Tabletop Scotland 2024

hi y'all,

What is this? 2 posts in 2 days? Well this is just a quick bonus post, haha I said I would add a few of these now and again...

Last weekend I flew up to Edinburgh for Tabletop Scotland 2024, the biggest gaming convention north of the border and rapidly becoming the biggest outside of Expo. I haven't been to TTS since before Covid, when the convention was held in Perth. That convention was my first and was brilliant fun with me showcasing my own board game design - Blood, Sweat and Horses! A chariot racing game you can find out about here. The whole weekend was filled with gaming, broken only by an unfortunate trip to A&E after I fell and bust my ankle, made worse by me having to drive 11 hours to get back to the southeast coast of England at the end of the con.

Fast forward to last weekend, TTS has outgrown its previous home and was being held for the first time at the Highland Centre, conveniently located within walking distance of the airport. So, I thought why not? I really wanted to go back but could not resist flying - £39 return ticket, 5 hours of travelling instead of 11 and delivered right to the door, what could go wrong... oops!

Getting up at 02:00hrs on the friday morning wasn't too bad I suppose, except it was a peasouper foggy kind of morning - bugger! No worries, we slowed it down and got to the airport 45 mins later than planned, but we were safe. Onto the plane - no problem, held on the tarmac for 30 mins longer than planned - no problem. Arrived in Edinburgh only 30 mins behind schedule, not too bad and we're all safe and sound... or are we? where is J? they haven't got off the plane - 20 mins later and they are wheelchaired of the plane and we are on our way to A&E - two trips to Scotland, two trips to A&E! thankfully the Scottish NHS is more than up to task and our group member was triaged, assessed and treated within 3 hours - a time that shames almost every hospital I've ever been to south of the border and i'm a paramedic so i've seen quite a few! However, drama over we still managed to get to TTS, missing only the first hour which would have been held up by the queue to get in - which was impressive and just shows how big the con has grown in the last few years!!

home from home...

The convention was amazing fun and I was too busy to get a load of different pictures but there was a massive area for retailers, game demonstrators, free space, game library and bring and buy.  I spent so much money that missus Gobbo will be wearing a frown for some time. I also played so many games from wargames like Fallout and Bolt Action, to RPGs (a brilliant Wild West RPG which is going through Kickstarter atm), to board games such as Zen Monkeys, Rising Sun, Hues and Cues, and may others. But by far was my favourite - Worms the board game by Mantic games! based on the video games from back in the day, Worms is a faithful recreation of the old classic and the nostalgia hit alone was worth the box price, let alone the excellent game play that had me laughing throughout the whole game and recreating the sound effects from the vid game.

our amazing accommodation

playing Worms in the airport following the delay 

my set of painted worms

i loved painting these guys and completed the whole lot in just two days. I could go on and on about the convention but as this is just a bonus post, I'm gonna leave it there and just thank the awesome David Wright and his excellent team for hosting a brilliant convention.

hope you enjoy

dGG

So what games are we playing now?

 hi y'all

So, the last post showed you what I'm playing on, but what games am I actually playing? Four and half years ago it was mainly Blood Bowl, some ATZ and Bushido. 

I'm still playing Blood Bowl and have been trying to get to some local tournaments over the last couple of years as the league play is hindered by lack of interest at my local club and my shifts. I have been adding various teams to my collection in addition to the Humans, Skaven, dark elves, pro-elves and halflings. Slann, Goblins, Amazons, Wood Elves, High Elves, Lizardmen, Norse, Chaos Dwarfs and Vampires have all been built and painted and will be shown off over the coming months but as a taster here is one of my favourite team sculpts - Chorfs!! the team will need tweaking now the official GW minis have been launched, due to the new positionals. The minis I got from Comminex and I can't tell you the designer (although I think they are a very old Greebo sculpt).

I still haven't found nicer sculpts than these for BB and although Chaos Dwarfs don't play to my style, being more Bash than Dash, I still had to have them.

Another game that I've been playing a lot of is Burrows and Badgers, the game of anthropomorphic animals by Michael Lovejoy. It's a fantastic skirmish battle game, with delightful miniatures and although the warbands have a low model count, I have gone a bit nuts and bought loads of them! I can't help it, the miniatures are amazing and the game is a lot of fun, with a relatively simple ruleset. 

Lady D'Eath - fox assassin

Madame Tilly - cat crackshot

Dandy Fox Highwayman

Fox bandit

Fox Mage

It has also inspired me to build loads of new terrain. All built from scratch, with a few printed scatter pieces that finish the look off nicely. I'll go into more of the buildings and how I did them in later posts as there are quite a few more and some interesting pieces as well.

As this post is getting fairly long already, I'll kind of skim over the other systems/games with just a couple of pics and a bit of blurb, just to whet your appetite and know that I'll be doing more in depth posts at a later date.

 I've also just started playing Star Wars Legion, which is a game with a larger model count than I normally go for, but it's Star Wars innit so I've just got to play. 

Count Dooku

and his Magna Guard

I've also finally got to play a decent Cowboys/Wild West game - Dead Man's Hand. A brilliantly simple skirmish game, which again has led me start building some nice old West buildings

There also have been a smattering of other games like Bolt Action and the like but they are few and far between. As for my beloved Bushido, all games have dried up due to a complete lack of interest from anyone else in the club and Damon having drifted off, so my huge collection sits on shelves gathering dust until I can coerce someone into a demo game and spark their interest.

As for ATZ that is definitely coming as I'm currently writing up a batrep....

hope you enjoy 

dGG

A new Grotto for da Gobbo

Hi y’all

My thanks for those of you who managed to get through my last post as self indulgent as it was. This post as promised is pure hobby, pure as it combines two of my main hobbies into one project. 

When my daughter finished university, she decided she would stay where she studied and work/live. As sad as I was that she wasn’t coming home… well basically I’d cleared all of her junk out of her room (the biggest bedroom in the house) and had it decorated and deep cleaned (girls are gross too, turns out) and then I moved my gaming stuff in, all within a fortnight. It was a blitzkrieg action designed to bewilder missus Gobbo and take over the space before she could object and find another use for it - lol.

While I was doing this, I was thinking about what the room needed, what my gaming needed. I mean, when we think of wargaming, we think of glorious miniatures, beautiful terrain and cool rule sets. What we rarely think of, is what we play ON. Growing up, i've played games on the floor, my dining room table covered in a cloth with books for hills and all that stuff, just like the majority of us. My setup in the old grotto was a 8’x4’ mdf board, painted green and partially covered with a flocked sheet, all sat on a set of trestles. More than adequate, I know and one that I’ve played some amazing games on too, but I really wanted something that was more bespoke and useful for ALL the types of games I play, wargames and board games of all kinds and now i'm older, have the space for it and a little bit of knowledge on how to go about making the vision come true. For this I took to the interwebs for inspiration and try to find a table that fit the bill, however I wasn’t looking to buy a table as the type I wanted was running at well over £1000 depending on build quality, instead it was my intention to build it myself. A tall order surely? but as I said in the previous post I've taken up woodworking as a hobby as part of my journey into middle age.

So without further ado, and because I have very few build photos (wasn't blogging remember...) here is the table.

the tops of the table with the cup holders cut out

the table top coming together,
the open sides are for hidden card mechanics in games

green flocked sheet from the old board repurposed 

the bottom part of the table, for playing smaller games,
board and card games

with it's final finish on, looks nice and shiny...
oh and a dragon flying over it

interior table top is 6'x3'

looking good, but quite finished yet!

time to add a table top so bigger games can be played

upper table has a 6'6"x 3'6" playable surface

oh yeah and i added LEDs to the inside for some mood lighting

playing Civilisation the board game on the inner table

The Great Wall - brilliant game

add a drop cloth over the top

and my home made rubber terrain mat (more on that to come)

and my scratch built Star Wars Legion terrain and it becomes 
a proper wargames table...

Now that's what I call a nice gaming table and suitable for da Grotto, if I do say so myself lol. 

hope you enjoy

dGG

p.s the build cost about £200 in materials and took around 18 hours to build (without drying time) over the course of about a week.