Preparing For Astromini-Con

(This article is a bit late, but it’s an update non-the-less!)

Every year a group of guys from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (for those of you not from Canada whom are reading this) put on a great Warhammer 40,000 tournament in their home town.   They started in 2001 and called it Astronomi-con.  Soon after they were able to expand and take the event to Toronto, Ontario, Canada every year on top of their hometown event.  Recently, in the last couple years, they have come to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (my hometown).  I wasn’t able to make it last year to the event as it fell on my wife’s birthday (and no matter how much I tried, she wasn’t going to let me game a whole weekend on her birthday).

It’s a 1500 point tournament with rules for composition, which I always try to follow as best I can.   The tournament isn’t until August and to give us a taste of things to come some local Alumni hosted a mini version of the event called “Astromini-con”.

In my list for Astromini-con I wanted to take the following: Command HQ Unit, 10-man Stormtrooper Unit, 5-man Ogryn Unit with a Chimera Transport, 25-man Platoon, 10-man Veteran Unit, Valkyrie, Vendetta, and 2 Leman Russes.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a couple of those units painted and it was a mad rush to finish them in time for the tournament (which I did manage to pull off by 8:10pm the night before)!

Out of the whole army I needed to finish a Vendetta, the Veterans and the Stormtroopers.  For my Vendetta, I decided a while back that it was more Imperial Navy than part of the Imperial Guard army itself, and therefore chose a non-camouflaged colour scheme that consisted of just a flat brown and a light grey belly.  In the future, when I purchase Forge World fliers such as the Thunderbolt and/or Lightening, this will be the same colour scheme.

The Veterans were just standard troop models I had left over and three meltagun models to bring it to nine, the final model was a bit more fancy and converted to be “Sergeant Bastonne” for use in other games complete with his Carapace Armour and Hellpistol.  At last count, I owned seven 10-man Stormtrooper Units, but this one is the only one I modeled with flamers.  It so happened that points were so thin for this army composition, that flamers was all I could afford.  So this unit was chosen to be painted (the rest all of either 2 plasmaguns or 2 meltaguns).