RE: [FT] Quick GenCon Rundown

Hiya, 

The miniatures were in the same place as last year -- the big room on
the
3rd floor right next to the exhibit hall, and there were also a bunch of
tables in the hallway outside that room for miniatures games.

There weren't a lot of really good deals at the convention, so I didn't
buy
a lot of stuff this year.

Mage Knight was incredibly popular -- the WizKids booth was packed with
people playing demo games from open til close. 

I bought the Munchkins card game from Steve Jackson Games, and we had a 
blast playing that on Friday and Saturday nights. I also picked up a
couple
of Ogre Mk.V figures on Thursday morning -- they were selling 
REALLY fast. 

Crystal Caste didn't have any cool dice this year, so I didn't get 
anything from them. 

I got some more silkscreened terrain from GeoHex -- I love that stuff! 

There was a guy in the exhibit hall who was selling boxes of old Star
Frontiers figures for $10 apiece, and picked up a couple of them. 

New Wave was there, with racks full of Confrontation and Excalibur
miniatures. They didn't have any Wolfen, but they had a lot of
barbarians,
dwarves and goblins. I picked up a few of the barbarians, 
but DAMN they're expensive!

The most interesting new figures I found were made by crocodile games,
Chris
Fitzpatrick's company for the "War Gods of Aegyptus" 25mm scale fantasy
miniatures game. I bought some of the figures they call "To-Tanem,"
which
look like little humanoids made of stone or mud.

I played a demo game of the new Chainmail game from WOTC, and I thought
it
was a pretty good miniatures game. Definitely worth looking into when 
it comes out (October 2001, I think). 

This was the year for roleplaying with the d20 system. It seemed like at
least half of the game companies in the exhibit hall have published
roleplaying supplement(s) and/or module(s) compatible with d20.

Saturday I entered the Full Thrust tournament, and I ended up in a tie
for
3rd place. Woohoo! 

The miniature painting contest was kinda lame -- they had a glass-front 
bookcase with fluourescent lights in the top to showcase the entries,
but 
some of the lights were going dim, and the bookcase was off in a corner
of
the miniatures games room. Just for fun, and to "show the 15mm flag," I
entered some of my 15mm GZG Stargrunt figures in the contest (no, I
didn't
win anything). I thought that the lighting changed the tones of the
colors
on the figures, and not always for the best. 

I spent Friday afternoon at the miniatures painting table with a couple
of
friends, and ended up sitting next to Patrick Chambers, the guy who
paints
the figures on the "Chambers of Miniatures" web site 
(http://www.sky.net/~pvccdc). I spent most of the afternoon just sitting

and watching him paint the details on the faces of a couple of figures
that
he was working on. It was really amazing how he blends the colors on the
figure! I'm going to try to steal his technique, but I think it'll
probably
be at least a year before I get the hang of it.