I spent Saturday and Sunday at the NOVA Open in Washington DC this weekend!

space_marine

This is the first time I’ve been to NOVA (despite close proximity to the event, its about an hour drive from me). While it was definitely smaller than the HMGS conventions I’m used to going to, it was still really cool and I’ll definitely be going back next year.

I had planned to stay for the whole con from Wednesday through Sunday but had to cut my trip short as I changed jobs (sigh I’m very not happy about it…that’s a long story).

I’ve learned that its best to only sign up for a few events to avoid schedule overload. With that in mind, my lovely wife and I played in a Star Wars game on Saturday using Fantasy Triumph. I’ve been a fan of Triumph for a long time and really liked the Fantasy flavor.

StarWars

StarWars2

Goofy

We won! We played aggressive on the flanks and pushed our Rabble (pilots and ad-hoc troopers) and crushed the Imperial Skirmishers while their battleline took too long to clash with ours (Vader even got gunned down by a very lucky artillery shot).

I was supposed to play in a Battlefleet Heresy narrative event Saturday night, however the NOVA schedule reflected the wrong start time for the event so I missed it. Bummer. I know now next year to be a little wary of the schedule and double check with event organizers if anything looks “odd”.

The Vendor Hall was really cool, we met a carpenter who works in our hometown and will likely commission a custom dining/gaming table from her at some point (we were really impressed with her work).

A game store was there with bins and bins of oldhammer miniatures. I spent more than I should have - grabbed some metal Eldar rangers, a handful of Dragon Princes (I love those old models), some Skaven characters, and this gem

brawwwk

Sunday we attended one of Games Workshop’s painting classes - this was the “Painting Terrain” seminar presented by Will Hahn from the Warhammer team. It was fantastic! My non-mini painting spouse really enjoyed it and I got some neat tips around using stippling to create texture on a basecoat that I hadn’t thought to use before.

painting

NOVA was a great time and I will definitely attend next year, hopefully for more days so I can play in more events. My kiddo will be 4.5 next year so I think we will bring her with us, she’d enjoy seeing all the tables and models I think.