For the first time since the NOVA Open moved out of NOVA and into DC I headed up for a daytrip! I met a friend of mine from Hobby University and hung out with him and his friends for a few hours.

You can tell I’m a history nerd as the first picture I took was of the General McClellan statue in General McClellan Square right in front of the hotel!

As I turned the corner I saw what most of the convention goers would notice first, a big inflatable BattleMech!

Since we didn’t get started until 10:30 we did a few laps of the vendors and I picked up the new Ork Codex for my son. My wife just told him that morning he could buy it for himself but I’m a sucker for the little Grot!

From left to right we have a case full of lovely painted dinosaurs for the soon to be released CARNIVORE from Buer games, the Games Workshop display, and Oasis from Collins Epic Wargames. Both CARNIVORE and Oasis recently successfully finished campaigns on Gamefound so hopefully we will see them available to purchase soon! They both look terrific and that’s half the battle!

For lunch we took a quick walk to Bistrot Du Coin a nice French resturant. I would definitely go back, someone in my group got the small muscles and it was a huge portion. I’m still drooling over the sight and smell of them!

After lunch we went back to the convention to wander around. The first thing I did was look at the entries in the painting contest.

We then wandered around looking at the games. As is my luck most of the events were between games so I mainly got to look at empty tables but I was still able to get some good pictures!

The Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game tournament had just started up again, I saw the huge Battle of Helms Deep table in action, and got to see some Gaslands starting to heat up! I really like the grass roofed Rohan houses, and I’m a fan of the Gaslands gates, I have those exact same ones from The Phalanx Consortium!

I did manage to get super lucky with my favorite game, Warhammer The Old World, because while the tournament was between games almost everyone had their armies out on display. The effort everyone put in was impressive to say the least! While normally I’d be hard pressed to choose my favorite this year that dubious honor goes to the classic Chaos Dwarfs! I still need to go look at the Legends list, I’m not sure how that few Chaos Dwarfs made up a full army, but they hit me right in the nostalgia!

As always I need to put in a plug for Arena Rex, next year I’m hoping to show up and actually play in one of their events. I have been basing my Adepticon events around Arena Rex, might as well play when they are almost in my backyard!

I found my buddy who was playing in a Horus Heresy event and snapped a few pictures, including this really cool campaign board!

Finally I saw some games of Kill Team, Star Wars Legion, and Oasis in action.

On my way out I stopped and picked up my second purchase, the Goblin Hobbies Stampin’ Starter Kit and a few extra paints. It was fun playing with this kit at their booth, I look forward to giving them a try on some actual figures!

After running through the convention and spending more time than I thought I would I ended up having a good time. It wasn’t as easy to get to as the NOVA location, and even the Metro stops required a decent amount of walking, especially if you had to carry an army with you! There are a lot more restaurants in the area within easy walking distance than there were in the NOVA location, but then again I did really like the food trucks they used to have on site! While there are pro’s and con’s to both sites I do think this one is slightly less ideal, even if the other location required two hotels! Still, getting into DC wasn’t all that bad and I’m now considering going to actually play in some tournaments next year!

I’m sure I’m going a few years back but I do have to say I liked having the free visitors badge. At $30 I wouldn’t bring my kids, and with the extra hassle of getting to the venue knowing the free badge was no longer an option might stop me from going. Adepticon lets you in without a badge, and while I could have easily not bought one for the NOVA Open I wanted to do the right thing so I bought the badge just to wander around. The HMGS shows don’t have a free badge option either, but they don’t charge extra for games or classes so if you decided to just hop in something you could. Plus the HMGS shows have much larger vendor halls, generally with around 60 or so vendors per show, while there were about 30 advertised for the NOVA Open.

As I said I haven’t been to the NOVA Open since it was in Northern Virginia so I can’t personally speak to attendance. Still, I went with my friend, and chatted with a few other buddies who were at the show and they all said attendance appeared to be down significantly. The tournaments all seemed well attended and everyone was having a good time, but when wandering around with my friend he couldn’t help but amaze at the drop in attendance. As I said above there were supposed to be around 30 vendors (Google said the website was advertising 34 vendors) but there were a few that were advertised that didn’t make it. I like having local events, I hope the number of attendees were sufficient for the organization to not lose money!

Despite the apparent drop in attendance it was a nice show, and while I don’t like having to go into DC and miss the chance to gorge on food off a truck it was a nice show with a lot of good looking tables topped with terrific looking armies. If you can make it next year you should give it a try!

-Wachtmeister

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