Well, we made it to Baltimore MD, to the Inner Harbor at the Baltimore Convention Center for Games Day 2010. Quite a few members of our local gaming club, Berks-PA Gaming Club made the trip as well. It was also good to see friends from other gaming clubs like Rich D and the guys from the Adventurer's Guild in Harrisburg, and Tony, Doug and the gang from the Gaming Garage, who will be hosting the Mechanicon-GT in West Chester PA this November.
I took my son along, Ethan, who is now 8 years old and building an Imperial Guard army as well as a combined Space Marine army with me. This would be his first ever Games Day. We took time to review the events list and think about what we wanted to do the night before.
We decided to make this a special Father/Son getaway and booked a hotel room at the Days Inn right across the street from the venue. Funny how many of the folks working there, especially staff from GW and Forge World were staying in our hotel.
I recall from Games Days in the past that there is so much going on, not to get bogged down in a big tournament. However, we did want to make sure that we played at least a game or two, get to see what was there, view models, buy stuff, and just enjoy the day.
Last year I was very dissapointed that there was no open gaming. Thankfully that was corrected this year. It seemed that many of the gaming clubs picked up on this as well and sponsored their own tables for games. I must say that this was perhaps one of the best features of Games Day for us.
We were drawn to the tables by Ineptus Astartes, a club based locally in Colombia MD, and their comical signs of "special forces" featuring a space marine dropping a hand grenade.
One of their game tables was "Da Hunt for Red Orktoba", a play off of the movie, where an Ork Warboss steals an imperial submarine and bursts through the snow and ice to launch a death missle. You could command Ork forces or Imperial Guard forces and try to destroy the submarine before the Orks launch the missle.
My son substituted 500 points of his Cadian 17th Imperial Guard for 500 points of the game club's Vostroyans. Sure they looked a tad out of place, but it added the personal touch of having some of your own forces.
We played with 2 players running the IG (us and another player) and 2 players running the orks. Hosts from the Game Club acted as referrees. The game was solid, the Submarine was very well built. The mission was fun. We had 5 turns to destroy the submarine by taking away all structure points. The sub was broken down into 4 sections, each with 2 structure points: Front: Armor:13, Sail: Armor:14. Middle/Hangar: Armor:12 and Rear: Armor: 12.
We all started with a few forces on the table and other units in reserve. We got to use one of their Valkyries, placing my son's stormtroopers inside and also a Thunderbolt fighter. In the end, a very tense fight (with a battle report to follow!), my son scored vicotry combining fire with our comrade and the Guard took away the last 2 structure points at the top of Turn 5.
We had incredible fun, and leaving that game with my son feeling really proud of himself, we made our way to the Forge World line of goods. Thankfully FW fixed their issues from last year, as they had no bar coding on any items last year, and had to tally items up by hand. Instead of having to wait 2+ hours for an item, I think we waited 5 minutes and walked away with some goodies, including our own Thunderbolt fighter. :-)
We made our way to view the Big Game, and than took part in a Mega-Battle of Superheavies and Gargantuan models run by Showcase Comics. The scenery was immense, and my son Ethan got to run a squadron of Vendetta gunships and a Warhound Titan in a battle against orks.
After that we made sure to get a chance to try out the Remote Control Tanks. Ethan got his hands on a R/C Baneblade and had fun with that.
We made our way past there to the Scenery Make & Take. I love this event, and we both made a sizable GW building to add to our collection. After the Make & Take, we helped texture some GW battle boards for another give away.
This one was really nice, and I wish we would have done more with this. In 5 sessions througout the day, people got to paint and texture complete boards. Your name got entered into a raffle for each time you helped. At the end of the day, they raffled off all 3 boards complete with about 8-12 pieces of terrain to go with them. This event was just an extra donation by GW, and I feel was a great one. Sadly we didnt' win, but I still think that it was a wonderful concept, and all of the boards looked terrific.
Finally, as Games Day winded to a close, we met up with some of our friends and went to Hard Rock Cafe and enjoyed a great dinner and swapped our tales of our adventures for the day. Back at our hotel, my son and I ran into a group of fellas from GW and Forge World, including Gav Thorpe! That just made a wonderful weekend even better.
So, in the end, we are saddened to hear that Games Day will not be in Baltimore next year, but regardless of that, we all agree that this year was by far the BEST Games Day event all of us had attended.
