Hamburger Tactica 2011

After 2009 and 2010 my visit at this year's Tactica convention has been the third time in a row. Unlike last year where I only had a few hours because I was in the process of moving to Berlin, I combined the event with visiting a friend who had just moved to Hamburg. Also I met up with some of my old gaming mates and it was great to see them again.

Warning: Please excuse the horrible quality of the photos! I know they are really bad and don't do the beautiful works that were presented any justice. All they do is give you a rough idea and I will include links to other galleries of the show as I find them. Also, I try to provide you with links to galleries of the works if I know them.

Something I very much looked forward to was checking out the Freebooter Miniatures' relatively new game Freebooter's Fate. I only had a quick look at the rulebook at my local gaming store and while the book looks absolutely gorgeous, just as Werner Klocke's miniatures, I didn't know how the game would play out. What I did know already is that is uses dicelss system of cards for determining hit or miss and damage. The hit system is not really new - I know the concept from Games Workshop's Pit Fighter game, which was published in issues 1 and 3 of the short-living Fanatic Magazine (see the "Gladiators" section of my blog under "Games").
The four of us got to play the game on one of the presentation tables. We each had a crew of three models and the objective was to find our captain who was locked away somewhere on a graveyard (yeah, pirates do this kind of stuff!). The board was pretty crowded with four crews so the action started pretty quickly. While I managed to pretty much eradicate the enemy to my right the opponent to my left managed to find their captain and had the game lasted longer (we restricted it to four rounds to not go on for too long) he probably would have won.
I won't give a review of the game here as I would need more experience to get a proper in depth feel for the system. I will say though that playing without dice is a nice change - even though I saw (and still don't see) a need for it. We had a good idea of the game quickly so it definately is a fitting system for a demo/presentation game. I don't know how it will play in the long run of a campaign and how deep the system really is. So far, I have only heard good things though.

 Freebooter's Fate gaming tables

Another hightlight of the show was meeting Thomas, aka "Chicken", of www.tabletop-fantasywelten.de. Until then I had only known him via the internet. He had sent me one of his scratch-built houses for me to paint (and keep!) and he presented a gorgeous Imperial city board (see gallery here).

Right next to Thomas' city there was - and this is a great tradition of the convention - another gaming table by Wolfgang: The Imperial Seaport (see gallery at Gidian-Gelände).

Like last year Geboom had his table/stall, carving plaster and selling resin cast of his works. I posted about his latest works - beautiful facades of Amsterdam houses - on my blog last year. He had casts of three facades on offer of which I happily bought one copy of each.

Lastly, some more random photos of various gaming boards and miniatures. I didn't even try to cover all of the tables and stands. It is just too much. Plus there is my lacking ability of taking proper photos. Still, I did take some photos so here they are. Hopefully you'll enjoy them anyways.

Norse Army by Witchhunter

 Further reading/watching:

• http://s278.photobucket.com/albums/kk82/Thorulf68/Tactica%202011/
• http://img824.imageshack.us/g/p2190042.jpg/
• http://pictures.dirknet.de/categories.php?cat_id=7&sessionid=6b535hctuehn0ccucmltdm8lu5
• http://www.powerfist.dk/forum/index.php?topic=43743.msg543549#msg543549
• http://www.hamburger-tactica.de/tactica/img/fotos_2011/ausstellung/ausstellung.html