Origins 2010 Convention Musings

Well, there's only about 30 days to go before Origins, time to start organizing my Ogre stuff for the trip. I've pulled all of the cases of Ogre miniatures off the shelves in the basement, located my storage tubs of terrain and buildings, and found my backpack.

Yes, every year I take a backpack with me to Origins, I find it very useful for carrying all the miscellaneous items that one needs at a convention. Digital camera, laptop, snacks, etc.

On the subject of snacks:

I always find it amazing the prices that the Columbus Convention Center charges for candy bars and 20oz bottles of Pepsi. Come on, $3.50 for a bottle that I can buy in any convenience store for ~$1.49? If I buy a 6-pack at the grocery store I pay less than $1.00 a bottle.

Maybe I should publish an article about how to save money at a game convention...

Park a little farther away in a free parking area, walk a bit farther to the con.

Have a cooler in your car, filled with ice. Stock it with snacks and soda. Save a lot of $$$$. Walk out to the car a couple of times a day and restock your backpack.

Use the backpack to smuggle in your snacks so the convention center security guys won't throw you out.

Don't eat meals inside the convention center. They have a captive audience, and they know it. For Origins specifically, I suggest the French Market, 1 block west of the Convention Center. Great food, cheap, and some of the best pizza I have ever eaten. I make it a point every year to get pizza there at least once.

Living near Columbus has been very helpful for my Origins attendance. If Origins was out of state I doubt that I would go very often. I've attended the con every year since 1996.

I make it to Gen Con every few years, but only because it is 4 hours away in Indianapolis.

Ogre Miniatures CRT update

I've been looking at the Ogre CRT lately, it just seems a bit outdated to me. I'm wondering if it might not be a bad idea to punch it up a little. I played around in Excel with the existing CRT and then expanded it to look like this:

Bender Mini

Found this at Origins 2009, need to finish painting him someday...

1/300 Sci-Fi Buildings from Scratch (well almost)

I attended Origins in Columbus this year (as i do every year), and noticed a fairly nice looking city table that Reaper had set up for CAV2. On that table there were a lot of paper buildings, and a couple made from something that looked familiar...





Now where have we seen these before...?



Plastic electrical boxes! Now how come I never thought of that before? Easily available at local big box home improvement stores and cheap too.


I did some price comparisons and found there was virtually no difference in price at any of the major stores. So I bought a few to experiment with. The small 2 bay boxes pictured above were $1.86 each. I also found a few useful items in the plastic plumbing aisle.


Step One - Remove the nails with a pair of pliers, they just pull right out.


Step Two - Remove the bar code sticker. This was easily accomplished with the application of a little heat from a hair dryer and a #11 X-acto blade.



Step Three - Remove the "wings" along the sides. I use a dremel tool with a cutoff wheel at low speed to carve the wings off and smooth the remaining areas. I used some fine sandpaper as well.




I decided to open one end of this one up and turn it into an Ogre "garage". A couple of razor saw cuts vertically...



...and then snap the door piece off and clean it up. I reglued it in the open position with some gap-filling superglue.



A quick primer coat of white to show any defects...



Hmmm... roof looks kind of plain. How about a ventilator from my bits box?



A couple coats of "stone" spray paint and some cardstock solar panels that I ran off on the color laser printer...



And that's it.

JR Miniatures 1/300 Sci Fi Buildings

These are a bunch of the 1/300 JR Miniatures buildings that I used for Ogre at Origins 2009.

Ogre Miniatures Measuring Sticks

I'm an old school miniatures gamer, none of those newfangled laser rangefinders or tape measures for me.

I made a dozen of these measuring sticks from 1/8" wood dowels a while back.
Construction is very simple, cut off a 16" section of dowel, then mark off the following measurements from one end - 8", 10", 12", and 14". Since OM uses 2" for it's (hex) ranges, this stick gives you easy measurements of all of the weapon ranges and vehicle movements.
Range 1 - 2"
up to
Range 8 - 16"
I spray the whole stick white, then mask off the sections that need to stay white and spray the rest black. A shot of clear acrylic finishes the job.

Ogre Pictures

Here's a quick shot of the Ogre family...