I went to GenCon this past weekend – my first attendance in five years. Looking back, I spent a lot of my time doing and buying Battletech things:

1) first thing I did was learn to paint a Battletech miniature under the tutelage of David Fanjoy (who has been a camospecs painter for years). I’d never really grasped the whole layering thing well, and learned that Walmart paints work just as well (and sometimes better) than citadel or Vallejo. Plus, I came home with another battlemaster, this one painted (by me!) to look like the one on the GoAC box. Sweet.

2) I went to Alpha Strike academy, where I learned the simplified rules and loved it. I think this will really work out better for my family of four boys age eight and under. I think I’ll tweak it to use attack and defense dice (a la Xwing) so that defenders actually do something on their turn. As it is, there is excessive downtime between player actions.

3) I bought the new Alpha Strike book and found it has cool little unit benefits. Build a lance with mostly heavies with firepower exceed X? Now you can call it an assault lance and get a special free perk. This is great. I also got the new dry erase cards! I have no idea why the corners are square instead of rounded, but whatever. Pretty cool.

4) I got a cool Battletech poster (free!), dog tag (also free!) and a tee-shirt (not free, but worth it!). It was fun waking around the con the next day and seeing all of us in our spiffy Marauder shirts.

5) I had another paint and take session with another Camo specs painter named Amelia, who taught us how to do jeweled cockpit techniques. And she taught us using a griffin! I now have both cover models from the new boxes beautifully painted to match!

6) I finally did it and played in one of those Battletech pods. I may have been 17th out of twenty or something, but I had a ton of fun in my Zeus.

8) I pitched my board game “Hack” to Catalyst! And Randall Bills took my prototype and sounded interested! Woot!

I did some other stuff too, but looking back, my 2019 GenCon seemed dominated by one of my first board game loves 🙂