Kublacon Report: Day Zero

So Kublacon has come and past, and I'm frakking exhausted. Something about three days with a 3:00am bedtime and a very chipper little girl saying "Hiii!" at 7:00am. But I get ahead of myself...

The goal for the Kublacon weekend is 14 games from the time Manny touches down on Thursday until I drop him off on Tuesday. I don't try to best myself every year, because that just sets me up for failure. Just a healthy 14 games every year. This year I'm happy to say I blew right through it late Sunday night/early sunday morning, leaving Monday and Tuesday for running up the score.

Right, so Thursday. Day Zero. I'd picked up Scott the day before and so had stayed up a bit late chatting (me? chat too much? NO!!!). Still, got a decent 6 hours of sleep. Normally that was an extra half-cup of coffee but I was flying on Kubla-excitement.

11:00 am: the Portu-geek lands. The gay jokes commence at around 11:02. We get him some food (some whining about a bagel in the past 8 hours or some such), go to Game Kastle to pick up some terrain for the Rezolution event, then hit the grocery store for some last minute foodstuffs so we don't drop $300 on food at the con.

Between feeding Manny and Game Kastle, Jocelyn wakes from her nap (Scott was watching her, I wasn't leaving her alone people. Although leaving him in charge could be seen by some as more negligent...). She gives "Papa" Manny the hairy eyeball for the first twenty minutes and then decides she likes him. After that, Papa got hugs whenever he wanted.

Come home, BBQ some Tri-tip for Manny. By "barbeque" I mean "ruin." The bald fatman likes his meat well done. And well done tri-tip is a Geneva Convention violation ranking just shy of waterboarding and Episode II of Star Wars. I should've just taken off my shoe and thrown that on the grill. Anyway, my cut of meat was suitably rare: it had just stopped begging me to stop cooking it.

After recovering from the meat coma, we packed the game stuff in the car and got down to business: some gaming. Our tradition is to keep Manny up for 24 hours by gaming, and we went to our old standby: Battleground Fantasy Warfare (affectionally known as "Cardhammer").

Manny played Men of Hawkshold vs my Umenzi, using the Kingdoms campaign pack to generate a scenario. I honestly can't remember the scenario, it might've been Total Warfare. The point was, we just slugged it out with the winner being the guy with anything left as opposed to nothing. That might have even been the mission. ;-)

My Umenzi rolled Manny up pretty good, but his two units of Longbowmen on my right flank were unscathed. They were effectionally dubbed the machinegun pit, and while the majority of my army rolled him up pretty good (including my Possessed standing against the charging Knights so the Worthy could get a rear charge), they held the right.

In the end, my army controlled the left and center but was battered and out of position. I figured he'd probably have just eough shooting to take care of me while he figured I had just enough target saturation that one unit would get there and roll him up. But either way, it was going to be a rather grinding affair and so we called it a draw. It was 12:30 am (3:30 ET), so Manny had been up the requisite 24 hours and so we called it a night.

Game count: 1.