Five Parsecs from Home: Turn 24 - The Moon of Biitas 12

 The Moon of Biitas 12 was an interesting place. Heavily urbanized, it had no right to be as important as it was. It was small but powerful, straddling an important trade route. Decades ago UCS had seen fit to garrison it, in order to keep clear it of pirates. This small garrison eventually evolved into quite a large hub for UCS military forces and became a major trade port. 

The Pelican crew needed to talk to a ship broker who would be able to match the settlers with someone selling a suitable ship. He tended to make himself available at Brunard airbase - a well defended military installation. Luckily, out on the rim, even at UCS outposts they could let you pass with the right fistful of credits finding its way into the right fist. 

As the crew approached the trading post they were waved on through. The Pelican was quite a normal sight in these parts and the grunts on duty knew them well enough.

Brenko and Holmes discussed getting a ship for the settlers while Carrick chatted away to some other travellers. 

Phillips was talking all things engineering with some techs who were running diagnostics on the atmospheric intercepter. A couple of others went to the supply shed. 

Suddenly out burst three horrifying creatures! Two technicians were torn apart immediately, the rest began running for their lives. 

With lightning reflexes Phillips pulled out a grenade and lobbed it over to the shed, not killing anything but disrupting the creatures enough that the others could get involved in the fight.

Mao and Brenko opened fire on two of the creatures, unloading shells and magazines at them, eventually causing them to collapse into piles of steaming, hissing blood and body parts. 

Earl launched a grenade to the top of the shed, making things even harder for the creature to orient itself. It actually fell from the roof, out of line of sight .

The gunshots and explosions drew the immediate attention of the guards. The dismounted infantry ran over, while the sentry vehicles spun around and drove their way into firing positions. 

Before anyone else could do anything, Phillips unloaded with her shotgun, taking down the third creature. 

As the guards approached, Phillips filled them in on what had just happened. Was it some kind of escaped bio-experiment? Who knows. The guards told everyone to evacuate, called in some more civilian transports to remove any other people from the area. They were going to need to go into quarentine, in order to secure the area. 

As the Pelican crew drove away they saw more of those creatures burst out of the shed. There must be a subterrainean nest or something. Soldiers, civilians and vehicles were torn apart. 

Well, this was a problem. No-one was going to get off of this moon for a while. The local UCS governer called for a sector wide quarentine - spaceports were shut down. Reinforcements were arriving. This infestation would need to be eliminated. 

MDF Ruins

 As previously mentioned I bought a Normandy farm in MDF. I also bought a pack of assorted ruins. This week I put them together. I am over all pretty pleased. You can see from below that some of them are literally a corner of a building. I will base those on a rough shape and add more rubble when the time comes. I mean they are pretty simple, I wasn't expecting much. I have other corner parts of buildings that are better - things I bought ages ago but have lived, unbuilt in a box since 2013. 

Below is some kind of workshop. It has doors for the front that I will put on at some point. I quite like it. Again, it will end up on a little base with some rubble. I am trying to work out how to make a tub of rubble that I can just pour onto the table when and where I need it. I have seen stuff you can buy but feel that is a waste. I have cat litter somewhere...

The frustrating thing about the below ruin is that the two walls don't fit together. Look, the longer wall extends out beyond where is should go. This complaint is minor. But it really does annoy me. 

Below looks like it is meant to be a flat topped building. I will probably just use it anyway in Normandy.

Below is one step up from a corner ruin. It reminds me a little of the Airfix Forward Command Post kit (which I have). I should dig that out and improve it. I built up a  bank around it to create a courtyard type area. I might add some bocage or something to it. This building will just go on as small a footprint as possible. 

What you can't see is the one ruin section where the first storey floor doesn't fit into the slots. It is frustrating because it is one of the coolest looking ruined sections. I will see what I can do with it, I might just leave the floor out of it. 

For the cost, these are a high recommend from me. They will certainly do the job I need them to do. 

I went to UK Games Expo 2025

Two years ago I took my eldest two - daughters then aged 8 and 6. Last year I was double booked and went camping instead. This year I was set to take my daughters again - 10 and 8 but the 8 year old decided not to go. Last minute my 6 year old son wanted to come - I was worried about it. He struggles to regulate his emotions at times, and is being a PITA at bed times. I am proud of him though. He did so well. More on that later. 

Thursday. Day 1: Drive up to Birmingham. I arrived at my brother's place around 6:30pm, we ate, the kids played in the garden, we tried to get the younger ones off to bed , played Circle the Wagons with my eldest, then when she was in bed I played it with my brother, then the adults played Forest Shuffle. 

Circle the Wagons was a surprisingly fun small card game, the kind of which I really enjoy. I looked it up immediately and it is going on my watch list. 2 players only though. Quick, however.

Forest Shuffle is annoying. The name in English is nonsense. The original German name Mischwald is very clever. Wald  is forest. Misch comes from the word to mix/shuffle. The compound noun Mischwald is literally a forest composed of many varieties of trees, including deciduous and coniferous. The game itself is brilliant, and have I mentioned I am a sucker for an animal theme? I was thinking about how you could replace the trees with mercenaries, and the animals/other vegitation with weapons, abilities, armour, gear and probably have the same sort of game play. But the animal theme is just pleasant. The game has enough interaction that you aren't just building your own tableau in front of you. You do need to watch out for what others are doing, and try to remove, take cards they might want/need.  I managed to score over 100 which is 40points better than last time. I still lost though.

After that game I went to bed, exhausted, but I ended up going through the preview game list and taking screenshots of games I would like to go and check out. I hadn't cared enough about that before, but my brother got me thinking. Spoilers; i didn't buy any new games at all, but did try a couple out and had a good time.

Friday. Day 2: We got there quickly. Went in at pretty much 9am on the dot - no queues because they had already gone in. We signed the 4 kids up for the junior DnD at 10am. I ended up having to sit with them this time because my 6 year old was unsure what to do and needed me there as a comfort. It seemed like he didn't enjoy it, but by the end, when he rolled a naturaly 20 he suddenly loved it. He kept asking if he could do it again later or the next day. We went for signing up for the next day. I didn't have to stay that time. 

That chest turned into a mimic. We then saw a bunch of mimics - this one was the first I saw but is the least cool looking.

We ate out on the grass and watched part of the viking battle at lunch. That battle - I could probably retell the story myself now having heard it 4 times. We left before the kids could fight them though because we were booked into the giant Battle for Hoth demo game. We played a few rounds and it was a blast. Playing the real game will likely be a disappointment as it won't have the giant figures and dice. Killing AT-ATs was perhaps easier than it should have been, but actually more difficult than just tracking hit points. I will probably not buy the game for a while though, as I can't justfy £40 on a game...unless it is a rule book?? Strange.

I took a photo of this Dune game. I love miniatures.

This table just looked so good. 

We found two tables that offered miniature painting where you can keep the miniature for free. One was trying out a bunch of marker pens that painted miniatures - they were pretty cool but didn't work too well for getting into small gaps. We painted a strange miniature there. Then walking around there was the Vallejo stand where you could use paint and brushes to paint what looked like Star Wars Shatterpoint figures. I painted a Magna-Guard droid, as did my son. My daughter was not interested in painting at that point. 

They found a table that had a bunch of 3D printed toys on it. My son loved it so much he wanted to buy something there. I tried to teach him the idea that we should look at everything before committing to buy something first thing on the first day. He spent the day asking me about when we were going back. Right at the end we found another stand selling 3d printed toys but they cost way more! So we went straight back to the first table and bought him a Stegasaurus skeleton toy. It is pretty cool I have to admit. 

By about 3pm it was time to chill out in the free gaming zone. My son ended up spending most of that time playing with the miniatures he had painted and the stegasaurus. I love watching him play. 

I played Fritanga but went out after two turns. I just got unlucky. Not a game I will buy to be honest. I don't really like player elimination.

The Crew Family Adventure (I think). That was a pretty cool game. You played short challenges about how many cards you could lay to match the board there. While kind of interesting, and each round offered a different puzzle, I will not get that myself. 

After eating and returning home we played more games. 

One was Alibis - I helped my daughter who couldn't connect China with Fish or something. I came up with Prawn. We lost the game. It is a team co-op game. I liked it and came close to buying it.

Another game was CubeMelt. It was a blast, but again, the excitement of opening a new game probably made me like it more than I otherwise would have. If I see it for £5 I will pick it up probably. You are an ice cube trying to experience love and life before melting. Lots of dice rolling. It was a fun 20 minutes. 

8 of us then played Team 7 Wonders. That was a fun time. Quite a good game really. It filled the huge table right up though!

Saturday. Day 3: This day was mainly talking to vendors, painting another couple of miniatures, my trip to the Bring and Buy. The kids fought the vikings and won. We left at around 3pm, bought stuff from The Works and then drove home. All in all a great weekend away. I have come away with probably about £20-£30 worth of free miniatures. 

In the end here is my haul. I have a dice tray that folds down, which I have been on the look-out for for a little while and thought I would get one at the expo to support a non-amazon business. I also picked up the two boxes of D6s from the same vendor. I want those mainly for Chain of Command, but will use them for other wargames. You can buy 100 D6s online for the cost of one of those boxes, but they don't come in those nice little boxes. So I splurged a little. Race for the Galaxy was bought via the Facebook groups (where no-one wanted to buy any of my games). Cartographers was my Bring and Buy purchase, I checked it had a full pad of maps. Air, Land & Sea was from my brother who had picked it up for free somewhere and knew I wanted it. I saw it on Actualol's channel and like the look of it. The cards were a free pick up when entering Hall 4 on Saturday morning. I don't know what they are. The magazine is the free DnD thing for entering, and I also have two small map tiles. 

I don't tend to buy much, but I genuinely like being there and experiencing the whole thing. Already planning for next year.