In our Road to LVO series, we’re following several different players and hobbyists as they prepare to play in one of the largest wargaming conventions on the planet. This year’s Road to LVO series is sponsored by Frontline Gaming.
Before we get to the Las Vegas Open at the beginning of October, we have the 2025 NoVa Open Tabletop Wargaming Convention in my home region of Washington, D.C. to experience first. As the smallest of The Big Three but most intimate, NoVa has always had an abundance of awesome things to do while ensuring I had the opportunity to see everyone and meet lots of interesting people I also had the opportunity to refresh my painting techniques for an Imperial Knight I’m building for the Knight Joust.
Wednesday
I know NoVa. I know for a fact that Wednesday afternoon and evening, the Washington Hilton gets busy and the parking lot fills up. So after waking up, taking the little one for a walk, and working out, we load up the car and drive into Washington D.C.
Even though we got to the hotel shortly after noon, the hotel parking garage is still nearly full and we are forced to park on P2. We check into the hotel, and I drop my stuff off in the room before going downstairs to pick up my badge and swag bag.
Lo and behold, at long last GW’s contribution to the swag bag is *not* a Skaventide box. Instead it is a Combat Patrol and a Kill Team. The Kill Team I got was Imperial Breachers: a godsend, as I am beginning work on a new Imperial Knights army. The ComPat was Black Templars, which has the contents of the old 9th Edition launch box but exchanging the launch box’s Redemptor for an Impulsor. I was unsuccessful in finding someone to trade with, because it does not seem anyone got a ComPat they were happy with from SuperNovas.
This is about when other folks are getting in, so Salsa and I head back to hotel registration to say hello to everyone. We quickly run into “FromtheShire” Dan, “Gold” Kevin Fowler, James “Fakie” Kauzlaric, and more. I get to see Fowler’s amazing Orc display, and Fowler gets to meet Salsa.
We then head down to the lower level to check out the opening Vendor Hall, and attend “a Night with Games Workshop”. Campbell and Dan have talked about it on the BadCast, and I suspect Norman has as well. There is a beer tasting from Wassen Beer, headlined by their flagship NoVa Light Beer. Campbell’s description of it is spot on – it is a Beer and it does Beer very well. It’s expensive, but it has *just* enough kick to be worthwhile.
There is also a trivia competition. Being a trivia guy, I roped Craig, Alex, Fakie, Dan, Underworlds Jake, and Dunkelbrau into a team. This trivia is not just 40K trivia, but asks questions from Age of Sigmar, Horus Heresy, Old World, and I think a few Blood Bowl questions. What made this particular trivia interesting was that you then put the answers into a Bingo grid. When Brandt read out the answers, he read them out in a random order and the winners would be the first to get a Bingo AND who got the most questions right. We did not win, but the trivia felt “right” in terms of challenge.
After that it was time for Salsa to take a nap and me to get dinner. I had a mediocre burger from the hotel restaurant, then we rolled into the Badcast Live Taping. The two of us grabbed a seat next to Fowler, and…promptly fell asleep.
After getting through Q&A, Salsa and I decided it was time to sleep in our fluffy hotel bed.
Thursday
Salsa goes to daycare on Mondays and Thursdays, and since there were a few classes I wanted to do on Thursday, off we went.
I returned to the con and spent the morning browsing the vendor hall. Compared to LVO and Adepticon NoVa’s hall is a bit smaller. While there was a couple of used model vendors (Atlantis Comics and Games and Gopher Games), they just didn’t have the size or scale of Toledo Game Room or the Frontline Games Secondhand Store.(1). The Games Workshop store is unusually barren of the big Forge World kits that is the selling point of the event popup store. I’m told that they had a *very good* GenCon and haven’t restocked. This is disappointing since I very much want an Acastus Knight Porphyrion, and they have been sold out since (at least) July. I did pick up a Saturnine Dreadnought, so I could say that I had built and painted a model at the convention. It’s also time for our first class, Customizing GunPla with Nestor Medina.
Underworlds Jake and I took this class, where we were given a Gundam Strike Rogue and given the opportunity to scribe our own panel lines onto the flat plastic of the model, and then to use various techniques to emphasize those lines. This was my first time to use a hobby chisel, and one of the things Nestor taught was how to create straight panel lines. He also went into the philosophy as to how many panels lines to etch and whether they should be mirrored on the model.
It was a fun class, and I wish I had more time to play with those tools. Ironically, I would get to hang out with Nestor and his girlfriend the next day while painting my Dreadnought. He also liked Salsa.
Afterwards I retreated to my room to continue building my Dread and to play through Reverse: 1999. During this I dropped a small part from the Dreadnought’s leg which disappeared into the grey carpet of the hotel room. However, I still had some plasticard left over from the Gunpla class and was able to customize a band-aid for the Dreadnought.
My second class for the day was the Artis Opus dry brushing class, but with a recommendation to drink beer. The class was taught by Byron and Fauxhammer. This was a further refined version of their class that I had taken last year, and they were better able to convey the hand motions and paint positioning, and also a different way to put water into the dampening pad. We started off on Sector Mechanicus bases before painting up a Space Marine helmet.
I eventually left the class early in order to get some dinner, because it turns out that NoVa is a fun place to get food when the weather is unusually pleasant. I go down U Street to try a chicken restaurant, before heading back to NoVa. On the way back I meet up with Alice and some of her friends and we hang out.
After this long day, it’s time for bed.
Friday
Friday begins with a wakeup and the second Kevin Convergence of 2025! The NoVa Necromunda Room is between the Hilton’s elevators and the hotel gym, so on the way to go work out I run into my two brother Kevins. We fistbump and I run in place for an hour.
I spend the early afternoon finishing the build for the Saturnine Dreadnought before heading down to Marco Frisoni’s speed painting with oils class. Unfortunately I did not bring the right brush for this class and thus wasn’t able to the blending as smooth as I would have liked.
Afterwards Alice and I met up for dinner to discuss the events of the day and plan for LVO. We went to a restaurant up on U Street called Whitlow’s, a gastropub that used to be my favorite restaurant in Arlington, Virginia before the pandemic. I had my birthday party there several times. So it was nice to be able to show my good friend a great restaurant.
It was also a very long walk (10+ blocks), though the weather was nice.
On the way back, we come across Norman, Andrew, and the rest of the PCA crew (including my new friends and teammates from the Goonhammer Open), where we go buy more beer.
After getting back to the hotel, some PCA folks have managed to get their hands on a sealed box of 1991 Persian Gulf War trading cards. Folks were handed a pack, and tossed out their cards to beat the other person while providing some sort of silly reason why their cards won. While what was said cannot be repeated, I took pictures.
Afterwards it was time for bed.
Saturday
I had a class that started at 8:30. It was one I was looking forward to. When I woke up at 8:15 I realized that my future was going to not involve a class at 8:30 am Eastern. I instead worked out, then went downstairs and outside to prime my Dreadnought. That accomplished, I went to the Hobby Haven to start painting my Dread. I hung out down there for a few hours, and I was able to get the metallics on the model to where I wanted it before airbrushing. I then headed out for the Pokemon Go August 2025 Community Day, wandering around Northwest DC catching Rookidees.
This year the NoVa Hobby Haven has several airbrushes to rent. For $5.00, you had 2 hours to airbrush to your heart’s content with freshly cleaned airbrushed and all the paints in Army Painter’s fantastic range. So I got all my pants and my pallet, and painted up my Dread. Unfortunately one of the few things they did not have were dryer sheets, so I would not be able to finish the Dread until I got home.
Painting the Dreadnought on Saturday-Monday was my main preparations at NoVa for the LVO, After all, a Knight is mostly just kind of an upscaled Dreadnought. My technique was to paint the black-primed model with Snakebite Leather, before drybrushing it with a bronze, tin, and ultimately a silver to give an aged metal look. Once I got to the airbrush, I then airbrushed on snakebite leather, a purple contrast, and a blue contrast to add some heat and weight stress to the metal before giving it another silver drybrush. I then airbrushed Army Painter Speedpaint Magic Blue onto the sections of the model that I wanted to be blue, in order to match my metallic Heresy Ultramarines.
The change I plan to make from how I painted the Dreadnought to the Knight is that before I start airbrushing on the heat/weight stress colors, I’m going to paint certain sections of the model bronze and red in order to break up the metallic color scheme. Those sections will also get the heat stress and silver drybrush, thus unifying them while still providing additional visual interest.
I also took the opportunity to take my half-completed Dreadnought down to the Vendor’s Hall and to the Goblin Hobbies booth, where Goobertown Hobbies and eBay Miniature Rescues were selling and demo’ing their new Nail Art stamping kits. Under their guidance, I added one of their Ultramarines nail art stamps onto my Dread. The process with their specific paint was surprisingly easy to do.
For dinner, Primaris Kevin and I ventured out to another NoVa restaurant, Pupatella, for some delicious pizza.
I closed out the evening at the PCA meetup on the patio, going through my collection of beers while overall being social. After we were all kicked off by the hotel staff, my friend Doug asked me to explain painting philosophy to a new hobbyist. I explained some things about painting black befire heading upstairs and going to bed.
Sunday
I spent the first half of the day in the Hobby Hangout, chatting and finishing the gold bits on my Dreadnought.
About midday through the day, I decided to head home to drop some of my luggage and spare beer. I also picked up Salsa so she could enjoy the end of the convention. Also I had accidentally held my room at NoVa through Monday. This meant Salsa got to experience the closing ceremonies of NoVa, and meet some people she previously had not met.
We had dinner with Alice and her friend James. We went to a restaurant where I got some bland chicken tenders. I wasn’t a huge fan, but this time around I had someone who wasn’t quite as picky as me when it comes to tenders.
(Naturally, the time she chose to stop enjoying the leftovers was the morning before she had to go get her annual vaccines on Wednesday).
Monday
At 6:30 am, Salsa woke up and decided it was time to go outside. She ate her breakfast, and then we headed home. It was good to be home and enjoy Labor Day together. I took the day to finish my Dread, because I had a base already and the dryer sheet necessary to get the marble effect.
Thoughts:
NoVa was the convention that got me into wargaming. I’ve played a bunch of 40K at NoVa, and have made absolutely amazing friends just by doing a random pickup game or two at NoVa. And that’s self-sustaining. Yeah in 2019 Fakie was just some random dude with a gorgeous Death Guard Army. In 2025 he’s a Beer Brother (when he isn’t getting a Silver Medal in Capital Pallet) who adores my dog and is overall a good hang. Or Alice whom I have never ever played a game of Warhammer with but who has become one of my closest friends despite as such. Or Dan or Dan or Campbell or Artum or Rob or Garrett or Greg or Andrew Corban or…
You get the idea.
Reader, I will be honest. At this point for Adepticon 2026, I don’t know if I will sign up for *anything* aside from the Games Workshop preview. I’m otherwise just going to go and chill with my friends. And just committing to *that* is enough to guarantee a packed schedule. And that’s why I love this hobby, Goonhammer, and everything: I have friends from all walks of life whom I can enjoy and bask in their presence, and giving *them* the attention they deserve is the pinnacle of a weekend. NoVa 2025 was like that, LVO XII is gonna be like that, and Adepticon promises to be like that.
I’m psyched.
- I will note the latter is at LVO XII. And also they are sponsoring this article.
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