After getting perhaps three hours of sleep, I was up at 6:30 am yesterday morning for the start of a long day. Rick picked me up at 7 and we drove down to Olympia to spend the day at Enfilade, a local miniatures convention I’ve been meaning to attend for years now. The drive was about an hour and we got there in time to register for the day and sign up for a 9 am game. We played Stargrunt, a scifi minis game that Rick has been talking up to me for ages now. The game is meant to focus on infantry combat and the refs even pointed this out but nonetheless the game had a lot of grav tanks, VTOLs, and mechs. It lasted until 1 and was fairly enjoyable. One of the vendors was selling Stargrunt and its sister game Dirtside for $5 each, so I picked them both up afterwards.

We were both starving by game’s end, not having had breakfast, so we went upstairs to grab lunch in the hotel restaurant. While we were waiting for our food, I went back downstairs to sign us up for an event for the next time period. I guess we should have done that first, since all the games we wanted to play were filled up. Whoops. I was ultimately able to find a 2 pm game though, a Flames of War event recreating part of the Battle of Kursk run by Chris Ewick from the Game Matrix in Tacoma. This was a huge game, with over 170 tanks and vehicles and 12 players. I commanded a T-34 company for glorious Mother Russia. It was interesting to play a game on that scale and with vehicles that I don’t field with my regular army, like Panthers and Tigers. Chris was a good ref and kept the action moving, a must in a game that big. Unfortunately, I could not stay for the whole event, so after flaming some Panzer IVs I had to bow out. We left around 4:30 and headed back to Seattle.

Next year I’d like to go back to Enfilade and just stay for the full three days. This year it overlapped with the Seattle International Film Festival and Nik and I already had tickets to several movies. Rick kindly dropped me off in the U-District and I met up with Nik, Ray, Christine, and Carol at the Neptune for OSS 117: Nest of Spies, a hilarious French spy spoof. If you are a Bond fan, you so have to see this flick. Very stylish and very funny. It’s also rather timely, as much of the humor derives from Western attitudes about the Islam and the Middle East. It’s set in Nasser’s Egypt of 1955 though, so it also has all the Cold War trappings you’d want for a good spy story.

After that it was dinner at Bento, an Asian place on the Ave, where I had some good Korean BBQ. Then two hours later Nik and I were back at the Neptune for Evil Aliens. This film from the UK was one part Evil Dead, one part X-Files, and one part Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It follows a crew from a TV show doing an expose on a Welsh woman who was impregnated by an alien. She lives on a remote island with her three brothers in what can only be described as the Welsh version of the Leatherface family. The group includes a cynical reporter, a super-nerdy “UFO expert”, a videographer, a soundman, and a hot actress and gay actor for the reenactments. Of course it turns out that aliens are indeed on the island and they are soon fighting for their lives.

To say Evil Aliens is over the top is an understatement. In the opening sequence an abductee is anally violated with a dildo-shaped drill and that’s just the start. From there it moves on to impalings, decapitations, people being beat to death with their own limbs, and a seemingly endless parade of faces splattered with blood, ichor, and other fluids. Plus alien fetuses and a threshing machine gone mad. Ultimately though, the film satirizes its sources and there are many funny moments. This made it pitch perfect for a midnight movie and the crowd seemed to really enjoy it. I kept thinking, “Man, it’s like they made a movie with Rob Schwalb in mind.” Dr. Evil definitely needs to track down a copy.

Nik and I finally got home at 2:30 am. After 20 hours on the go, I was ready for sleep and was soon unconscious.