MillenniumCon 2025 Report

2025-10-20 Millennium-Con / Conventions /

Almost exactly an hour from my house, the Mayborn center in Temple is in the center of the Texas Triangle, and a damned fine venue for a cozy convention. I ran two games this year and had an overall wonderful weekend of wargaming.

Battle of Loubino (Blucher)

• 30x60 units of 6mm figures representing something between a division and a battery

Alan Spencer is on my short list of great GMs and I'll sign up to anything he's running no questions asked. Sam Mustafa is an amazing game designer and I'll play anything he writes at least once. So this one was an easy pick.

We had a little bump with how and when Zones of Control applied, but the rules ran smoothly otherwise. The cavalry division commander did a great job at harrying and feinting to keep enemy forces from wheeling and charging across the wide open part of the map while the 3rd corps dug in and held firm, rebuffing a series of French attempts to break a hole in the line of battle.

We called it a clear Russian victory with reinforcements fully deployed to hold the lone bridge over the Stragan river before the French could bring any pressure to bear.

I was particularly impressed with how well Blucher replicates the feel of a Napoleonic battle map, pondered over, moving at a stately beat. The command friction mechanic only triggered once the whole game due to high rolling and tight formations, and I think it could have made for a divergent game had it come up during a few key orders.

Overall a great opening to the weekend.

Predator (Spectre Ops v3)

• 28mm figures, man-to-man

I've come to appreciate light and short games in the evenings, and this hit the spot. A cinematic replaying of the movie Predator (1987) with each player controlling 1-2 named characters and the GM running the eponymous alien. A clever decoy mechanic with translucent models, random rolls, and a variety of spurious contact outcomes.

I leap frogged Blaine and Mac as they 'get to the choppa'd their way across the board. I kept catching the Predator in fire lanes and snapping off just enough minigun fire to wound it over and over again while the rest of the team charged ahead taking pot shots and chasing down Anna. Bleeding out, the alien finally caught me in melee, whiffed its rolled as I aced mine, and I beat it to death with the MG. Everyone else flew off into the sunset silhouetted by burning jungle.

The rules were a pretty chopped down Spectre Ops that played about the same as last time I played them. Wherever the edition changes are, they're either subtle or buried in the advanced sections. No complaints, it suited the scenario just fine.

Battle of Oak Grove (Sharp Practice)

• 60x120 units of 28mm figures at 1-to-1 scale

I originally signed up for a Force on Force game, but the GM had to drop out the day before the con, so I grabbed an open slot as soon as I found one. An American Civil War version of Sharp Practice, and I'm not sure to what degree it was modified or official, though I think very little. We were using official QRS at least.

I've played a few Two Fat Lardies games before, so was reasonably comfortable with the activation mechanics and general flow. I'm still not a fan of the variable movement, which was on full display. We wound up reorganizing the table into two halves, one a solid line of lock-step infantry, the other a mad dash across scrub to thwart light guns. I literally had a unit roll an 18 and a 3 for movement, splaying themselves across the table.

A fine time was had by all, and we got through a couple turns of proper ACW firing lines. The GM said afterwards he should have shortened the table by about a foot, but also we were rolling shit for movement.

Retreat from Klendathu (Starship Troopers)

• 10mm figures variously based, about 1-to-1, totaling a company of infantry and a never ending horde of bugs

I was feeling pretty good about this one. I've put a ton of work into the models and terrain, and the rules have been percolating for the better part of a decade. It turned out even better than I hoped it would. I had people stopping me all weekend to ask about it, congratulate me on a great game, or lament they couldn't get a seat.

I've got a whole write up of the project to do as its own separate post. I think I captured the feel of the Verhoven movie, the MI driving back an endless horde of bugs, ultimately getting overrun with only a handful of bloodied marines making it off the planet.

Teaching it went really well, I was mostly hands off the second half of the game and got some great notes on how to teach it faster. I need to tweak the health of the big bugs, the AoE dimensions by an inch, limit bug reinforcements to one tunneling marker per turn so the board itself is more full looking, clarify artillery, bring in air support earlier, and work out a better system for tracking worker casualties and reinforcement groups. That sounds like a lot, but I just think I can have this really dialed in by the next con.

HEIHO

• 20x40 stands of 10mm infantry organized into units at about 1 figure to 100 men, played on a gridded Table

Some folks I know had been curious about this game, and I like the scale and period, so signed up totally ignorant of what I'd be stepping into. I was kinda hoping it was this unnamed game I saw last year in the lobby.

What I got was quite disappointing, as a game. The players did their best to keep it fun. But HEIHO is a garbage ruleset and I hate it. It's "Giant Grinding Lines: the Game". There were only a handful of actual decisions made over the whole three hours we played. So much wasted time on pointless resolution tasks that left the game unaltered, full of random things disguised as choices, and mechanics that thwarted strategy and canceled meaningful impact. There were multiple rules questions that the hosts had to admit the author still hadn't clarified they'd also asked about as well as stuff they did get answers for that made for a worse game that the hosts were just outright ignoring (they demonstrated one of these on the spot). Least fun of all was one wildly imbalanced type of commander that dominated the game.

It felt extremely 'inadequate playtesting' which I loathe. I don't want your first draft wild fucking ideas, I want to pay for rules you've done the hard boring iterative playtesting work on so I don't have to.

Operation Jungle Rhumba (Heavy Gear Blitz)

• 1:144 figures individually based, 1-to-1

I hadn't run a morning game yet, and I really need to account for more setup time. I got it done before all my players arrived, but I was scrambling and made a few dumb mistakes that negatively impacted the scenario. Nothing ruinous, just... I can do better. I did better last year. People still had fun playing for sure, and a lot of folk stopped by to inquire or reminisce.

I deployed the CEF + South convoy both too clumped up and too far to one side. I put a hill between them and the North players that a cagey commander used expertly. And I think I gave everyone a few too many models. Next year, I'm not going to sweat the middle being flatter, I'm going to give people 100TV of units, I'm going to string out the line of march almost the whole length of the table and put the ambushers in the corners and give them the first turn, and I'm going to replace that ugly ass green felt with something cooler.

France 1944 (Rommel)

• 25mm square stands of 6mm figures representing entire companies

The GM was delayed, traffic and health reasons, so this game started almost half an hour late and in a very hurried fashion. I'm not holding any of that against him, and I hope I didn't come off as overbearing when I stepped up and became co-GM (he said thanks for the help at the time, I just hope it was genuine).

Late WWII, which none of us had played (I've only played Rommel in early war and North Africa) so we were all shocked as hell when the first 105mm battery hit and obliterated an entire stand of panzers. Germans were holding the line in the face of a massed British assualt, they just needed to hold 3/6 objectives for 8 rounds to call it a victory.

I was sat on the British side in the first moments of the game and proposed a pretty aggressive overall strategy which put the Germans in a really bad position due to some bizarre deployment choices (tanks in woods, no armor on the open roads whatsoever). I actually wound up reassigned as German advisor and rules explainer / resolver before the first German turn, and they turned it around heroically, cutting off supply lines, burning ops on defenses, and eventually making a game changing play to directly threaten the allied supply lines relieving pressure on more than half of the contested ares of the board and tying the Brits up for a couple turns.

The only downside was one of the German players checked out immediately on that first turn, head down in their phone and then just up and walking out of the game during the second allied turn. Everyone that stayed had a memorable game with both sides sweating hard choices, and I just feel a little disappointed he couldn't see past the immediate state, didn't help brainstorm a strategy, and ultimately missed out on a desperate but complete victory, 6 of 6 victory points held the full duration.

Shoal of Discontent (Naval Command Modern)

• 1:2400 ships, 1-to-1, on a table at 1cm=1nm

A Harpoon heartbreaker of a game. I should have stood up and left when the GM opened with "I'm not going to bother teaching the rules, let's just play". I should have stood up and left when I read the mission briefing packet that kept using weirdly close but wrong terms for game mechanics and restating things it just said but slightly differently because he had an LLM generate them (the GM said this with pride). I should have stood up and left when I realized the four Chinese coast guard vessels I was assigned had no missiles, no defense systems, and no impact on the game whatsoever.

The GM had 8 positions setup, I told him I'd take the four ships because I was happy to deal with the complexity, and then when we only had 6 players he handed the guy next to me what turned out to be a second and the only other Chinese warship. So he deliberately did not give me a unit worth playing. And when I say my units did not matter, they moved 6cm a turn, had a single gun with a max range of 7cm and only had any target whatsoever because we all didn't understand the threat ranges the first two navigation phases and the Filipino commander accidentally drove too close to me. My deck guns at their best did less damage than the weakest missile volley rolled the whole game, and I couldn't intercept in any way whatsoever.

I stayed because there were some players I remembered liking from another naval session last year. The best part of the game was working with the two of them at one end of the table trying to extrapolate out the rules from the unit sheets and QRS while the GM became increasingly peeved that we were figuring out the systems and trying to play the game without him. But I really couldn't find much fun in this one and left at the three (of four) hour mark.

Flea Market

I cleaned out some much needed shelf space, got rid of:

• my old 28mm Starship Troopers models
• my languishing Skaven and Lizardmen WHFB armies,
• Spartan Games Dystopian Wars / Armoured Clash Covenant of Antarctica walkers
• A whole bin of random Reaper and Wizkid D&D figures
• a spare Heavy Gear CEF plastic starter
• the 6 All Quiet on the Martian Front tripods I never did anything with
• a few boxes of Frostgrave plastic sprues
• some old Infinity Ariadnans and Combined Army

Puts me close to done with my 28mm purge, excepting a few sentimental pieces and some cool sculpts for maybe fantasy skirmishing or roleplaying in the future. And netted me a smidge over $500 in cash.

The only thing I bought was a couple trays of old Firestorm Armada Aquans, the original sculpts. It's getting some decent table time locally lately.

MCon 2026 Plans

As much as I enjoy playing new things with new people, I really enjoy running a game people are enjoying. And the con needs games. So next year, I'm going to push myself to run 4 sessions. 2 of my Starship Troopers game, 1 Heavy Gear, and one that depends on how some other projects progress over the next year.