It was with a certain amount of trepidation I found myself being taken into the barely air-conditioned tin shed that is CanCon 2006 this morning. All I knew about it beforehand came from some scathing comments by the girlfriend of one of the participants about “little men” and the painting thereof.
The front foyer had the following sign in it. I peered in the door of the room that supposedly had magic in it, but to my eyes it looked like a bunch of people lounging round with no magic of either the Potter or Copperfield variety in sight.
Entering the main room and I was overwhelmed by the sight of men peering at tables. On closer examination some of the longer haired of these were actually women (but only some).
The tables in question were in various states of being set up with little men and having games played on them (I also spotted some board games too which I was told were just like the other games but on a larger scale because you can’t fit tens of thousands of figurines on any kind of table).
Closest to the main entry were tables with re-enactments of various real-life wars (such as the American and English civil wars). I found out that these aren’t actually re-enactments as such because it is possible for the historically losing side to win.
At the back of the room was the most substantial area, for Warhammer. I had had some previous association with this in the form of delivering my brother’s French exchange student to the Games Workshop in Woden, so I had some idea it involved expensive figurines (but I didn’t realise just how expensive — $15 for a basic little man!).
The tables were all set up with different arrangements of scenery on them, some much better looking than others. I particularly liked the rivers, made realistic by pouring clear resin over a blue painted mould. One of the more impressive had all kinds of rocks and bits of wood in the middle of it too. I also quite liked these spiky balls, even though I suppose they could have made at a preschool craft day. Apparently there are special rules about what happens if you run into them.
At the other end of the hall were stalls with all kinds of figurines, large and small. One of the stalls had boxes and boxes of DVDs of war videos among which I spotted a copy of The Princess Bride. At another one I noticed dolls about twice as big as Barbies which were modelled on various Playboy playmates. But mostly the merchandise wasn’t that interesting (to me anyway).
And then it was time for the games to begin. This seemed to involve an awful lot of time fiddling about with placing little men just so on the table according to rules that seemed to me to have been agreed on by osmosis. There was also a lot of measuring going on to make sure that the men were the correct amount of inches away from wherever they were supposed to be away from.
When the game play began, it was completely indecipherable if you didn’t know what was going on. Each player had a large amount of dice and they kept rolling these in combinations and each roll of the dice meant something different — like how far you could move or see or shoot or whether your cannons blew up or shot accurately. It transpired that the game I was watching was actually being played in the dark, but this of course was not apparent to the casual observer. Each table also had a sizeable rule book on it which were very intently consulted at times.
Wandering around the room I noticed a bank of couches with people in various states of coma on them. On enquiring, I was told that moving little men around tables is actually a very tiring sport and this is quite a common sight at these conventions.
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