Despite being in the hobby for almost 15 years now, I have never actually gone to any tabletop cons. In general I tend not to be the most outgoing person and so I rarely ever attend any big events; My one and only Comic Con attendance was the first ever German Comic Con in Stuttgart back in 2016. Since then I cannot recall any convention I have attended. Up until earlier this year I had not even gone to any bigger game events. TUFT was my first foray into any larger events and I had a blast. As of this Sunday I have secured myself a ticket for TUFT 4 next January, more to come soon.
My big vacation this year had to be slightly restructured and so I went looking for stuff I could do; I saw that there would be a small tabletop convention three towns over in my area: Rhein Main Multiversum Since I wanted to do some stuff outside my usual routine it seemed the perfect event for me to attend. I had no idea what to expect, but I saw multiple people in the German indie community talk about or attend it, so that was a positive sign. Truthfully I wanted to go in blind, so I mostly ignored the posts on the main website, only reading through the essential stuff; Such as the event Con being free entry!
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| My loot |
I got up bright and early on Saturday, the venue opened at ten and I had a one hour bus ride ahead of me. The first Saturday I have had off in a while and I still got up early, some vacation this is. Jokes aside, the trip was fun, I have not taken a bus across the countryside in a long time and it looks really nice in the morning sun. The bus trip was also a nice place for me to continue reading the new Orikan and Trazyn novel. I loved 'The Infinite And The Divine' and this new book is on par with it. I have been on and off reading through it the past two weeks and am nowhere near finished with it yet.
Once I had arrived I decided to start with a small tour of the hall and get an idea of what was there.
Most tables served for different demos; Some of the bigger ones such as Konflikt 47, Clash of
Rhyfles and Ascending Fate(a German tabletop game) were present, but outnumbered by the smaller indie games. The convention also featured a handful of vendors, a flea market section and even a painting set up on the stage. While hobby vendors are what draws a lot of people to these conventions, it is sadly not as fun for me as it is for most. You see, I work at the friendly local gaming store; Which means I have access to most hobby products already with an employee discount. I do not have that access to everything, but it covers a lot of the more mainstream products and companies. As such I tend to not have as much fun when visiting other stores or vendors since I will always be reminded I can get the minis at work. That is not to say I do not enjoy window shopping still, but it lessens it slightly. At conventions however, you can usually find products both new and second hand which are usually only available through the internet; All three of the historical vendors had some products I had never even seen before; Spielekontor and Worean both had a lot of small scale historicals (primarily 15mm I believe) and some out of print products. Spielekontor had some old Bolt Action book figures in-between their products. While I do not super actively collect these, I still have an already sizeable collection. One of the miniatures there was Pierre Billotte whom you could get when buying the Battle of France book. Since I have the book but not the miniature, I immediately bagged him. The next find was the 'Defend the Eagle!' figure I found at the Belloludi table(we will hear more from them soon). Both of these figures are not super rare to find, but they were only available during the initial release of their associated book in stores and afterwards only when buying the book straight from Warlord Games. The big winner of coolest collectible has to go to the Little John figure though. From my research it seems he was part of a trio of figures released in 2015. Unlike the other two, he seems to be primarily a display model since he is larger in scale and has pre-shading applied.
After that small shopping trip I went to play my first Demo of the day. One of the tables presenting was demoing Gangs of Rome in a unique setting. The boards and scenarios were set in the old Roman town of Nida which used to be in the region.
The demo had two beautifully designed boards with lots of little decorative models. They also had prepared four gangs of four fighters each. They were all identical in terms of gameplay, but came with sheets detailing their origins and patron. I chose the gladiator gang because I like gladiators. It turned out the patron for that gang was also called Aurelia, what a lucky coincidence!
The game was a lot of fun to play; I like the planning ahead and the simple dice mechanics. There is no fussing about with comparing stats, any roll of four or more is a success and anything below a failure; This leads to some fun interactions such as the melee system. Usually the attacker rolls and counts their successes as damage, then the defender rolls their dice and every success negates one from the attacker; But if you roll more successes when defending, then the difference becomes damage dealt back to the attacker. I imagine it like the defender blocks the attack only to then punch back with that same fist(or shield). It is simple and yet multiple times during the game, more damage was dealt that way than by straight up attacking. I have had miniatures for this game for a while now, I was never sure if I really wanted to play or if I would just paint them. I think this demo convinced me to actually try to put together a board and play.
Next stop: Ascending Fate. I assume outside of Germany the game Freebooter's Fate is not particularly well known. It is a pirate skirmisher game that does not use dice; Ascending Fate is the younger Cyberpunk cousin of that game. It hit shelves sometime last year and I had not really given it a second glance since. Since I work at the LFGS we obviously stocked it, but it never picked up much traction like its pirate cousin. Well there was a demo table in the convention hall, so I thought I might as well give it a try. The dice are replaced by cards; You get a set of cards showing body parts which you use to hit and then there is a deck of damage cards which determine how much damage you do and can withstand. Your units and characters have all the six body parts shown on the card and each is associated with a stat in the game; Attack determines how many body part cards you are allowed to select when attacking, while your defence does the same when defending; If the defender managed to pick the same body parts as the attacker, the attack on that body part bounces. If they chose the wrong cards, the attacker choses one of the remaining body parts to attack and then draws a damage card. The number shown is added their own strength and any modifiers to get a number; Then the defender draws a card which becomes their defence value, they add their own defence and then you calculate the difference to deal damage.
This is the simple explanations for that system. That is to say, it takes a second to get into and understand it. Once you have used it a few times, it becomes pretty easy and is a fun alternative to dice. I think my verdict on this game is: It is fun, but I don't know if it is for me. I think the setting also does not do it any favours in my book and I might enjoy the pirate version more.
The flea market was amazing as any hobby flea market is; There were plenty of affordable second hand miniatures including a lot of Song of Ice and Fire armies. I had a lovely conversation with a hobbyist from Gießen, who ended up gifting me six epic scale ancients figures he was selling. I also found an incomplete metal Nagash for a steal. He is missing his staff, but I think I can find a replacement at some point. One person was selling a few bags of old Berlin or Bust miniatures and I thought the German casualties could be fun to paint up. Shown on this photo are also a lot of miniatures and bitz I got later from a Pay-What-You-Want table. The notable pieces from there was an old Fantasy Regiments Dark Elf crossbowman; Two old plastic Terminators, a 3rd edition Dark Eldar Homonculus and two metal Space Marine bodies. I also saw a box with old Warzone sprues and as per usual every time I see a box of these I find a new sprue I do not yet have. After the flea market I grabbed myself something to eat and withdrew some cash, since not every vendor accepted card payments. The convention hall was luckily right next to a drink market and a super market.
The next Demo on my radar was Konflikt 47. Despite painting miniatures for it I actually had not played it yet. I was eyeing the table ever since I arrived, but it had been consistently occupied, so when I saw an opening, I jumped in to play a round. I previously played some games of Bolt Action 2nd edition, so I knew the rough idea of how the general rules work; But the demo included two mechs, making this my first time interacting with the vehicle rules. Though to say I learned a lot would overstate it, my Vogelspinne took one shot at the Linebacker and immediately blew it up; I know rolling a six and a five in a row is not very common, but it was a hilarious first time trying out vehicles.
The rest of the demo went by pretty quickly after the Americans lost their mech. I finally learned how the rift dice work properly. Previously I knew how their different faces worked, but not how they recharge and such. I also get the feeling, that the axis forces in the starter set may be slightly overpowered, since they wounded on a five and the Fireflies would wound on a six followed by another four.
One of the games I missed out on trying was Clash of Rhyfles, aka A Quar's War. They had this beautiful table full of weird and wonderful critter set up. Sadly it was almost constantly occupied and I never got around to trying it out. Similar to Gangs of Rome I have mainly observed the miniature releases for this game which are adorable! In terms of the game itself, I have not really had much interest yet, but I want to try it at some point.
As of writing this post it has been announced, that the Quar table has won the Best of Show Award for this convention. Sadly I forgot to submit a vote. I had seen the little cards on each table and I had made a mental note of it, but given this was a convention, I sadly forgot it by the time I left.
After another few rounds through the hall I came back to the Belloludi table where they were doing demos for Belloludi Javelins, their Ancients skirmish game. Honestly, I had never heard of that company, nor their games, until then. They are a small dutch studio and produce quite a few games, both mass combat and skirmish. From ancients all the way to modern. Javelins a pretty simple game with units sized around 12 miniatures. You determine the amount of actions your units can take by rolling an activation dice, which has faces for zero activations or even a failure(which luckily neither of us rolled during the demo). All in all this was a really fun game and I decided to buy the rules for it. They were also selling a bunch of small press rule- and painting books and among their wares they had a painting book for Back of Beyond(inter war) which caught my eye. I bought both the rules(including a small deck of event cards) and the Painting Guide for a small discount and blew around half my budget. I got to say also, the man running the table was a delight to talk to and incredibly kind. In general everyone I talked to that day was friendly and shared my passion for this hobby and its many aspects. I guess this is what I must have been missing out on, not going to conventions all these years.
The last demo game of the day was Mortal Gods. The table was beautifully set up and the miniatures were gorgeous. Out of the entire hall I think these were some of the best painted pieces.
The game itself was surprisingly turbulent, despite only lasting two turns. My opponent was a father-son duo who were also trying out the game and while they convened on strategy together, the son was the one rolling the dice. And roll them he did, they managed to obliterate one of my units to a man in one go. Luckily this game has some tactical flexibility and I managed to turn it around at the last second. One of my units boxed in the majority of theirs to deny them movement to the objective, while my slingers whom I kept back first swooped in to take the objective. Despite this it was a close match until the end; Their one free unit made a charge towards the slingers, but luckily this one roll went horribly and they bounced off the unit giving me the win. I had a lot of fun with Mortal Gods and if I was not already going to try and play Warriors of Athena properly, I might be swayed to buy this instead. As it stands I would like to play another demo, but with a full table instead of only half what you usually take.
At this point in the day I had to check my bus connection and saw that I had to leave a bit earlier than I would have wanted. With a time to leave in mind and an alarm for it set I decided to just go take a look through the Pay-What-You-Want bitz box. On the way there I stopped by the convention entry table where they were selling shirts, stickers and a miniature for the event. I bought the skelly miniature that you can see on their logo. Sadly the poor horse broke it's pelvis during transport, but nothing some pins and glue cannot fix though. They also gave me some of the wonderful stickers for free which was very kind. I was considering buying a shirt, but since I am not a shirt girl I thought better than to buy something I would not wear. I also stopped by one of the 3D Printed vendors since they had some Anvilrage prints on sale. Alas, they did not really have any miniatures I liked enough to buy and so onto the Pay-What-You-Want bitz I went! You already saw which pieces I picked out there in the image near the start of this post. There I also met Sebbo from
Magabotato, a German hobby podcast, again. This is the third time him and me have run into each other in the wild and as usual we had some conversations about our current hobby projects and helped each other picking out some of the bitz.
The last thing I bought were some paint from the same Pay-What-You-Want table. There was a big basket of old Scale75 and P3 paints. I had no great interest in the Scale colours, but wanted to try out the P3 Formula. I knew they existed, I saw the promotional campaign put on by SFG for the new release, but that is it in terms of my exposure to them. Seeing as someone wanted to get rid of theirs, I gladly picked out some tones I liked and wanted to try. I already managed to put the two Cygnar blues to good use painting a star map. The consistency is slightly more viscous than expected, but they have great coverage.
And that was my day at the Rhein Main Multiversum convention. After 7 hours in the stuffy hall I looked suitably ruffled, but it was so much fun! The drive home on the bus was beautiful as the sun went down, bathing the horizon in orange; The perfect ambience to continue reading. I had originally planned to go there Sunday too, but ended up sleeping in instead.
This was an amazing first hobby convention to attend and I already jotted down the date for next year's Rhein Main Multiversum. Hopefully by then I might demo my own game Space Corsairs 28. I started painting some miniatures for the game and now with my hobby space being rearranged, I might also build a gaming table too. In any case, if you want to take anything from this post it is to check in your local area for events and attend them. Engage with your local communities like you do with the ones online. Thank you for reading as always.
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