We enjoyed tons o' company this weekend. Vince and Gage came down from Clovis on Friday night and joined Jenn and Kenny and us for a bit of gaming. We hosted them while they were in town for a Warhammer tournament.

Our friends Bob and Helen (from Ithaca) stopped by for most of Saturday on their way to a New Zealand vacation. We played a new (for us) Settlers variant with them; it's based on Alexander the Great's conquests in Asia Minor and makes for a nice change in the game. We do have to look into some of the rules, however, because the English translation of the German rules did not always make sense compared to options on the map board.

Sunday I tagged along with Vince and Gage at their tournament to leran more about Warhammer and enjoy the superbly painted miniatures used in that game. If I had another room in the house and time for an additional hobby then Warhammer would be a possbility. They have a good and well-organized tournament system for minis with a round-robin system for different opposing armies on different kinds of terrains.

The game system uses an aweful lot of dice, from what I saw, but they say that depends on the army chosen to some extent. In any case, the minis ain't cheap: some groups of five list for $50, and each army in the tournament had perhaps 60-75 figures in it. Plus there's the time needed to paint them up nice, because part of the tournament scoring considers the painting.




Gage engaged.




One of the nicer displays: many miniatures set into a rather large castle diorama.





One guy modified a number of minis and fit them into a circus theme. His diorama had little lights, Big Top music playing, and he wore a top hat and passed out cotton candy. Needless to say, he won the vote for best display.




Another guy modified his minis in less appealing ways, by crafting on genitals and adding spew, as to these characters.