ReaperCon 2022 - The Aftermath

It has taken longer to write this post than expected. Mostly due to testing positive for Covid on Tuesday and while we tried to isolate my wife came down with it as well. Thankfully which ever version we came down with felt more like a summer cold, I attribute that to, likely, catching the latest variant and being up to date on our boosters.

There are really only two things that I manage to get done at ReaperCon and painting is definitely not one of them. I spend a good majority of the convention wrangling the vendors and keeping them as happy as possible and judging miniatures in the MSP Open Painting Competition.

I felt pretty successful on the wrangling side of things and the vendors were very happy to have a dedicated person to come to. I was unable to attend last year after I set everything up because one of our dogs was in the last stages of cancer and we weren't going to leave her for someone else to deal with while we were gone. It was a great show for the vendors most of them had made or were close to making expenses on Thursday. That can certainly reduce a vendor's stress level quite quickly.

I judged ordinance this year and we had a fair number of entries enough to keep my team busy for a couple of hours. I admit that we get a lot more time to contemplate the ordinance entries  because of this but its fun and very low key. At ReaperCon we use a variant of the Open System which means that we are awarding medals for the level of your work rather than trying to determine a 1st, 2nd and 3rd. This means that regardless of the number of entries if there are 5 entries worthy of a gold medal then we will award 5 gold medals. We use teams of three judges with an alternate if one of our own entries is up for judging (in other words I don't judge my own work).We judged 39 entries (there were more than on the table but we only judge one from each entrant, sometimes are discussions about which piece to judge can be a little heated in the case of multiple entries) and awarded: 6 Certificates of Merit, 17 Bronze Medals, 7 Silver Medals and 9 Gold Medals (its a little odd to see more Golds than Silvers but that's the way it worked out this year, not a lot of middle ground entries).

Personally I did pretty well. My Stug IIIG received a gold in Ordinance and the Stuh 42 received a bronze in Open (Open is primarily a conversion category and quite frankly it was a bit of a stretch to enter it there). The UNIC P104 won First Place in the Warlord/Trenchworx stock category. They didn't receive their certificates in time so I'll get that in the mail sometime.

These took forever to build (not a because of the kit) it was nice to get a couple of them finished. For those that don't remember or don't know these kits are from Rubicon Models and you can build just about every StuG III G variant that you want. You do end up with quite the box of parts at the end but they are fun to build, sturdy and the instructions and decals are excellent.

Why Bronze on this one? Well, I pushed it into the Open category which is for conversions and original sculpts. So its not that the conversions on this aren't well done, but they are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things and paint work counts for only a small part of the medal determination. I only felt a bit slighted but its okay. I have plans for a conversion piece that will hit the marks much better next year.

While I am very pleased with how these ultimately turned out, its easily one of the worst kits I have ever assembled. The extra work to get it to this point was rewarded with that 1st place finish for Warlord Stock models. Here is a link to the first blog in the series for their construction: https://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/2020/04/world-war-ii-project-return-to-normandy_30.html
You can find the rest in May of 2020.

For next year I contemplating three entries; The Charing Cross 1940 Diorama from Scale 75 (which is looking like a fun kit to build), the BFG from Reaper (which I'm seriously contemplating starting over...again), and maybe back to the old science fiction diorama that I partially started years ago (bonus I have all the lighting components I need still). Some where in there I should have an ordinance entry and maybe a painter entry. Since three of those are diorama entries, I might work on all three and the one closest to being done next summer will get finished. There isn't much point in entering 3 dioramas if only one can be judged!