ReaperCon 2018 Day 4

Day 4, worn down and pretty tired at this point, but its still the highlight of the convention for me because its auction day! We have been ending the convention with the auction for quite some time now and it gives me a chance to get up on stage. The only time I enjoy being on stage! At this auction you can only use Reaper Bucks which you earn by taking classes, playing games and in general just participating in the convention. While the issue of people pooling their resources always comes up as a sore point each year there isn't much I can do about it and when it comes right down to it everything is free anyway. There was plenty of stuff on hand as well, from the slightly used classroom paints, to miniatures and airbrushes. Overall I would say it was quite successful this year. I know the room was certainly packed to the gills. It was so big that I had problems seeing folks in the back they were so far away.

We were already packed up to slip away and head home right after the auction and so we did with a few quick good byes. It was time to hit the road for the roughly 750 mile trip home. Our goal, once again, was to get to Amarillo that night and make back to Denver early in the afternoon on Monday. That didn't quite work out as planned.

About 65 miles out of Amarillo we blew a tire, lost the whole tread. That required changing a tire, at night, on the side of 75 MPH highway. Fortunately we lost the right front tire so I was away from traffic, but its still a little nerve wracking. The Volvo C30 naturally features a small spare so I had to limp the car into Amarillo at 50 mph which took quite a while and made us a hazard on the highway to boot.

We arrived safely at the hotel, and then ran into more difficulty on Monday morning trying to get a new tire. It was Labor Day and everyone but Walmart and Firestone were closed. It took about four hours at the Firestone and we were finally back on the road, albeit with two new tires there were not the right size. It was the best that could be done and it got us home late Monday night. Yesterday we replaced all four tires. The Volvo only gets driven about 8 miles a day back and forth to work and the 45,000 mile tires only had about 20,000 miles on them. However, they were six years old and that's what made the difference on a dark night in TX!

A very empty painting competition room.

Stuff for the auction!

James Wappel had his own space away from the other Artists, he needs some serious elbow room when wielding his airbrush.

All the remains are the sidewalls on a 215/45R18 tire, which apparently in TX no one uses.

ReaperCon 2018 Day 2 & 3

I'm just going to combine Friday and Saturday together. They all start to blend together after a while and from my standpoint they are pretty much the same. Lots of classes going on, lots of shoppers and lots of gaming.

A Freeblades demo game in Action

We use a modified version of the Open or Medal system created by the MMSI in Chicago. In Chicago dioramas are included in the Open category, at Reaper we elected to split them out into their own category resulting in a total of 4 categories: Painter (stock figures), Open (scratchbuilt and/or converted), Ordnance (Machines of War) and Diorama. Here is a selection of a few of the 500 plus entries in the various categories in the painting competition. I'm the captain for the Ordnance judging team. And no we don't score our own entries, we have an alternate step in to do that.

I love the creativity behind this diorama featuring Moby Dick.

The exclusive Con Sophie as painted by Rhonda Bender

I really just loved this horse, very well done

A good example of an Open piece, this is a scratch sculpt that started life as a piece of dead wood

I like the miniature in the pocket watch

Ordnance, from GW

To 1/35th scale Armor

While this diorama is extremely well done, it takes some time for the story to really come out,

This one was just fun

Here is my FT-17 in progress, this would eventually get a silver medal.

While I'm thinking about it. The one thing that is really holding people back from getting gold medals in the Ordnance category is mold lines, seams and poorly applied decals. Take some effort to clean up all your mold lines and fill the seams, they distract so much from the model. I saw some beautiful GW kits in the competition, that suffered from this plus poorly applied decals. If you are going to spend $100 plus dollars on a kit at least take the time to build it right!

ReaperCon 2018 Day 1

Day 1 starts off bright and early for us. The vendors' hall is open at 8 for the rest of the vendors coming in which really is most of them. Thursday is the lightest day for activity but I would guess we still had about 300-400 attendees on site. The vendor hall was busy with shoppers right from the time we opened it up.

One of the things that we do to encourage attendees to stop in is the Vendor Punch Card. We give each vendor a punch to use for the convention and attendees bring their punch cards (from the their swag bag after they register). If you get a punch from each vendor then you can turn it in at the Reaper booth for an exclusive con miniature. It guarantees that most of the attendees will actually visit your booth, although there is a certainly level of rudeness that has cropped up with it over the years. Lots of attendees have started to really just stick the cards at the vendors without so much as a "hello, could you please punch my card?"which bothers me, but the vendors haven't really complained to much.

The first entries started to show up in the competition area too. Its best just to have it ready to go and get it in rather than try and finish something on site. That never works for me very well. In the end I decided not to enter the Sherman from Trenchworx as I felt it just wasn't ready, so I opted for the Trenchworx FT-17 and two of the 21st Panzer Division Normandy vehicles that I did from Mad Bob's last kickstarter.

DGS and their skirmish game Freeblades

Talon Games, the owner of CAV. Who doesn't like stompy mechs?

Texas Viking, local game seller

Forge Prints, although the company name is officially changing. I'll have to dig that up.

And there is one of the new cards right in the photograph!

Best Little Craft House in TX

Complete with Cats

Hanger 18

Bombshell Miniatures

Bobe's Hobby, a con staple

Badger Air Brush Company, back in attendance

Jane's Tools, he usually does model railroad shows but decided to give us a try this year. What painter/modeler doesn't love tools?

Another local game seller, specializing in used material

Queen Penquin, making all kinds of cool jewelery

Another Convention Staple, Frontline Games

The Reaper Booth, already seeing traffic

Darkflame books, finally releases her second book

MidKnight Heroes

Frozen Ninja 3D

And a close up of their display board

Tabletop Plus, another con staple

Typhoon Paint Mixers

Scale 75

The main hall filling up

Those are game demo booths on the left side

Registration, in between rushes. We had some issues with the Growtix software we were using but I think everything will be ironed out for next year. The company was on site and I think has a much better idea of what needs to change.