Mantic Open Day & Deadzone delivery!

 This morning I did a slightly insane thing... I did a trip up to Nottingham for the Mantic Open Day just so I could pick up my Deadzone kickstarter box. A 5 hour round trip because I couldn't wait for the postman. What kind of idiot am I?

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from the Mantic open day. The GW ones are obviously huge and the photos of the Warlord open days seem well organised and include loads of other companies, so it's more like a mini convention. Mantic seemed to have followed suit by inviting a couple of other companies along, but neither presence was massive.

The venue itself was what looked to be a closed hospital/medical center as there were sinks and toilets in most of the rooms and no actual power as there was no heating and all the lighting was from a series of daisy-chained power cables taped to the walls! As the rooms were all very small, it was quite hard to actually get in to even see what was in some of the rooms, let alone join in. On the plus side, everyone got a little goodie bag on the way in. Thanks to their work on the Mars Attacks kickstarter, Mantic were giving out packets of the trading cards. I wasn't too excited about this until I opened mine and found a unique piece of art, hand drawn. It seems that Topps get artists to contribute a series of one off, hand drawn cards to be sealed into the packets at random and the one you see here is mine... and I love it.

Anyway, back to the open day. Warlord had a small presence, mostly demoing Bolt Action and Dredd; and Hawk Games were there showing off the starter set for Dropzone Commander. One of my aims for the day was to try and get a demo of Deadzone. Despite there being 8 demo games set out, there were only 2 people to run the games, so I didn't manage to get one in. I did, however, manage to pick up the quick start demo rules and scenario so we can try it at home.

After that, I picked up my box of goodies (look at all that plastic to add to the Challenge pile!) and headed on home.

[update] Damn. It looks like I missed a whole other building with new models and loads of other stuff. Damn. Damndamndamn. It really wasn't clear...

I'm currently sat on the sofa unboxing it all and playing with the modular terrain sprues, which are fantastic. Theoretically you're supposed to be able to dissassemble the pieces for storage and to build new things... but I suspect I will be making a couple of permanent constructions out of these and filling in the gaps. I can see the terrain being massive when it gets a general release with the three other sets that were funded by the kickstarter.

Here's a quick building using 5 pieces and some accessories