DunDraConundrum

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.

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