I was almost totally disappointed with this convention. It was well run as usual with quite a few dealers but only 125 attendees. I sold a few old figures but nothing much. I guess it was held just too close to Christmas.

Ben and I spent a few hours putting together the one piece of scenery with boxes of troops plenty of dice and at ten on Saturday morning there was no one there to play, they must have been watching cartoons or something. And I was the only colonial game of the convention. Such is life.

As to the construction of our scenery piece we took three sheets of styrofoam blue board and glued it together with carpenter's yellow or wood glue. This holds much better than white glue. We let it dry for several days before attacking it with sandpaper and my drill with a round paint stripping plastic brush attachment. First we cut the board to 4' by 6' to fit in the pickup and to fit the tables at the convention. We then placed piecs of the cut off board around the piece until we were satisfied it looked realistic, at least until we start terrain manufacture. Then we glued these pieces on and waited until it dried a few days.

We then discussed how best to make the flat blue board look like the Sudan. I used the drill and paint stripping brush to carve a nullah 1 1/2" deep about two feet from one end. The nullah is about 2 1/2" long with several smaller side branches. This was just in front of a soon to be hill. This made a real mess in the shop and covered me with bits of blue board, it also smelled bad so I guess you should also wear a mask, no not halloween.

Meanwhile, Ben was using sand paper to shape the hills to make them look more like dunes. We then took turns using the stripper brush on the drill to go over the surface of the exposed blue board to give it texture, more mess. We gently ran the stripper brush over the surface trying to make it look random rather than in one direction. On the whole it looked very good when we finished. There was little space left that was untouched. We cleaned ourselves off then the blue board then ourselves again. The shop floor looked like a blue snowstorm just blew through. I was later able to clean this up with a shop vac and sweeping compound which help to keep the board from acquiring static electric charge.

We then painted the board using a light tannish brown latex as an undercoat. Ben then highlighted while I applied a dark wash.

My idea for the game, using TSATF rules, was to have an Egyptian / Sudanese force on patrol with several British officers. The landscape would be uncovered as the force moved across the board each turn. The native players would know what the terrain was and would plain their attack based around the main force coming out of the newly exposed nullah and from the flanks, depending on the Egyptian / Sudanese troop placement. I think it would have been a pretty good game but maybe next year.

Both Ben and I played in Howard Whitehouse's Matrix (Chris Engle's Matrix) Dark Ages (Viking-Anglo-Saxon game with modified DBA rules of engagement). What alot of fun. Howard puts on quite an interesting game, and make some great scenery.

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