Thursday 20 June 2013

Mantic Open day.

Well, it's taken me a while to get round to writing this post considering the Mantic Open day was back on the 11th of May. But don't worry about it too much as I have lots of pretty pictures to show you (and a couple of my friend Richard too).
Mantic, for those of you that don't know, are a wargames company. They currently have three games out, Warpath, a 28mm science fiction tabletop wargame, Kings Of War, a 28mm fantasy tabletop Wargame, and DreadBall, a sci-fi sportsgame, also with 28mm figures. (There is also the forthcoming Deadzone, a sci-fi skirmisher set in the Warpath universe, the Kickstarter of which has just finished. More on that later.) It was DreadBall that took me to the open day as there was to be the first ever Mantic Bowl.


This was the set up for the first of my four DreadBall games of the day. My team, the Plecostomus Knights (in grey and purple) faced off against my best friend Richard's team, Beer Money.


Here he is also taking a picture of the set up. Now I had only ever beaten Richard once, at another tournament. It wasn't a great victory as he was attempting to gain the "Most Violent Team" award and was forsaking scoring for beating up his opponent's teams. It was an award that he did indeed get that day. At the end of the game pictured, I had lost by a landslide. Richard scored seven points in a very short time. In fact, we were the first pair to finish.

In my second game of the day I played against the only female coach in the tournament. I was lucky to win that game by a landslide. I had lost my first game but after winning this one, it meant that I might not be placed very low in the eventual rankings for the tournament.


In my third and fourth games, I was drawn against the same coach. He had a very nicely painted robot team. This is them in the above picture at the start of my third game. In DreadBall, each player usually fulfills one of three roles, striker, jack or guard. The coach of a robot team can spend an action to shift the role of a player from one to another, thus changing what it is able to do on the pitch. As all the models in a DreadBall team have to be numbered and there are different models for each role, a coach of a robot team could end up buying several packs of models. Quite a few coaches, including my opponent, have gotten around this by gluing magnets to the bases of their models then sticking player numbers to those magnets which can then be removed and stuck onto a different model of an appropriate type when that player's role changes. A few have even done what my opponent had and written the numbers in binary. A very nice touch I thought.
This third game was very to-and-fro, with neither of us really gaining the upper hand for most of it. One of us would score followed by our opponent pulling the points back his way. We ran out of time to complete all the rushes of the game. There was one rush left at the end and it was my turn. I was ahead in points, only needing three more for a landslide victory. I was confident that I would have gotten it if only I had had two minutes more to complete the rush. Thwarted.
My fourth and final game in the tournament as I have already mentioned was against the same coach. Somehow, this time, I managed to get a landslide victory quite early on.


Other than the Mantic Bowl, there were several other things going on. There was a huge Warpath game, a shop, previews of forthcoming models, alpha-testing of Deadzone and the above pictured massive game of Kings Of War.

Talking of Kings Of War and previews of unreleased models, her is a picture of a trio of werewolves. These creatures will become part of the undead army for the game.

And these models at the front in blue seem to be a type of nun flagellant. They are for the as yet unreleased human army for Kings Of War. On the right in the same colours are Human knights.

Keeping on with the Kings Of War previews for the moment, this steam-powered, choppy, grindy wagon thingy is to be crewed by goblins for the greenskins army. It reminds me of the thing that chased Sarah through a tunnel in Labyrinth.

More previews? Why not? These guys are the Terratons, a Season Three team for DreadBall. They are based on Ankylosaurus, which happen to be my favorite dinosaurs.

One more from the display cabinet now. This guy is from the Rebs faction for Deadzone.

And talking of which...

This is a second generation for the Plague faction. This and the next two pictures are from the lovely looking Deadzone diorama the Mantic had provided for us to dribble over.

This fellow here is an Enforcer, one of the Co-Prosperity Sphere's finest soldiers.

Two Enforcers take cover behind a barricade while their captain strides towards a first generation and three third generations from the Plague faction.

After a fairly tiring day (we'd had to get up around 4am to get the train to Nottingham), Richard and I had to decide what we were going to do for dinner. Being in Nottingham, we thought, "Why not go to Warhammer World?"
The restaurant wasn't open to the general public (it had been set up as a buffet for players of a Warhammer tournament that was happening in the gaming hall) so we got food in Bugmans, Warhammer World's dwarf themed pub.

In the carpark at Warhammer World, they have a lifesize Rhino APC. Apparently, it even drives. Very cool.



And they have huge Imperial Aquilla on a couple of their buildings.


After a hard day geeking out, Richard falls asleep on the train home.