Almost everything went according to plan; at least, nothing went horribly wrong.  JM and I had a great weekend and we both hope to go to more conventions in the future.

Driving to Lancaster always confuses me for some reason, and I found new and different ways to get “almost lost”.  We made it there in time for registration, but just missed getting into Larry’s game (Auxilirama).

Staying at the Lancaster Host was a good idea, and I’ll do it again.  It costs more than the closest cheap hotels, but being in the same building as the convention left more time for gaming between sleep breaks.  We still had to go outside to get to the dealer hall, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone outside all weekend.

Speaking of the dealer hall: I seem to be getting better at not buying things I’m not going to paint.  Between the dealer hall and flea market, the only unpainted figures I bought were 15mm early WWII Russians.  I plan to paint these up for a scenario I’ll run when Mike is in town over the holidays.  I’ll have to fire up the airbrush, since “all one color” is faster that way.  I also bought a variety of other materials and accessories: more bases-by-the quart and adhesive “plasteel” from GF9; a few nicer road segments for DBA; and some cards from an obsolete CCG.

Apparently, last year was the first year they started supporting Toys for Tots at Fall-In.  Besides collecting toys, they also get donations of games, models, figures, and supplies from vendors and individual modellers, and either raffle or auction off the donations.  All proceeds go to Toys for Tots… it’s for the kids!  I have no problem donating money to a good cause, so why not get something good out of it too?

So with that in mind, I won two auctions.  One was a set of foam core buildings, 28mm scale.  These were built by hand with a printed veneer to add a great amount of detail without having to actually paint them.  They’re the perfect scale and style for Malifaux, and they’ll complement our existing terrain nicely.  I also won a 28mm Greek Hoplite army for DBA.  It’s not likely to be a big winner in any tournaments, but it’s a better size for demonstrations and kid-sized hands, and it’ll allow me to play in 25mm DBA events in the future.

I played in all of the events I planned to enter, except the Armies of the Americas event on Saturday morning.  It was early: 9am; and I needed a time to dedicate to shopping without a time limit.  Armies of the Americas was very similar to the 1491 event the night before, and I’d have used the same army for both events.  Unfortunately I got sick of playing my all-bow army pretty quickly… but more about that later.

This was my first convention playing nothing but DBA.  I don’t miss “all the random events” very much.  The comraderie of playing a game I know I like with a group of opponents I’ve played with before more than makes up for the lack of variety.  In the future, I wouldn’t mind spending one or two slots testing out some new rules if there’s something that looks really interesting, but I won’t miss it if that doesn’t happen.