Ogre at Blast-Tastic! 2014

With Steven 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.

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.  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 is 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.  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, and 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.