Railcon is Moving

While it doesn't appear often in my blog train board games are among my favorite. Mayfair's Empire Builder series (sometimes called crayon games since you draw your track directly on the board), the 18xx series (Started by Frances Tresham with 1829) and the Ticket to Ride Series by Days of Wonder are among my favorites. I'm also a founding member of the Train Gamers Association (TGA) which I helped start back in 1989 or '90 (I forget the exact dates, I'll have to dig up an old newsletter) with my ex-wife, Heather Barnhorst and Darwin and Peter Bromley from Mayfair Games.

I'm sadden to hear that Railcon will not be held in Denver this year. It has been a staple of Tacticon for 10 years, when the decision was made to give it a more permanent home rather than a traveling convention (being held in a different city each year). While I realize that it wasn't the ideal place to hold the TGA's National Puffing Billy tournament it was great to have it here in Denver where the Puffing Billy rules were born. Dean Washburn and his group of fellow train gaming enthusiasts spent many an hour working on set of scoring rules that would allow an organizer to get comparable scoring for any type of train game.

Tacticon will still be on Labor Day weekend, but for some reason the organizers have decided to move to Colorado Springs. My personal opinion is that this will kill the show. Colorado Springs has never been able to support a convention on a regular basis and it has been tried many times over the years. I'm very doubtful that many Denver/Boulder folks will be willing to travel to the Springs for a show when there are so many opportunities to game up here. Time will tell though. Its also somewhat inconvenient to fly into as its a dead end airport with very few direct flights. Almost everything routes through DIA up here in Denver.

I have included the relevant sections from the email I received:

First, big news about the Puffing Billy National Championship at Railcon. After ten years of partnering with Tacticon in Denver, we've decided to go a different direction. First we want to thank Tacticon and Colorado train gamers for making us welcome and helping us run many great tournaments out there. Tacticon is undergoing a number of changes, including moving to Colorado Springs and raising costs, and they are simple not able to support Railcon as they have in the past. We fully understand their situation, and wish them only the best.

The TGA is excited to announce that the 22nd Annual National Championship at Railcon will be held October 16, 2016 in Schaumburg IL. This is a very convenient travel location, near Chicago, about 20 minutes from O'hare airport. This will be a standalone event, so everything will be focused around our tournament. Our room is larger than we've typically had in Denver, with naturla light. There are numerous restaurants in easy walking distance and it's a very short drive from a major shopping mall (Woodfield). We will have a block of rooms that includes free breakfast, and we are working on a few other things.

All the details about registering for Railcon and booking sleeping rooms should be announced within a few weeks. For now, save the date and enough vacation days to make it happen!

So there you have it. I'm unlikely to be able to attned a show in IL as I'm committed to attending ReaperCon at the end of October. I know its a much better location for other players across the country. I'm looking forward to hearing about how great the show was near the end of October.

Game Auction Tacticon 2014

One of my favorite parts of any game convention is the auction. My philosophy is to keep it moving as fast as possible to keep everyone's attention focused on the auction itself. Its not easy and it requires that Mark and I stay on our toes and keep things moving right along, once you have the momentum going you don't want to lose it. While the audience certainly wants to get stuff as cheap as possible I have always felt that its my job to get as much as possible for the seller and that's really what I focus on. That requires that the auctioneers be invested in the auction, we don't sit down while selling and we don't stand behind a podium or a table, we are right out there in the middle of it. I'm pretty sure that our approach to the auction is fairly unique and I know there are some auctions that have "borrowed" some of the things we do for their own auctions. Everything is manual, while computerizing it would be a good thing we have never come up with a way that is faster than our manual intake. We also don't have to pause for computer glitches or errors, the slips may pile up but my crew will catch up and we just keep selling without pause.

I think that's why I'm pretty critical of other game auctions. I despise the massive auction at GenCon, in general it is far to slow and lacks energy and I don't think that the majority of the sellers really take away what they should. The lack of energy is certainly a disadvantage but running 12 hours a day for four days means that there are times when the auction hall is almost empty of people and stuff is going way to cheap. I have found this true when I worked the Origins auction as well and I find both of these auctions very frustrating because of that. The LA auctions where a lot of fun when I was helping with those, the auction crews have styles closer to mine. We go fast, we work in jokes and we engage the audience and when you engage the audience that's when the money really starts to flow and the energy from the crowd helps keep you going.

I just finished up the Tacticon 2014 auction this evening. We spent 4 hours selling stuff and had everyone checked out by 11pm. That's our earliest finish in years. I have been told that there is no way that we can sell as much as we do in the period of time we have. I tracked the number of lots sold through the first hour of the auction tonight and at the end of 60 minutes we had sold 72 different "lots". By the end of the four hours we should have sold 288 lots so we were selling a lot every 50 seconds or so. I'll see if I can get an exact count on the lots tomorrow. Fifty seconds seems to long to me, but then there is quite a bit of difference speed wise between Mark and I. While Mark is really good, he's not as fast as I am, while I'm certainly not a professional I have a pretty good cadence and it doesn't take me long to finish off an item an get a good price for it.

So here are a few pictures from tonight's affair

The check-in begins

The tables and floor is starting to fill up as sellers' bring their stuff in to be "recycled"

And a shot from the other side. Those big boxes under the tables are 3d boards for Space Hulk.

A better shot with no one in the way. To the left of the picture you can see the edge of another table that is full of games

The back table is filling up as well 

The money side of the operation

Mark in full auctioneering mode

The paperwork processing begins. First stage is taking money for cash sales during the auction (which we encourage, saves time later). The blue sheets are buyer sheets, for those running a tab. The white sheets are the seller sheets. Both sheets need information from the yellow tag that comes off each item as its sold. The white tag stays with the item and is stored on tables at the back of the room.

Genghis Con and Tacticon Miniature Painting Competition Galleries

Recently the CMPA (Colorado Miniature Painting Alliance) website was hacked. Lili Troy spent three or four days of work restoring the site. She is unhappy to say the least! Fortunately she was able to recover almost everything for which I'm eternally thankful. If you haven't had a chance to check out the talented painters in Denver then I would encourage you to pop on over and check out the painting competition galleries; CMPA Painting Competition Galleries

"Shopping" Street Scenes

I was messing around with the camera tonight and took some street scenes of the Shopping diorama and then de-saturated the photos to get that gritty reporter on the scene look.

"Shopping" a diorama with Hasslefree Miniatures

I have worked on the is particular diorama for well over a year at this point (although to be honest there is probably a 12 month stretch where it just lived in its box). It was mostly finished and entered at ReaperCon 2011 where it took a silver medal. I decided to try again at Tacticon 2012 with it. I added the glass to the window and tried to bring the highlights up on the girls and darken up the rest of the diorama. So I pulled all of that off although the bullet holes in the glass didn't come out very well but after three attempts I was willing to go with it. After the contest we were thinking that maybe the Vallejo Crackle Medium would have gotten me closer to the effect I was looking for. Anyway so I pulled off a second silver with this one. I need to figure out what to do for February.

The three Hasslefree Miniatures are: Debra (HFA048), McKenzie (b) (HFA054) and Ashlee (b) (HFA057)

Hasslefree is a great little company and people don't come much better than Sally and Kev White.
HassleFree Miniatures

A few WIPs before the final entry photos:

And the final result:

Lysette - Finished

Tacticon is the big reason I haven't posted in a bit. Getting everything ready for classes and the competition just eats up my time. I did manage to finish Lysette for the painting competition at Tacticon. Up until the judging I thought I had done a pretty good job on her. But in the end she only managed to get a bronze. I was rushed so I left off the sabretasche and belts, I wasn't confident that I would be able to paint them and attach them without messing something up. From the judging standpoint I imagine that they didn't even notice that the scabbard was missing. I do actually agree with the judges, I think I was just to close to the piece at that point and I missed some of the flaws. I'm going to paint another one up but I will do a different Hussar uniform. So here are a couple of pictures:

Again you can purchase Lysette and Louie XIX or XIX.v from Rastl World Minis

Painting for Competition

I organize the Painting Conference and Competition for both Genghis Con and Tacticon here in Denver Colorado. I have been painting miniatures off and on since I was ten, lets leave it at I have been painting a long time. I am a very good painter, good enough to win medals and trophies but definitely not in the upper echelon of those that win Golden Demons and Slayer Swords (for those that don't know these are the awards from what is currently the most prestigious painting competition held at the various Games Days hosted by Games Workshop). Almost every game convention has a painting competition of some sort. The national conventions; GenCon and Origins both have competitions and Adepticon is now hosting the Crystal Brush Competition (huge cash award). There are other military modeling groups that hold their own competitions as well like MMSI in Chicago.

I have seen the frustration of entrants when their pieces don't do as well as the expect them to yet they never ask why their piece didn't do well and I know some of them go away angry and disappointed thinking that the judges are in league against them.  So here are some thoughts on what you can do to improve your work from the perspective of an entrant, a judge and an organizer.

As entrant my best advice is ignore the comments of your friends. Unless your friends are all excellent painters their comments on how great your are don't really mean much (harsh I know but true). If you are thinking of entering at this stage (and I think you should) you should start looking at some of the forums and see the quality of the work that is being shown off online. This is what you are going to be facing in a competition. Don't bring in one of your gaming pieces (even your best gaming piece) to the competition. Odds are that it is showing some use and abuse from your gaming sessions and that is not what you want to show the judges. Pick out something new that you want to paint and give your self plenty of time to paint it (i.e. three days before the event is not enough time), Take the time to clean the miniature, remove all the mold lines, make sure its a good casting (details are crisp and fully molded). Make sure you apply a primer coat that is thin and even. A good primer coat goes a long way towards a quality paint job. If the primer coat is rough then the paint will not go on smooth. Then you can start painting, use your best techniques and I recommend not trying a new technique on a competition piece unless you are sure that you can get it right the first time. For competition pieces I stick to my strengths or only use new techniques that I have been practicing on other miniatures with. And when you are finished, DO NOT apply a dullcote. The application of any type of matte finish will kill your highlights and blend all your careful work into a single color. It will survive without a matte finish for the length of the competition.

Judging is a tough thankless task. You are often under a time limit maybe facing upwards of several hundred entries to get through. There are two distinct judging styles as well; Podium/Trophy judging and Medal judging. Under the trophy judging judges are looking for the best three pieces in each category and are probably working with 2-3 other people and trying to come to a unanimous decision. So the team is first going to eliminate anything that just doesn't measure up. This can sometimes mean that half the entries are eliminated in the first run through of the entries. After that it gets more and more difficult as judges look for the elusive top three. What you need to do to survive here is something that will catch the judges' eyes and keep your piece in contention. A nicely finished base, nice clean paintwork, and unusual miniature will all serve to keep you in the running. In the end though it comes down to who has the fewest number of flaws in their paintwork to get that elusive first place finish.

Medal judging is a whole different process there can be as many as five judges with a couple of alternates involved. In this style the judges will select your best miniature to judge. If you enter three pieces in the single fantasy category the judges will decide, as a group, which one is your best work and that will be the only piece they judge. There are variations to this but in general that's how the selection is made. Then without discussion each judge will give the piece a numeric score from 0 - 4. A tabulator will take the scores, toss the high and low scores and add the remaining three. A score of 11-12 is gold, 8 - 10 is silver, 5 - 7 is bronze and in some competitions 2 - 4 is a certificate of merit. In this type of judging everyone that deserves a gold will get a gold and so on down the line. For this competition you don't need to catch the judges' eyes quite as much as you need to make sure that your miniature has been prepped properly, your paint work is nice and smooth and the techniques you utilized (layering, wet blending, washes, drybrushing, OSL, NMM) are executed to the best of your ability. A nice presentation helps, so don't ignore your base work.

From an organizer's standpoint I want you to enter and enter often. The more miniatures I have in the case the more excitement is generated to see who wins the gold medals. If you don't win a gold then I hope that it inspires you to get better and try again. What I want you to do is to ask questions about what you can do better to get to that next level. My conventions always have painting classes and if you want to try out a new technique like NMM then take the class and see if its something you really want to try. A successful show for me is one where everyone who enters asks a least one question on how to improve and is excited to start a new miniature (or two or three) for the next competition.

Genghis Con is coming up in February so let's get those brushes to work!