Crisis 2017 – Part II

Another view towards the gates of Crisis, roughly 2 hours after opening hours, the crowd was still coming. The first to come through the doors, were standing in line since 08:40 a.m.!

Under the eyes of the maestro himself, Alex Buchel, Studio Tomahawk showed Congo and the upcoming Saga 2nd at their booth. We got a small insight on the upcoming changes by Stronghold Terrain, but here's a deeper look by Skirmish Wargaming.

Wargames Foundry / Warmonger Miniatures was there with the usual large booth. They had a quite good show offer, 1 GBP = 1 EUR. But 12 Euro for 6 miniatures is okay-ish, but if you keep in mind that many of these ranges are 20 years and older and tend to be on the small side, I prefer more modern Perry sculpts for less. And the prices of Warmonger Miniatures odd fantasy sculpts are just ridiculous. But there seems to be a market for that.

The belgian gamer club Golden Goblin had an interesting table and went with the old Rogue Trader rule set for a proper retro feel.

The number of german wargamers is on the rise. So it was no surprise to see the Kurpfalz Feldherren with their 1655 AD table at the show. I saw parts of this in Speyer at Ad Arma Con 2017 earlier this year. It uses the rules of Donnybrook by the League of Augsburg. Ad Arma was there as well, supported by K'Town Tabletop.

Pats Laser Cutting supported this Capture of Breda szenario, as well as a World War 1 Colonial steampunk setting with airships, called Barsoom. I have seen the capture of Breda a few weeks back on social media and it is quite an impressive sight.

Spectre Miniatures showing off their own rule set of Spectre: Operations. I knew about the table, as they shared the building process over on Lead Adventure. It was very impressive to see it in reality. I'll have to take a closer look on the ruleset and see how it compares to Osprey's Black Ops.

Another company / community from germany Mechworld had a high quality set up as well, and supported Full Thrust - a sci-fi space battle system. Many of the products can be used for X-Wing as well.

Modiphius, having only a few days to rest after Spiel 2017, was back at Crisis bringing demos for their upcoming Fallout game. But that is not all, they were covering some offers on the brand new Star Trek and (remaining?) stock of Achtung Cthulhu.

How do I sum this event up? Well, I already talked about Antwerp and that it is worth a visit in the Intro to Crisis, so I got that covered and you know my stand towards the city. The Tinsoldiers of Antwerp did a great job organising the whole show, as the ticket line worked fast paced, there was food and drinks and you could roam around the show without bigger problems.

But you could feel the proximity to Spiel. Many faces were missing, that I'd like to see, there was no Alessio Cavatore, there were no Perry twins, there was no Ronnie Renton. This was rather sad, as I enjoyed having a chat with them. Beside that, I had the feeling that there weren't that many novelties. For many companies the Spiel was more important, which is understandable, but still creates a lack of satisfaction during the show. Then there were issues with some traders, nothing you could blame the hosts for, but you still connect it with the show, which is sad. But I'll cover this in detail in the Crisis haul article. This brings me to another topic, the goodie bag, which ended up being a bit light / empty for my taste. But like I said, I'll go into detail on that separately.

So a few questions including answers very briefly. Is Crisis a great show? It is very well organised and covers a lot of companies. Is it worth a visit? Absolutely, maybe not annually. Will I be there next year? Haven't decided yet, some of things I was looking for weren't offered and others were cheaper to buy at the manufacturer including postage. Never the less, a big thank you to Johan and his crew for organising the show, wishing them the best for the upcoming events.

Link: Tinsoldiers of Antwerp
Link: Crisis