Mim's Cancon 2012

As with every year thus far, the Cancon convention is run by CGS or the Canberra Games Society.

Maps were posted all round the place to help people find their way around. To add a little perspective as to the scale, there were around 200 Warhammer 40,000 players alone, hence a hundred or so tables in rows for their use alone. That may give a rough indication of the nmbers of players tunring up for the other games systems shown on the map based on their allocated floor space relative to the 40k players.

I was thinking it was a little hot outside on the Sunday :o

A little surprise visitor turned up causing some commotion in the main hall. He was provided fresh water and food to keep him happy and away from the main hall for the rest of the event ^.^"

Not quite sure who the owner was, but I fear he was a stray.

A new toy one of the organisers picked up only a day prior to the convention opening. Just needs some new pipes, which are on order, to sound like a real mans bike :D

I started really healthy at a brilliant little Japanese resturant just to the left of Zaferely's (not sure if thats the spelling) pizza in Dickson.

And then it all went down hill.

There was a really mind blowing amount of dealers once again this year. Whats really awesome though was that the Australian distributor for Bushiroad of Japan, being OzAnimart, had a store and were also running free demo games for Vanguard and Weiss Shwarz all weekend.

Shameless plug - www.ozanimart.com

Needless to say I made some fine purchases of Japaneses only cards. Something of a real Novelty for me was that although only Vanguard was in English, their Japanese stocks sold just as heavily or more so.

This was their first Cancon and I hope not their last, but from speaking with them all along the weekend, they really sounded like they were enjoying themselves. :)

Bloodball going really strong as usual, which is a great thing to see as I've alway's been fond of that Games Workshop minature game. Think of American Gridiron football, but set in a fantasy environment with Humans, Goblins, Elves etc... oh and add weapons.

Loads of Bloodball players.

And more.

The main dealers area closing shop for the day on Friday / day one.

Some of the minature games systems used some brilliant tables to play on.

Games Library was a new event where games were purchased / sponsored from the dealers and a large area was set asside for anyone to open up and play. You would simply buy a $10 day pass / wrist tag and then you could play from 9am untill 2am the next morning. Yes 2am the next morning.

Though you might think there would only be a small hand full of people wanting to play as late as 2am, but there was close to 50 people so we had to enforce a cut off time. Call us crazy, but we ourselves wanted to sleep >.<"

Great idea imo as people got a chance to try any games they wanted and then if they liked them a lot they could simply look at who supplied the game and perhaps buy a copy from that dealer to play with friends and familly at home.

Cardboard wars, as I'm fond of calling it, was pressent. Magic the gathering still goes really strong and the organisers even ran an all night session for the launch of a new expansion. Sleep depravation does funny things to people the next day XD

An artist doing some awesome drawings using nothing but black markers.

Yep we even have a lazer tag space ship every year just in case you need to burn off a few calories. As you can tell buy the bulges its a maze type thing inside.

A few pics of the "smaller hall".

We even had traditional Dungeons and Dragon's players in aircondition comfort playing away all weekend.

No thats not a lan party. Its how everyone now carries all their rule books and character sheets ^.^"

Many are now migrating to tablet devices though so things will get less cluttered in future.

The amount of effort many put into painting and modeling their armies is pretty hard to imagine and these are only a time hand full of some nice examples.

These few pics are from the painting competition. Yes the massive dragon was hand painted and assembled from a resin kit. Would you beleive the wing membrains were around 1mm thick!

Sadly I could not take any really close up shots given the iPhone 4G has no zoom and all were in a large glass cabinet.

Some loot from the weekend. I hear these have sold out everywhere.

Though not 100% sure I think there were only 2 signed cards for this expansion set so win! Sadly I missed out on the other signed card, which was found by another lucky customer at the con.

After 5 booster pack boxes or 30 packs in total I was only missing 6 foils for the set.

I really enjoyed a demo game for Weiss Shwarz so I decided to take the plunge.

Danny I'm really hoping to get my hands on some of those Mirai demo cards for my collection and deck use ^o^

Although my Japanese skills arn't overly high I'm using this purchase to motivate me along with my studdies and to pick up their pace as I fully intend to play at events for the game, which are only just starting to happen later this year.