Salute (Random) Pics! PIC HEAVY!

With my usual level of inefficiency I wandered the show taking pictures of anything that caught my eye. Some games were not labelled on the day so I simply gave up trying to identify things. So my advice is just enjoy the scenery and reminisce if you were there and take whatever inspiration you can from this random selection of games at Salute 2013.

If you have any questions or want me to try to identify a particular game (a small chance I will be able to but I am happy to try.) Just leave a comment. I did not take many of the Waterloo game simply because I KNOW it will get a huge amount of coverage.


 I will do one more Salute post on Wednesday dedicated to the bloggers and the Zombie Bloggers Association. So I would advise those of a nervous disposition or those with small children to skip my blog on Wednesday and Thursday and pick it up again on Friday.

If you have gotten as far as reading all this Well done, I would have just looked at the pics!

Have a good few days and I hope to see you all again in 2 days time.

All the best Clint

Salute Loot!

I  was very very very very restrained at Salute yesterday. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly there was nothing I could not get at other times or places. Secondly I was not in a spending mood. Thirdly I did not find any extra special deals, I am sure there were some but I must have missed them. Fourthly I am actively trying to reduce the unpainted mole hills of lead that dot the house. And Fifthly for me, at least, there was not a "Must Have" that really grabbed me at the show. So overall I was very restrained.

• Dead Mans Hand... a new set of Wild west rules. With a name like Clint it's almost an unwritten law that you have to be interested in the period in some way.
• Four packs of Napoleonic ships from "Tumbling Dice" Merchant vessels for the Broadside game.
• Some 15mm Sci Fi GZG stuff.
• Pack of Weird West figures by Ainsty Castings. (These are really nice, sculpted by Ian Mountain).
• and the Salute Freebies of dice and Salute miniature.

And that was all I bought. Not a huge list. I did leave the show thinking I should have bought this or that but overall I am very happy with what I did buy. And more importantly I had a good day out. Which of course is worth a lot!

I shall do a show post on Monday. That should get me back to my normal blogging schedule.

All the Best  and have a good Sunday. Clint

Fishing Village WIP and PRE Salute Game Anaysis.

 As you will note on the Pictures to the right the fishing village is coming on quite nicely now, still a huge amount to do of course, but you can now see the intention much more clearly. You will be able to see blobs of glue as the pictures were taken in the drying process. It will dry clear and not be noticed (I hope). The section of the beach which is deliberately left unfinished will turn into a small harbour, wait and see. I will try not to show any more of this for the time being so that when BROADSIDE comes it will be fresh, well that's the hope. I have put enough photos up to give not only the layout but the location on the board and to a lesser extent a scale. I have left out walls and boundaries because they would be so small, about 0.35 mm. That being the case I will most likely either paint or draw them onto the boards.

But that's not want to talk about today. I do want to talk about Salute. Firstly let me say I have not been able to get two of the ingredients that I would use to make my recipe of chocolate Fudge. So no free food from me this time out. It's a shame, but never mind.

But that's not what I want to talk about either. Yes I still want to talk about Salute. Or more accurately the games that are being hosted at the show.  Here's my disclaimer! I have taken all the information from "Miniature Wargames Magazine" issue 360. Not all the information is complete and if you do your own version of this analysis you will also realise that I will have miscounted. I kept getting distracted and losing my place.

Going down the games list I was struck by how many Participation games there were and that's why I did the count up. UK readers will know that there are usually at least one wargames club within reach. So playing games at shows is not as important as, for example the states. In the US because of the size of the country (so I am informed) playing games at shows is more important. A quick count-up  informed me there were about 34 demonstration games and 57 participation games. Nearly twice as many, which I found interesting. I, personally, find it easier to run a demonstration game than a participation game at shows. So I was expecting the results to be reversed with more demonstration games than participation games. Well as you already know I was wrong!


Which meant I should look a little closer at the results to determine why I was so wrong. So I broke it down by adding another parameter. How many of each type of games were run by wargames companies as opposed to clubs.  20 of the Participation games were company lead and only 10 demonstration games. This is a little out of skew because some companies (like Crooked Dice) are running more than one game but only on one game table area, while others are getting their associated clubs to run the game for them. I mean no critism by stating this  as I am sure I would be encouraging this If I ran a games company. So follow the trend and not get too caught up in the small details. In my opinion many companies are using participation games at shows in preference to Demonstration games as it gets players more closely involved. This should not be a revelation to anyone who attends the bigger shows in the UK but it is still worth stating as it introduces the question "Where will this trend lead?" Given that it would be impractical to run a large, for instance, ACW, game with hundreds of figure on the table top as a participation game and keep all the players interested for an extended period at a show with all the trader distractions and temptations. Smaller games like Saga which can yield a result with many less figures in a fraction of the time do yield themselves more open to public participation. As twice as many participation games are being put on by manufactures this year does that mean that big battle games are in decline and that skirmish games are currently on the rise from a manufactures point of view?

I also broke down the periods being played. I did this because just skimming the list there did seam to be a lot of "Steampunk" games.

Here's a rough list, again I can't be too precise because some games straddle two periods. In Order of numbers.

• Science Fiction 21 (including 7 "Steampunk"/VSF Games)
• Ancients 14 ( Including 8 dark age and Medieval)
• WW2/VBCW 13
• Fantasy 13
• 19th Century 10 (including 5 ACW games)
• 17th Century 5 (Including 2 Samurai games)
• Napoleonic 3
• Modern 3 (including horror and other similar things*)
•  Other 2 (Snits Revenge and Those Magnificent men and their flying machines.
• Zombies 2 (Dedicated zombie games and not horror!)
• 16th Century 1
• Wild West 1
• WW1   1

If you so choose you could clump certain categories together in different ways, Horror with zombies, Wild west with 19th Century for example. There are more options of course and if/when you do the Analysis I am sure you'll do them in your own way.

I am most interested in noting what game genres are missing. In the Modern section it's mostly horror and 70's TV shows. No Afghanistan, no Falklands, no Vietnam, no Cold war battle games or Korea or Arab Israeli. If there is a ECW game on the list I must have missed it as well, which is not to say it's not there, but if it is I will have missed it.

I will draw no more conclusions before going to the show, I'll leave that to you.

I would normally post on Saturday this week, but due to the show I will leave it until Sunday. And probably do my show report on Monday. I hope you have found something of interest. Be kind to yourself and hope to blog again after the show. All the best Clint

Town Planning

I woke this morning to the news of the bombs in Boston last night. There are no words I can use to try to explain why someone would choose to do such a thing. All I can say is that my thoughts prayers and best wishes are with the victims. As I am sure all ours are.

Before I start the town planning I had to do a couple of running repairs on the boards. Nothing major, just a bit more glue and clamped to hold it in place. Just letting you know that sometimes it does not go to plan.  Mostly it does, but just sometimes it needs to be given a little more encouragement than normal!

I have finally started the little fishing village I want on the BBIB boards for Broadside. Given the scale (1/2400th) the buildings would be really quite small. Modern buildings such as sky scrapers, shopping centres and the like would be much larger. Temples and Palaces of any period would also be larger, but as the fishing village would not need any palaces or warehouses or other buildings of that size. This being the case I went for the simplest solution. That solution was to cut triangular section plastic rod into random short lengths to represent the roofs of the cottages. If I had different triangular sections I would have used them, but as I did not and as the fishing village is not a very major part of the boards I am not concerned.

The second stage has been to add thicknesses of card (Grey board) underneath the roofs to turn them into buildings. As my Grey board is 3mm thick and quite the thickest card I currently own they have started to look a little uniform. I am sure I can overcome that by positioning and applying colour. As soon as the rain stops here I will spray them ready for painting.

As you can see to the right creating towns in this scale is not particularly challenging. This was achieved simply as I put them down to dry. Once roads/tracks and possibly gardens have been indicated I suspect it will start to look more torn like. If the weather holds I should get some more done in the next couple of days.

That's todays very brief work in progress update for the BBIB boards. Thanks for reading and I'll do my pre Salute post on Friday. Maybe my shopping list, or items I want to look at.

So until Thursday, take care and be kind to yourselves! All the best Clint.

"My Hits don't lie!"

Firstly I want to say a big thank you to all my followers, lurkers and casual clickers who stumble upon my blog. As I type this I have had 24 970 page views. Just 30 short of 25000 which is a milestone to me. I am not going to do some give away promotion to attract more members I would rather pass on my thanks to you all who make Blogging so much fun enjoyment and yes at times frustration. Cheers Guys I really appreciate it.

I have learnt a lot from the honourable Fran and have included the picture above to introduce my recent wargames thoughts. Followers of the blog this time last year will have seen my build of an Afghanistan village. It has not been used since and that's a shame so I have been thinking of alternative uses for it. Given the architecture and the layout it could easily be used for a lot of different periods, anything from late medieval to near future. A magazine editor did suggest I use it for the 1st Anglo- Afghan war as he wanted to do a series of articles about wargaming in Afghanistan through the ages. Being honest the idea never really floated my boat so it went no further. Which knowing me will mean I will no doubt start it in 2 years time!

 Finally coming to the point the boards would work well, for some other middle eastern wargames. So recycling the Afghan boards and with reference to the picture above I intend to use Salute this year to check out the possibility of the Arab Israeli wars.
1948 has some interesting features but is perhaps a little too similar to WW2.
1956 again possible and with British and French Support gives it more variety and versatility, but the overall feel is still to similar to WW2 despite the fact that it had the first airborne helicopter assault. But one battle does not make a war.
1967 "The Six Day war" does appeal there is a variety of forces Israeli, Egyptian and Syria many of the vehicles are still WW2 vintage Syria was using Panzer Mk IV's, Egypt T34/85s and Su 100s along with more modern tanks like T55s and "Super Shermans" (used by the Israelis).
1973 "Yom Kippur War" again appeals as the Israelis start on the back foot. Weapon systems have improved. The Egyptians backed by the USSR have Sagger Anti Tank Wire Guided missiles T62s BMPs and BTR 60s as well as many of the older vehicles such as T34s. And as a war fought on two fronts has many interesting prospects from a wargaming point of view.
1980+  More up-to-date vehicles still including the Merkava the most well known Israeli tank. Is a period that is also possible as a wargames period perhaps with things like Operation Opera (The Isreali strike to destroy Iran's Nuclear facilities.)

Obviously the above has glossed over all the conflicts in a mere line or two, when any number of books have been written. So it is definitely over simplified  in the extreme. It does seem to be at present an era of wargaming that is pretty much under played at the moment and yet perfect for my Afghanistan wargames terrain. It should also be a lot less controversial.

A very quick look has highlighted the lack of figure manufacturers for these conflicts but a wealth of vehicle makers. But this as mentioned above will be something I want to look at while present at SALUTE this year.

Thanks for Reading, more on Tuesday have a great couple of days and I hope something above has caught your interest.

All the best Clint

Kra Vak APC

I am one of those people who struggle to finish projects. There is always something I can add, alter, re- paint or improve. Today my 15mm Kra Vak from "Ground Zero Games" force nudged along just that little bit further. On the run up to Salute I am not looking to spend any money so I am trying to get a few pieces that have been hanging around finished off.
This Kra Vak Armoured Personnel Carrier uses gavatic power as a means of propulsion (most Kra Vak vehicles on the battle field do), which explains the flying base. It also gives a reason for painting the underside blue!

This vehicle can carry a full squad of the alien race. While not massively armed it does have a small, one "Man", turret with some undetermined armament. I won't go into all the technical stats that are on the GZG web site but needless to say it's fairly well balanced and can hold its own against other human APCs.
As with the few Ground Zero vehicles I have put together there were no instructions, but there are only a limited number of configurations. Which leads to very little head scratching as all the components do fit together quite well and instinctively.  This is where some bright spark tells me I have got it wrong and such a piece is upside down or in the wrong place. If that happens to be the case, so be it and OH Dear never mind!

That's it for today. As despite not looking after my nephew I am STRUGGLING with the N.H.S. E-Learning. So far despite numerous attempts and several e mails and phone calls I have failed to log into the web address I have been given. I know I am not alone as the local NHS trust is doing a "drop in E Learning Clinic" on Tuesday because out of 3500+ employees only 200 have managed to complete the training. Utterly Ridiculous!

Anyway have a good weekend and I'll probably blog again on Sunday, Well that's the plan..... now back to banging my head against the keyboard and swearing at the E Learning protocols.

Best Wishes Clint

Full or Half Sail

As you know I have been looking after my nephew so there's not too much real progress. That said I have managed a very little. Here is a quick update on the planned BBIB game for the Broadside show in June. One of the issues with the trail game over 2 weeks ago now is being able to tell a ships speed. Obviously speed in a Napoleonic naval game is reliant on several factors including the wind. Other than the weather, ships in BBIB may set themselves one of 4 speeds. In order they are Anchored, No sails/ Drifting, 1/2 Sail or Full sail. Needless to say ships at anchor don't move at all, while drifting ships will move a certain distance in the direction of the wind. Half Sail and Full Sail, are the settings used by far the most in the game. I needed to make an easy way of identifying if the ships are fully rigged or half sailed without getting more ships and chopping sails off. Given that a ships captain would easily be able to tell what any opponents sail settings would be and thus be able to anticipate their respective speeds.

 My solution is to show this in creating wake markers for each ship. Having made 12 of each I now have sufficient for all the ships we are likely to use either now or on the day. These are 2mm MDF bases 20x40mm and 20x20mm for full sail and half sail respectively. I am first to admit that they will not win any painting competitions, but they will function as I require them too.

That's it for today. I appreciate that it's not the most exciting blog post in the world but it has moved the Broadside game on ever so slightly. Thanks for reading Next post on Friday. Take care till then, all the best folks.

Sunday Club (Star wars)

It was quite a strange day yesterday at the club. There was to be a large "Hail Ceaser" game with 6-8 of us playing, but John (Who was hosting the game) could not make it for family reasons so I had no real idea what I would be playing when I turned up. As it turned out I played "Star Wars" I have played wings of war, but this I found a far better mechanic. I was impressed by all the components and Dave had a set of boards with a trench so terrain was all sorted.

We managed to get two games in. Having not played before (the other 3 players had, although one player claimed only once but that was disputed) I went with a force that Kev selected for me. As far as I was concerned he knew best so I was happy to go with his selection..... It turned out to be quite good.

If you don't know I am quite strongly dyslexic especially when it comes from knowing my right and left. I can tell them apart don't get me wrong, I know I write with my right hand and that's how I work out right from left. Working out right from left on someone else is a step harder. Working it out on a space ship that is at an odd angle to me (which does not have arms!!) a step harder still. Working out left and right on a playing piece with a dial that is then inverted is actually pretty hard for me. If I only had one playing piece I would have a very good chance of working it out. And here's the problem..... I was controlling 4 tie fighters.

In the first game I had all four ties destroyed pretty quickly as much by my own ineptitude and the fact that I was somehow magnetic to the asteroids as enemy shooting. I would have been alright with just the asteroids, but with a X Wing and the Millennium Falcon to contend with as well, let's just say goodnight Vienna pretty quickly. Which left Kev with his 4 ties to face pretty much a whole rebel squadron as well as the Falcon. I think he lasted 3 or 4 more turns before the weight of incoming fire utterly destroyed him. I have to admit it was my fault he was facing more and bigger ships but without weight of numbers. I felt bad for him but Kev is the kind of bloke that plays for fun and not for victory.

The second game was a different story. We had an objective. We had to pick up some damaged satellite pieces. I was more aware of asteroids and I had worked out a lot of the rules. Kev and I very quickly decided that we would ignore the victory conditions and shoot the shit out of Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon, and that would be enough for us. (We're like that!)  Dave (A fairly new club member) was controlling the Falcon, he also had an X wing for support. . Ian two X wings and a single Y wing. I screwed up on the first turn and steered a Tie the wrong way and it ended up directly in the way of all my other plotted moves. When the dust settled and my little game of bumper cars had sorted itself out Kev had managed to strip most of the screens from the Falcon. Ian had picked up one Satellite and Dave's X wing had nabbed another. But I was back in the fight and could keep bearing 2 of my Ties onto the big ship.

My tie advanced (Kev kindly gave me Vader to control, more out of kindness than the belief I could do anything useful with him) was well out of the action steering well clear of asteroids (well sometimes). Anyway there was a rush to pick up the last two pieces. Dave grabbed one with the extra large base of the massive ship and both me and Kev had a Tie closing in on the last one as did Ian with his Y wind. I overshot it and had to spend two turns turning round. Kev undershot it and Ian killed his Tie with the Y wing.

Meanwhile, More by luck than judgement my two Ties took the last of the Falcons hull points and it was out of the game and dropped the satellite token. Dave's X wing was headed of table to secure the victory point for the rebels so Dave was out of the game. One of my Ties managed to pick up the token and started to head off the board with an X wing chasing me. I set the move dial to right instead of left. Left would have set me up for getting of the table the following turn and it was the only sensible option. Right was towards an asteroid and the no go section of the board edge which we had already been informed was instant death. Left was the only Option. In my mind I was going left and knew that Ian's X wing would have a free blast at me. I worked it all out and set the dial for a hard left, confident I had a tighter turning circle. And then I turned the move dial over only to see the hard right manoeuvre revealed.  Remember my dyslexia? Well sometimes it works in my favour. I was out of shooting arch and still had JUST enough room to avoid the wrong board edge and the asteroid.

Darth Vader meanwhile had been out of the game pretty much since the start playing dodge the asteroids but somehow Ian's Y wing with the satellite came into range and arch of fire. So I shot him down. Yeah Ok it took me two turns but I did it!) Vader then managed to pick up the bit of space junk and with nothing rebel close headed for the board edge.

My last Tie was also "stressed" but moving super fast (speed 5) in a straight line and coming to join my other tie behind Ian's last x wing. Cutting to the chase I managed to turn the Tie carrying the Satellite so close to Ian's ship he had to move beyond my tie and that allowed my other two Ties to get the killing blow.

 It wasn't pretty, it was lucky and I really enjoyed the game.  Sometime Dyslexia is a joy. Kev got chewed up pretty badly but I think he stole one Satellite part. The game finished with me having 2 of the satellite pieces and a full compliment of ships (some very beaten up though). Somehow I won the game. Mostly I think from a combination of luck, ignoring the victory conditions, shooting down the falcon and Kev doing all the hard work!

Conclusion: Having played Star Wars I would be tempted to buy it myself. However as Dave has a everything (Apart from A wings and a couple of other ships) and Kev also has a copy (basic set). My purchase of it would be redundant. And that is the only reason I have not  been checking the internet for the best price today. Over all a great fun game and worth playing again.

That's it for today. Sorry it's so wordy and with so few pictures but I was more interested in playing then taking pictures and I think that is the real testament to the games quality.

Wednesday is the next post so with luck see you then. All the best Clint.