2015 NHMGS Game Day at the Museum of Flight

NHMGS held our annual game day at the Museum of Flight on November 8. We were originally schedule for the previous week, but an unexpected scheduling conflict forced us to move to the 8th. Unfortunately, the schedule change lowered gamer turn-out for the event.

We were back in the museum’s main gallery under the Blackbird (not a standard SR-71, but the last surviving M-21 version). We set up our information table and four gaming tables around the Blackbird. I spent the most of the day at the information table, but took time to grab some photos of the games.

This year's information table (we forgot the banner)

The morning session had a Wings of Glory World War 1 game, a Check Your 6 World War 2 raid over Rabaul game, a Golden Age Air Racing game, and an All Quiet on the Martian Front game.

The busy Wing of Glory game

The object of the fighters attention

The Check Your 6 game getting underway

Corsairs and Zeros square off

The running (flying) start for the air race

The field was pretty spread out at this point, but I understand the finish was pretty close

All Quiet on the Martian Front starting off

The Martians advance, but were taking heavy damage

In the afternoon we only had two games going, a Thunderboats hydroplane racing game and a Star Wars Armada game.

Hydroplanes on display(the checkboard pattern in the front left was hand-painted)

The new "pickle-fork" boat takes the lead

A busy Star Wars Amada game with a few museum visitors participating

As with last year’s event, there were fewer people at the museum on Sunday than we have seen at Saturday game days. A lot of the people I talked with had never heard of miniature wargaming before, so it was fun to try to explain it from the ground up. This year I remembered to add some websites with free rules to the information handout, so I was able to direct to those when they asked about getting started. We did get a few people to join in the Wings of Glory and Armada games. So maybe we will get a few membership inquires.

The game day is always a good opportunity to show off the hobby to the general public and the museum is a really great forum for it.

Preparing for Enfilade 2010

The local historical miniatures gaming convention, Enfilade, is just a couple weeks away and I'm getting into final rush mode for my game preparations.

This year I'll be running, or helping to run, 3 events. Two are hydroplane racing games that Kevin Smyth and I will run using the locally grown Thunderboats rules. The Enfilade Cup will run on Friday evening and on Sunday will will run a historical game based on the 1965 Gold Cup. We've added some additional rules to make this historical and a little different than the normal races. You can read a little about the playtest on Kevin's blog.

The third game, slated for Saturday afternoon, will be a modern missile/gun boat game off Korea using David Manley's Bulldogs Away rules. I'm still finishing the work on most the boats for this game. All, except for a couple optional Osa missile boats, come from The PT Dockyard's 1/700 scale modern line. The North Korean ships include the Chong Jin class (a P-6 hull with a T-34 85mm turret), the Chaho class (a P-6 hull with a 122mm rocket launcher), the Chinese-built Shantou class (a P-6 hull will twin 37mm guns) and some Soviet/Russian-built P-6 torpedo boats (do you see a pattern in the mix?).

The South Koreans will have some Sea Dolphin (Chamsuri) class gunboats and some Pae Ku (PSSM-5) missile boats. For the Sea Dolphins I chose to go with the newer version with the 40mm gun on the bow and for the Pae Ku I modified the standard model, getting rid of the Standard missile boxes and adding some Harpoon missile canisters.

I'll provide some better pictures as I finish up the boats.

Dave