Last year after I visited DunDraCon, I had a spaz attack about geekdom. I’m over it now, though. I know this because DunDraCon is almost two months away and I’m already getting psyched about a three-day weekend of gaming goodness. Truth is: I’m a geek, I like playing games and hanging out with other geeks, really geeky stuff like gaming conventions is—somewhat paradoxically—super cool to my twisted sensibilities.

In case you didn’t catch the undercurrent there, let me spell it out: This post will be riddled with excessive nerdosity and virtually oozing with evidence that I am, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a dork of extremely high proportions. I’m just giving you fair warning.

So here’s my dilemma, as it were: I have a plethora of projects that I could focus on for DunDraCon and no way I can get them all finished. So I have to choose carefully. Observe the possibilities, complete with time estimates:

• I have a brand new Blood Bowl team (Undead) waiting to be assembled and painted. I’m reasonably sure that Strahd will run a Blood Bowl tournament again this year and it would be fun to play with a new team… although come to think of it I haven’t played with my Orc team at a con tourney yet either. Still, you can never have too many Blood Bowl teams. Time Estimate: 20 hours.
• Assuming there is some type of 40K tournament, I’d have to do a little extra work to get the last vestiges of my army painted. I think I have about a dozen or so assorted soldiers that are not really table-ready (primed or, at most, have base coats) and practically none of them have decent bases completed. There is also a lot of little detail work that could be done especially on the vehicles. Either way, if I want to play any 40K, I’ll have to break out some paints. Time Estimate: 25 hours (whole army getting to minimum tournament-level paint); 15 hours (smaller force, like 1,800 points getting to tournament-level); 12 hours (enough paint to play in public spaces but not tournament-level); 6-8 hours (Kill Team-ready only).
• I could also devote some additional time to my 40K general model, a beastly metal guy I converted with some wicked-looking wings and a head I bitz-ordered from Warhammer Fantasy. He’s all assembled/converted and primed, but really needs some paint. If I put a whole lot of TLC into the paint job and base, I might even consider entering him into a painting contest, should one exist. Something like that would take a lot of extra time away from other projects, though. Time Estimate: 18 hours.
• Now that I have the new Shadowrun book, I need to do a bunch of conversion work to get the campaign I wrote earlier this year updated. If I did so, I could run the next adventure right there at the con, though. Sounds like a good time and place to playtest some new rules to me. Time Estimate: 12 hours.
• I’ve started work on a board game. The basic rules are done and it would take some time but I could probably get a prototype of the board, cards and rules set up before President’s Day weekend and do an initial beta playtest, should people be interested in such a thing. And as I mentioned above, cons seem like good places to playtest games. Time Estimate: 40 hours.
• If there is going to be any minatures action going on (40K, etc.) it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try getting some decent terrain together. I found an interesting bit of recycled cardboard inside a printer box that was supposed to help protect it during shipping. I was thinking with some wire, a bit of papier mache and a lot of flocking it would make a nifty craggy-rock style hill or something. I also have a notion to build a few bunkers with some cool polystyrene bits I found and some foamcore I have left over from my failed wall-making experiments. Time Estimate: 6 hours (per peice).
• While I’m on the subject of miniatures, I also have a strong notion to get going on my Warmaster army in earnest. I just picked up a couple of additional units in the bargain bin a few weeks ago ($3.00 each!) for my Empire army and I’ve been hankerin’ to try out the game/rules. There’s a lot of work involved in getting these together since my initial assembly method experiment failed, and there are a lot of the little buggers. Plus this is one of only two possibilities I’m considering that might require me to spend more money (I’m lacking in basic troops necessary to build a “legal” force). Time Estimate: 30 hours (per 1,000 points; goal would be 2,500 points).
• I also got a nifty Napoleonic game from Lister for Christmas. He had previously given me a sackful of Napoleonic miniatures that I could put together. I’m not sure if it would be possible using the rules of the game, but it might be worth investigating the possibility of playing the game with actual minis instead of paper counters. Or, I suppose if that didn’t work there are plenty of miniature-based rulesets for Napoleonic battles including the one the minis were initial for, a game called Shako. Time Esitimate: 30 hours (for the whole army).
• If I wanted to go the money route, or possibly try to angle something out of my forthcoming birthday, I could see about scoring a Necromunda gang and getting that together for a bit of squad-level goodness. Time Estimate: 20 hours.

Okay, so the only other factors are what games other people are interested in playing and the amount of time I have to devote to these projects. I’m reasonably sure the Blood Bowl thing will happen, but I could do that without having to finish the new team if I wanted to. There is a Rogue Trader 40K Tournament; I don’t have to participate in that, but I would certainly love to at least get one game in; if nothing else a few rounds of Kill Team would be fun. There’s a pretty high likelihood that there will be some kind of painting competition if I wanted to try and get my model in, if nothing else the RTT has a painting element built in.

I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t be able to get the Shadowrun game to happen; if nothing else I could apply to make it an official con event and get some players in that way. But I bet the folks in our gaming group would be down for a few hours of adventure anyway. That’s not much of a problem. The playtest of the board game is also something I’m pretty sure could be arranged; people (especially the people in the group) are pretty supportive about assisting the creative process along.

As long as some kind of miniatures action happens, there would be use for the terrain. In terms of non-40K mini games, I’m pretty sure if I told Lister in time that I wanted to do Napoleonics that he’d get ready to make it happen and between him and Strahd I know that someone would let me try out Warmaster. But both of those options depend more heavily on connecting schedules and having the people involved complete their projects before the con.

I estimate that I could squeeze an average of between ten and twelve hours per week into these things; I also have a standing offer from Nik to help me get some of the painting done. In the time between now and the con that gives me between 70 and 80 hours to do this stuff. I have about 200 estimated hours worth of stuff listed up there. Some stuff has to give.

The Decision Process

After thinking about it for a bit, I’m leaning this direction: I’ll axe the Necromunda gang for now. As much fun as the game is, I have enough unfinished stuff that I don’t need to spend more money and add to the queue. Necromunda can wait for KublaCon. Also, the Shako miniatures sound like a hoot to paint up, but the time sink is extensive and there’s nothing wrong with paper counters; if I want to get in a wargame in that setting, the boxed set I got will do just fine.

I’d really like to playtest the board game I’m working on, but I know the time involved would require me to push a lot of other stuff back. Doing that would mean that the primary event for me at the con would be that one playtest. Since the input to output ration on that particular undertaking is fairly low, I think it would be better to postpone that unless for whatever reason there ends up being a lot of requests for some playtesting. For now I think I’d rather spread my time out a bit and get more gaming out of the con.

I think I can safely say that the Shadowrun campaign continuation is something I’d like to do. I won’t decide just now if I want it to be an official game, although checking the con site reveals that there are no scheduled Shadowrun games yet so it could garner some interest. I’ll block out the 12 hours I estimate for that project. The bigger question involves whether I want to push for Warmaster or 40K. The RTT is three rounds, I assume that goes over the course of two days. If not I could be looking at an entire day shot for the tournament. The points value for the tournament is 1850, which would probably take me about 20 hours to get into tournament-ready mode. If I did that, didn’t worry so much about getting the general done up for a contest and saved Warmaster for another day, I could probably get that in, Shadowrun, Blood Bowl and maybe have some time left for a bit of terrain. In fact if that were the case I’d then be able to decide based on what other games were happening whether I wanted to join the tournament or just play some 40K with the usual suspects.

Of course if I enlisted Nik’s help, I could probably cut the time on the Warmaster figs down about half. I wouldn’t end up with a huge army, but 1,000 points or so might be a good introduction level game. I could then just not worry about the 40K tournament and make sure I was just good enough on the Chaos army to play in public and not trip out trying to be all that impressive since the games would be private anyway. I’d even have time to get the Blood Bowl team done up as well. Probably no terrain would get done, but I’d have plenty to keep me busy: Shadowrun, 40K or Kill Team, Warmaster, Blood Bowl, Napoleon at Bay and Settlers of Catan. And that would just be what I brought along. The only official games in there would probably be Blood Bowl and possibly my Shadowrun adventure, but that’s okay. Cons are mostly about dedicating time to play games anyway; the availability of sanctioned game events is pretty much gravy.