Ogre at Blast-Tastic! 2014

This was the first time Michael of Angel Barracks had run Blast-Tastic! It was a small specialist SF&F wargame show, which will hopefully grow and fill the space left by the SFSFW Ragnarok shows of years gone by.  

I had gotten myself into a bit of a tizzy over preparing for the demo.  

This meant I ended up painting for a few hours everyday last week to get the North American Combine forces presentable. Note the description, presentable. There's still another lot of painting to do to get them finished. I was lucky that everyone was kind enough to not notice, and or even say how good the miniatures looked.

Regardless of my panic, I had a blast running the GEV variant of Ogre with a scenario of my own devising called Escalation.

In the picture above:  Steven is leaning back as his Ogre prepares to destroy my Command Post. I was just explaining a rule before he chortled with glee as the Ogre's missile reduced the target to rubble. 

It's a variant of the Ceasefire Collapse scenario where at the end of the game the loser rolls a D6 and gets bonus victory points. The loser can either use these points to turn their loss into a victory, or buy more forces to continue the attack. My opponent who lost the initial attack chose to escalate, and was able to bring on a Mark 3 Ogre. 

The game came down to a nail biting last throw of the dice.

I still need to polish the scenario victory conditions and point values, and I hope to write it up for Miniature Wargames & Battlegames in due course. In the meantime I will be submitting a review of the show for Henry in the next week or so.

Well we got back from Blast-Tastic! pretty much creamed crackered from driving down to Bristol on the Friday evening, setting up for the show and then driving back via way of Reading for a meal out with our friend Clive (who came to provide moral support for my demo of Ogre) on Saturday evening.