BEFORE WE SETUP WE'RE TOTALLY PLAYING FLOOR HOCKEY IN THERE This week I (and a couple of goons) had a chance to visit the hall where we will be holding Games Day 2008. As you probably know (because I keep repeating it over and over) we are holding the event this year at the Queen Elizabeth Building at Exhibition Place in Toronto. What you might not know is that Exhibition Place has a fine military history that predates the mayhem of Games Day. During the war of 1812 the Americans crossed the border with 300 troops and burned Fort York to the ground. In the aftermath a new fort was built in very place where Exhibition Place stands today. Also, during the Second World War Exhibition Place was used as a training ground by the Canadian Military. What does all of this have to do with Games Day? Nothing, but history is cool and if we find an old unexploded bomb when we are setting up Games Day at least we’ll know why (actually, I got all this information from Wikipedia, so it could be nothing but a pack of lies).
In an effort to get back on topic I can say that the site visit raised my expectations for a great Games Day. The hall is huge and has a great stage and although it looks impressive but rather empty in thesephotos, with the powers of imagination you can see it full of giant Space Marines, rampaging fantasy armies, signs, banners and most importantly happy people (including you I hope).
I’ll leave you with an extremely short video of Cory demonstrating the size of the new Games Day hall.
The Queen Elizabeth Building before the invention of colour.
Goons.
The entrance without fun.
The entrance with some fun cheaply thrown in via Photoshop.
They promise they won’t be pink when they are done I recently had a chance to check in with our table building crew to see how things were progressing. I’m happy report that things seem to be going well although the crew is starting to show some signs of wear and tear. Some of them have been working so hard they haven’t bothered to change their shirts since last time.
Rally call for Golden Demon 2008 Fellow painters, greetings from Saint John, New Brunswick! A year ago I moved here from Montreal to pursue a career opportunity for a couple years. Though I don’t have as much time as I’d like to paint models anymore, I’ve joined this blog effort with a purpose: To motivate more people to enter Golden Demon. Why would I want to promote competition you ask! Because to me there is nothing more exciting in this hobby than to lean down on a display case and marvel at the hours and hours spent on creating and painting these fantastic miniatures. Canada has quite its share of great painters, and I’ve met a lot of aspirants who are well on their way, amazing me with their improvements every time. I want to keep this positive push, I want to motivate those of you that have been admiring the fancy Golden Demon entries, wishing you could do that. The fact is you can. Oh it will take a lot of hard work, but I bet you that if you are really serious about improving, I can help you build a model you’ll be proud of for years to come. And though it may not win a trophy, it will earn you invaluable experience to paint better models and armies, and get you interested in finding out even more. There are as many techniques and styles to painting a Golden Demon-level model as there are miniatures themselves. Your goal should therefore be to learn and try these various techniques, and adapt your own style with what you prefer. Over the course of the months leading up to Games Day 2008, I will be posting thoughts, tips and techniques that hopefully will help and motivate you to join the painters across the nation who will gather in Toronto this June.
For now, I leave you with a PDF tutorial I made, explaining the same painting techniques I used to paint my last Golden Demon model. We’ll go over these aspects in more detail in the months to come. That’s it for now.
as of this post reports of severed fingers are way down! Anyone who plays Games Workshop games knows that you need tables to play these games on. You can try playing on the floor but you run the very real risk of impaling yourself a couple of dozen times on a mixture of plastic weapons (or ending your game by tripping on some poorly placed dice and performing a sudden and unexpected amateur diving demonstration). Anyone who has been to Games Day knows that we bring a LOT of gaming tables to the show. These tables take a long time to prepare, that’s why our team is already hard at work on this year’s tables.
This year a corner of our warehouse space has been transformed into a gaming table assembly line. From this sea of pink insulation foam and badly mangled tools will rise a plethora of brand spanking new gaming tables ready and waiting for this year’s event. I’ve been told that this is just the beginning, that soon every member of our GW Canada team (even the accountants) will be helping to build new tables for this year’s event.
Games Day is Games Workshop's annual gaming expo. The event features all manner of exciting gaming events not held anywhere else. If you love Games Workshop Games don't miss this show!
Games Day 2008 will take place on June 21, 2008 at the Queen Elizabeth Building at Exhibition Place in Toronto, Ontario.
