Event Report: Daffcon

Gaming Hall at Firestorm Games

Last weekend, 8th-10th April, I attended the first ever Daffcon in Cardiff, Wales. Daffcon is a ‘multi-system gaming convention for all the small games out there’. What does this actually mean? About seventy people per day playing their favourite games that perhaps don’t have the audience or exposure yet to be able to warrant their own event (as well as Malifaux which is popular enough, but the organisers are well known on the Malifaux circuit and it would have been remiss of them to omit it!).

Huge schedule of events at Daffcon

The other games that folks could sign up for included some systems that you may have heard of such as Frostgrave, Epic Armageddon, SAGA, Guild Ball and Infinity; some that you may not have such as Open Combat (have you not been paying attention to my blogs?), Relic Knights, Krosmaster, Dragon Rampant, Iron Cross and Of Gods and Mortals.

Daffcon took place at the South Wales Gaming Centre located at Firestorm Games in Cardiff. As far as venues for gaming events go, the SWGC is pretty much perfect. As you can see from the picture above the gaming hall can host dozens of games, with boards and terrain to suit most settings. There is a fully licensed bar (I can recommend the Fubar, a few pints of which were sunk over the weekend) and Christian’s cafe does cooked breakfast food, burgers, hot dogs and other meals for very reasonable prices (unlike many conference facilities you might have frequented).

Firestorm Shop

And then there is the games store part of Firestorm Games. The sort of store that makes your wallet cringe – the impressive wall of board games was tempting enough (you can glimpse a tiny bit on the left of the picture), before I even looked at the shelves upon shelves of toy soldiers, paints, terrain… Let’s just say that if Firestorm was thirty minutes away instead of three hours I’d be out of the house more and would have less money for Kickstarters!

Before getting into the meat of what I got up to, I’d like to say thanks to Mike and friends, as well as everyone else I spoke to and played with, for making it a really friendly, social weekend. It seems that everyone else agrees that Daffcon was a great success and dates for next year have already been announced – 11-13th August 2017, once more at Firestorm. I’ll be putting that on the calendar, you can be sure. You can follow what’s being planned next year on the Daffcon Twitter and Facebook pages.

Bear hug apparently not optional

I rocked up just after lunch on Friday and things were already well underway. My plan for the weekend was that I had no plan. This was a perfect opportunity to hang out, chat to people, look at what’s been happening in the gaming scene of late and maybe roll some dice. I met Mike Marshall, principle organiser and frontman for Daffcon, and of course our first conversation was about… Wrestlemania. But there was lots of gaming talk too. Mike introduced me to one of his Malifools/ Fools Daily/ Butterfly Gamers podcasts co-hosts, the unforgettable Matt Spooner, who was running demo games of Dragon Rampant. Matt reacted to his brush with ‘celebrity’ with poise and decorum.

The last of the Butterfly Gamers trio is Conrad Gonsalves, like Mike a man I first met many years ago when he was one of the infamous ‘Geeks’ playtesters for Warhammer. It was really good to catch up with Conrad and share views on what’s been going on with gaming and miniatures over the last few years.

Open Combat

What took me to Daffcon in the first place was offering to help my friend Carl of Second Thunder with his Open Combat event on the Saturday. As it turned out, one of the attendees pulled out due to illness so I stepped in as a ringer (ha!) to take his place. We managed to fit in five games of Open Combat over the day, using the standard campaign rules presented in the Open Combat book. That was pretty good going considering this was the first time Carl had tried to run an event of this kind, and everyone was still a little slow with the rules to start (in fact, one of the participants, Dave, had not played at all before our first game, which shows how simple it is to pick up).

Over the course of the day we played through different scenarios and tracked the injuries, experience and Reputation of our warbands, with a handshake and trophy for the player whose warband finished with the highest Reputation. (Also, everyone that attended got a special green custom Open Combat dice, only available to the Kickstarter backers and event goers.)

I put together a warband using some classic Undead figures I’d taken along just in case, and away we went. If I get a bit of time I’ll be putting up my warband roster(s) on the Open Combat forums.

The first scenario was ‘Open Combat’ with Confrontation deployment. There was no terrain, but the magical mists that had swept up our warbands contained random hazards. I was matched against Dave, the Open Combat newcomer, who used a warband of elves drafted by Carl. After a couple of turns Dave was well into the swing of things and needed only minimal prompting to play – mostly hints about positioning and tactics rather than the rules.

Game 1 ended in defeat, and the death of my ‘Duke of Hell’, as well as serious injuries to two of my other models. Thus the tone was set for the day…

The next game used the ‘Capture’ scenario in which both warbands are trying to grab (moving) objectives and get off the battlefield. I had a run-in with JP’s orcs as we tried to swipe as many chickens, pigs and villagers as possible.

Another loss, and more casualties. It seems that sometimes the dead do rest easily.

My third encounter was against the rapacious halfings of Connor, over JP’s great marsh village board. In the ‘Retrieve the Prize’ scenario both warbands are searching locations of interest for treasure, or something else they both desire such a pieces of a map, maybe the broken parts of an amulet, that sort of thing. There are also mishaps, dead-ends and, um, giant fish to be uncovered.

I managed to corner the elves but unfortunately lacked the punch to do much damage once I had them there… More bones sent back to the graveyard meant that I was in very poor shape for the final battle.

In game four I once again lined up against the elves under the leadership of Dave, who were trying to Escort something valuable from one table corner to the other. Using a selection of animal miniatures, I set up ‘ambush markers’ representing traps, hidden warband members and the like.

I managed to corner the elves but unfortunately lacked the punch to do much damage once I had them there… More bones sent back to the graveyard meant that I was in very poor shape for the final battle.

The last battle of the day returned to the ‘Open Combat’ straight fight scenario, this time with random deployment. As Dave and JP had the highest warband Reputation at the time, we all agreed we should let them face off to decide who walked out with a swagger and bragging rights. This left me to battle Connor’s vengeful halflings.

Due to an Old Battle Wound suffered earlier in the day my necromancer didn’t even bother showing up. I think he knew what was coming. Outnumbered and surrounded, my stumbling dead succumbed, the Banner of Despair trampled into the dirt by a halfling mounted on a goat…

Big congratulations to JP, whose orcs fended off the elves (including a clash between a troll and an owlbear!) and emerged with the highest Reputation.

Demo Games!

I don’t really have space to go into detail about each of the demo games I played, but I will try to do some more on them in future posts. Here’s the basics to get you in the loop.

Mythos is the first release from Paranoid Miniatures, inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. You’ll not find any Elder Gods on this tabletop, this is a skirmish game set on the city streets, with a really interesting cast of characters and back story based on Lovecraft archetypes and classic folklore.

The Roots of Magic is a game of duelling wizards. Each player controls a spellcaster from one of the Houses of Magic, vying to control the courses of mystical power – the eponymous Roots of Magic. This will hopefully be expanded over the months and years to include apprentices, summoned creatures and the like, as well as multi-player encounters.

The Roots of Magic miniatures, like those of Mythos and so many others coming out at the moment, are beautifully designed and sculpted. These are the demo models, the production painted versions were being kept safe for photography.

Inspired by Mad Max, unashamedly riffing on Death Race, Gaslands is, as the tag line tells us, Post-Apocalyptic Vehicular Mayhem. (I think that is pronounced vee-hick-oo-larr.) The game system was smooth and fun, picked up in just a couple of minutes, but with huge scope for development and added craziness.

My Batmobilesque performance car did a victory handbrake turn over the line, to machine gun a truck that had fired a missile at me. Always end with a bang! If you can get some cool cars and a bit of scenery together, you can sign up to playtest Gaslands too.

The fact that I happened to win all three of my demo games (yes, yes, they were demos but it makes me feel better anyway) in no way influenced me to think that these were all great games that I look forward to adding to my collection. And with each being pretty low investment – a subject I shall be talking about in the near future – that will hopefully not break the bank either.

Hopefully I’ll see you at Daffcon next year. If you’re at Salute on Saturday, swing by the Second Thunder stand where I’ll be helping Carl share the joy that is Open Combat.

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