Jack of Harts

KSAGG VI is over.

The birthday boy has survived another celebration, and he even won the whole tournament. He spent months playing his list to make certain he got every bit of performance out of it. He wanted to win a tourney, and he did it. It was a very good job and fully congratulations are in order.

I played one game of Alpha Strike, and that was the Thursday game where I got volunteered into the first Dragoon game and then given the Assault lance to play with. I did not pick the lance. I in fact allowed everybody else to pick their lances, and nobody picked that one. I didn’t even go over to where the lances were. I was last to enter the game, I wasn’t signed up for it, and I was going to let everybody else have their pick. At the end there were three lances left, and the one guy who hadn’t chosen wanted a certain style. The organizer, actually the birthday boy himself, gave him what he had that fit that. That left him with the Homeguard lance and the Assault lance. I am famous for playing fast little bastards and being the annoying little ankle biter that attacks people from every direction at once. I think I would have done well with the Homeguard lance. He wanted to see what I would do with an Assault lance, so he took Homeguard and gave me the big buggers. He held the flank while I walked up the middle and held the crossroads.

I decided they were Zeta.

Now Zeta wasn’t in that battle, but I went with it and the birthday boy was probably the only one on the table who knew the Dragoons enough to know. In my defense I don’t know the Dragoons good enough to remember that Beta uses green colors. Also, Beta would have done the same thing Zeta would have done. So… difference is negligible.

As far as the boys on the other side know, they just faced a guy playing Zeta the way Zeta should be played, and they were shocked and horrified at what I did with them. And what I did to them. And when they found out afterwards that I hadn’t actually picked them they just shook their head in disbelief. And it’s a disbelief I share. Why did NOBODY pick that unit when picking units? I have no idea. I just got handed it, and I played it to the hilt, and I’ve never had so much fun losing three-quarters of my unit in a pitched battle. The pure destruction they generated while going down was awesome. And one of them still held in the end. One of them really was making every other ‘Mech on that end of the field hide from it.

Zeta Stands. 🙂

For the rest of the con, I did a lot of standing and walking around and talking. Watching other people play games. I spent time in the painting room when the tables were packed with gaming. I found individual open tables from time to time to run demos. I met people and made connections. I helped many people get their first game of BattleTech Encounters in and they loved it. I never was able to unpack the rest of my demo kit. Just the little BattleTech Encounters box. I could drop that on a postage stamp of a free table, or one recently abandoned by someone else. Which worked for me, though I didn’t get the chance to do as much as I wanted to do. But what I did was awesome. People who wanted to find out what a game they hadn’t been able to play got the chance to play the game with someone who had spent time learning it enough that I maybe knew what I was doing. It’s a fun game and something that I think anybody could play. It is a Push Your Lucky style of game. Totally different from BattleTech in mechanics, but they did a good job of making all the bits give it the feel of being inside BattleTech.

It was a good con for me. It was a good con for the birthday boy. And it was a good con for a lot of other people. The venue was amazing. The hotel I stayed at was amazing.

And now I’m back at home sleeping in my own bed, and that is also amazing.

It was a good weekend, and I’m happy to be back out of the weekend. 🙂