Omaka Classic Fighters - Arrival

I'm back and slowly working through a few photos from a great Easter weekend away down in Marlborough.

Great company, great show, lots of photos, beer and a bit of wine :)

All in all a fantastic time.

I've been trying to figure out the best way to blog about the trip, but in particular, about the Classic Fighters 2015 show. The easiest is just going to be a day by day account.

So prepare yourself for some long photo heavy blog posts!

Today's will be small though as I work through picking out the photos to post from each show day.

Thursday was day 1 and it was arrival day.

Time to get ourselves orientated by finding all the vineyards... :)

Here's how it started...

A late lunch at a very nice and relaxed winery.

The Moa brewery just happened to be down the road...

Heaven! Until we did the tasting and got stitched up with a couple of tastings of sour beers. No thank you. Still the others were pretty good. 

And coming from a rather large bottling plant, I did like watching the little single head filler at work...

Next stop more wine... more tastings. It's a hard life.

The Wither Hills cellar room smelled so nice. The wine was good too.

Then it was onto chocolate. Something I was less interested in, but Lee and Rob seemed a little more keen...

After that it was back to the accommodation to get ourselves organised and then off to the Dodson St beer garden for more beers and dinner (recommended if you are ever in Blenheim!).

Stay tuned. More to follow soon :)

Zombies! And a birthday

This week one of the crew celebrate a big birthday! You'll have to read to end to find out who...(but no it's not me!) :)

So, since this Sunday was the closest gaming day to the birthday... it was pizza, beers and games with more pizza and beers to watch the cricket after (but we won't talk about that one...).

When I arrived Mark and Rob were playing a game of Bolt Action. 500pts each and just killing each other to make it simple. Japanese (Rob) vs. British (Mark). I wasn't really following the game to give it much narrative, but I did snap off a few pics. Having played around with some black & whites on Saturday, I decided to try the same thing here :)

I think the British won, but only just!

The end of the game saw the timely arrival of Lee, so it was time to break out the first beers and play something that all of us could join in on - Zombicide!!!

I would be El Cholo for this game. A board was set-up. We had to free a team mate and then escape the board.

I think we may have had too many zombie spawning points...

That is pretty much every zombie on the board. It's not looking good! But then Lee spots a gap and gets the rescued team mate out through the exit. Rob and I charge through a group of zombies and see the exit, so make good our escape....

... whilst waving goodbye to Lee, Phil and Mark's characters who were just too slow. And the zombies close in....

So much for teamwork. At least some of us survived though :)

Finally, rather than another game of Zombicide, Phil ran us through a game of the recent Kickstarter that he had received - Cthulu Wars

Models & board looked pretty good and who doesn't like the idea of Great Old One's stomping around fighting each other!?!

I got to be Nyarlathotep. I'll leave it to your imagination to decide what the model looks like. Mark loved it :)

As far as I could tell, the basic premise is to control areas by building gates on them. This increases your power allowing you to do more stuff and more gates gives you more doom (which is what I think you need to win the game). I'm sure there is more to it though.

Gameplay seemed relatively simple and each of the Old Ones has very different spells and abilities. Would take a bit of time to figure out how to use each of them in the best manner... although it was a little odd that the game owner had already claimed Cthulu as his choice of character. He had clearly studied Cthulu's dirty tricks!

Unfortunately, we ran out of time to finish the game and decided to have some more beers instead.

So....

Happy 40th Mark! Have a good one :) Hope you enjoyed your day on Sunday.

Next week's post might be some what delayed. I expect I will have a few photos to work through as Lee, Rob Mark G and I will be at this over Easter -

Getting pretty excited now. Looks like its going to be a good show again. Fingers crossed all this scratchy crappy weather clears!

Stay tuned :)

Going West

With a trip to Classic Fighters down in Omaka fast approaching... Rob, Mark G and I popped out to check out the Kumeu Militaria show.

The weather wasn't the best, as the day started with heavy showers and then settled to just a whole heap of heavy dark cloud.

As for the show.... Great if you wanted to buy some guns or general military stuff (medals and uniforms etc), but not a lot else on offer. A little bit on display and only one re-enactment. I suspect the weather may have thrown a few plans into disarray, but not a show I'd pop back to in a hurry.

Got a few okay photos though...

Then it was time for the re-enactment. I wandered up to be up near (and later behind the German position). Mainly to get away from all the bugs.... but I wanted to try for some different action shots.

Remember that Commando comic display from earlier.... I think these two have read too many of them! Especially when the guy on the left just picked up his bren gun and "ran" towards the nearest MG42!

"Check out my new boots!" :)

With the re-enactment over, there wasn't much else on offer. So, it was time for a coffee break and then out to Muriwai.

The sun was out now and had turned the day into the scorcher. Especially with no wind. No wind also meant the gannets weren't doing much, but the young ones have certainly got much bigger since I was last there!

But, for something different to photograph... there was also a surf comp on at Maori Bay. The light was starting to get pretty harsh by now, so I found it difficult to shoot. That and I don't have the same reach as Mark and Rob, so not many good ones.

All good fun though. Roll on next weekend!

I was going to end with go the Blackcaps... but maybe not :(

Thanks for having a look.