Antonio de los Baños, a little village close to Havana.

Last year I was very happy with the pictures I took at the Tactica with my father’s SLR camera, which was discontinued in 1988. But this year, this happened:

All the pictures I took of the game we played on Sunday morning are out of focus. Now I need to run some camera tests to find the mistake.

By the way, I enjoyed "Take the Pass!" a lot, thanks to Admiral Benbow and Monty from the wargaming club THS.

It is the year 1880. Following the massacre of the British delegation in Kabul and the increasing unrest in Afghanistan, the British Empire is working hard to secure the Northwest frontier of India and to subdue the Afghan province. They send various marching columns over the mountain passes, encountering fierce resistance from the Afghan army and local tribes.

The theme of “Take the Pass!” is the arduous march of the British army and shows a typical battle in the mountainous regions of the Indo-Afghan border.

My cousin and I played the Afghans, our friends Jörg and Krüger played the British. The ruleset was The Men Who Would Be Kings by Daniel Mersey which is similar to Dragon Rampant which is one of my favourite games at the moment.

I’m not sure if you can see this … The terrain was beautiful, especially the hills. There is a thread by Admiral Benbow about how to make rocky terrain out of pine bark in the Lead Adventure Forum.

Thanks to Jörg’s iPhone 6s, I have at least one picture of the game which is in focus.

Thinking about it, maybe this Leica R4s, this old ghost of a camera, is saying to me: Don’t fight so hard, son. You can’t control everything. And if you wanted to tell other people about the wonderful game Admiral Benbow and Monty presented at the Tactica, I did my job, didn’t I?