CMoN Expo

This past weekend I attended the 2015 CMoN Expo held at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Atlanta Georgia.  I missed last year's so this was a brand new experience for me.  I have to say, it was smallish, intimate, and pretty busy the whole time.  The turnout was solid with people flying in from all over the country.  Many of the demo tables were full up most of the expo.

Spending most of the expo playing games, I didnt really go out of my way to meet the game designers (plus I'm not much of a people person).  My friend and I went to Brandon Palmer's panel on his Golden Throne diorama for Warhammer 40k.  Very awesome guy from Indiana.  If you havent seen his work, check him out at gmmstudios.net and the Golden Throne here. 

We also played some of the demos.  Chaosball was fun, but after a game and discussing it we feel it's better for 1 on 1 games.  1 on 1 on 1 just resulted in a lot of killing of models and not trying to actually score with the ball...it was more worthwhile to neuter your opponent.

Xenoshyft is a fun deckbuilding game modeled off of tower defense.  It's built to be pretty challenging, but I think the price tag is a little high for what you get with this one.    Apparently the guy doing the demos was way off about the price.  It's about what you'd expect for this game (~$60) instead of the $90-$100 we were told.

I ended up picking up my Character Box 1 (wave 3) for Hadross and they had some of these guys in their CMoN store.  Limited run (100 of the Red, 50 of the White).

                                                                                                                                        

I did play in an excellent Wrath of Kings tournament on Saturday where I pitted my freshly built Carcharians against 3 opponents (one of them Hadross).  My record for that tourney was 1-1-1 and I learned quite a bit in the process.  For instance, it never dawned on me to use my sevridan's gelatinous shift when they werent engaged...

I have to say, I love the use of a sideboard in the tournament system (Option system).  We had the core list with 2 different builds using the "Option" section of the army list.  After viewing your opponent's core, you chose which option (A or B) you wanted to use against them.

The list I brought with me was evidently a very anti Hadross list.  2 Friars, 1 Frenzy Charger, 5 Sevridans, 3 Carcharians, 2 Taxi Crabs, and my options were A) Ilva and B) Orsund Cavalier.   I beat Teknes, and due to some grievous player errors on my part lost to Shael Han.  Not to say the Shael Han player wasn't skilled, but I screwed up a couple times in big ways.

Great sportsmanship all around.  It was a very fun tournament.

Hadross vs Teknes...Wow I'm outnumbered hard.

Hadross vs Shael Han...Note the location of the Orsund off to the side...yeah, that was the biggest 
mistake along with not using gelatinous shift to break up those clusters of guys.