Partizan - yes, I was there too..

..and you know what they said? Well, some of it was true...  Especially the part about it being a really good show -  with loads of great games and a good turnout of traders, in a decent venue with good facilities. All in all, a really good day out. 

I had never been to any 'Partizan' show before, and it was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment decision to go along, but I had the day free and decided the journey should be OK. It turned out to be just over 2 hours by car, so not too bad.  I didn't rush it, arriving at about noon ( I think the show opened at 10:00) to find a pretty busy hall. The attendance had clearly exceeded expectations, and they had run out of programs! As a result I just progressed around the hall taking in games and traders as they came up, rather than marking out specific targets to see - I don't think that mattered, though I think I did manage to miss one or two displays ( I seem to have blanked out the 'Lard Zone' area, not sure why, a shame as their setups always look great ).  

Overall impressions very good, as I said above, Not as big as Salute but that's no bad thing, and a much more pleasant, light and airy venue - with free parking right outside. A higher ratio of 'historical' games compared to Fantasy/Sci-fi etc than at Salute - and I thought that may have been reflected in the demographic of the punters, I'd say an older crowd than at the Excel last month. I had the feeling Fantasy etc were better represented in participation games than demo games - make of that, what you will.  I took a few pictures of some of the games I liked  : 

Westbury Wargamers :  Paraetacene  316BC

 

The Iron Brigade : Hopton Heath 1643

( that standard says 'Come Out You Cuckold'! )

 

Boondock Sayntes : Laswari, India 1803

the camels are coming..

Immaculate uniform - and a tray of chips!

Y

The Bayonets: fictional ACW 'December 1862' 

Eagles & Lions: Sherwood Rangers at Gheel, Sept 1944

This game  was clearly inspired by James Holland's book 'Brothers In Arms' (which is in my 'reading backlog' pile) which  has loads of detailed maps of actions the Sherwood Rangers tankers  took part in, including this one at Gheel. A great  source for a wargame scenario.

Sherwood Rangers tanks

The Bunker : raid on Entebbe

I loved the fact that the Hercules aircraft in the Entebbe game were not just there to look impressive, they were clearly units in the game, being moved around the taxi-way as I watched, and I think one of them was getting shot at by a T-34 tank!  Quite an ambitious setup, to say the least..

Also on a grand scale, the ever-reliable Simon Miller's  'To The Strongest'  Ipsus , which he says is 'quite feasibly the largest ancients game ever fought at a show'.  Can't fault his ambition, either: 

 

Look at those Pike phalanxes!

Forest Outlaws - Vellinghausen 1761 're-imagined'

 

Lovely 15mm 7YW figures

 

1st Corps: McPherson Ridge, Gettysburg

Glasgow Tradeston club: Lutter am Barenburg 1626

Nice to see the earlier 'Danish' phase of the Thirty Years War being gamed : and I liked the carpet tile scenery with cut-out river, simple but effective. 

Chesterfield Old Boys: 28mm AWI ( Springfield 1780? )

Barnsley Association: Death in the Snow, Finland 1939

Lincoln Miniature Warfare: With a Rebel Yell

 

The big spectacular games are great, of course, but I am also interested to see games which make me think 'I could do that at home', which was the appeal of the Lincoln group's game, on a simple hex terrain ( 12 by 9 hexes or so? ) which would fit many home tables. They were using the rules of the old 'Battle Cry' boardgame, which I think is related to 'Command and Colours' - again, keeping it simple. 

There were loads more games of course, it's just that I didn't get pictures of all of them, or failed to get good pictures! For some reason I completely bypassed the 'Lard Zone' which had several games using Too Fat Lardies rules, and of course they always have lovely terrain - I'm afraid you'll have to look at other blogs for those! One I can thoroughly recommend is Ray Rousell's Don't Throw a One  - he has more and better pictures than I do!  I had a good chat with Ray at the show, he had come up from 'down South' with the Posties Rejects crew - I think he said he was up at 4:30am to get to the show when it opened!  Very nice to chat with you, Ray!  I also got to meet Graham Evans aka Trebian, author of the excellent Wargaming for Grown-Ups blog, had a good talk with him and his Northamptonshire Battlefields Society crew - now I can put faces to some of the names in their game reports! Great to meet you guys, too.  Needless to say it seems almost everyone who is anyone in UK wargaming was there, I'm only sad that I didn't make the acquaintance of Norm Smith  or  Epictetus, or catch up again with Rob of The Eastern Garrison - all of whom were around and have put up their own reports of the show.  Maybe next time..

Of course there were also plenty of traders, tempting us all to spend our money; having not planned ahead very much, I hadn't made a big list, but I seem to have picked up a few things anyway: 

- WW2 vehicles and figures for my 20mm  'D-Day Dodgers' - a couple of Steyr Heavy Cars and a Lloyd carrier from the Rapid Fire guys,   PIAT and Panzershrek crews from Brittannia Miniatures  

- a pack of Hexon flocked single hexes from Kallistra, to slightly expand my potential gaming table

-  'A Mighty Fortress'  starter pack for WW2 Air Combat  from Tumbling Dice, with rules and some nice 1/600 B17, P51 and Me 262 models.  Me and air warfare games go back a long way ( thanks  to Mike Spick ), it should be fun to have a go at this one. 

Finally a rather lovely nostalgic bargain - a gentleman running a demo game under the name of 'The Hornsea Contempibles'  ( he admitted the 'Contemptibles' were just him!)  had a pile of old wargaming magazines for sale, very cheap, and I remembered I have been looking for Issue 35 of Miniature Wargames ( from 1986 ) for ages - lo and behold, there it was! So now, I have a complete run of issues 1 to 48, all the editions produced by Duncan MacFarlane before he jumped ship and set up Wargames Illustrated the following year. This is strangely pleasing to me...

The Holy Grail..

 

What's more, some other rather veteran mags were in the pile, and I couldnt resist:

..and some lovely bonus nostalgia

 

Blimey, Battle - before it was even for wargamers... Really interesting stuff - one of these has the very first 'Observation Post' column by Terry Wise - I think the teenage me caught up with it a few issues later. And Stuart Asquith's  Practical Wargamer is surely still worth reading? I only bought a few back in the day, I feel another collection coming on! 

So there we are; I stayed till pretty much the end at 4pm  ( as I left, I witnessed a dubious-looking crew making a final raid, on the ice cream stall :

cheers guys! )  

Thankfully it was a fairly easy drive home again, after an excellent day,  with loads of great games and fine people, 'tired but happy' pretty much summed up my evening - and with lots of new ideas and inspirations. There's another one in October, I gather, and I hope to be there. Meanwhile, thanks to all involved in the organisationof a great day, and  keep well, everyone.

Slow Saxon Struggle : Painting Progress of sorts

I seem to have lost a bit of 'traction' since Salute - little hobby activity, partly due to 'real life' stuff, as always. But I have been trying to make some painting progress, however sporadic.Chiefly this has been with the Spencer-Smith 7YW  infantry for Saxony - but I am first to admit I have not been doing a brilliant  job! 

The main  problem is that they are quite lacking in  definition of uniform details - plus the ones I have had been varnished too, presumably as a stiffening undercoat. Perhaps I should have tried to strip them, but was very uncertain about what could be used safely without dissolving the figures - they are the old plastic versions. So I slathered a coat of white onto them, and hoped for the best - in the process blurring  even more of what little detail they had. I just don't have the skill, patience and dexterity to accurately 'paint on' the details. Choosing a regiment with Yellow facing colour also made things more 'interesting', and there's always the challenge of white crossbelts on a predominantly white uniform - how to make them stand out?  For that feature, I have tried using a fine artist's black lining pen to mark the edges of the belt ( more or less - not a very steady hand!)  and then painting the white belt inside the lines.  I wasn't very hopeful for the results, but persisted and they look ( just about ) OK to me for my very simple block-painted style.  One foible I have is to always  do the faces and hands pretty much last; I think I read that in Terry Wise as a kid, and it seems to 'bring the figure to life' somehow. 

So, with apologies to any half-decent painters out there, let alone the button-counters, here's a work in progress picture.. 

"don't look, Ethel.."

 

Not my finest hour, and the officer, drummer and ensign will be even more of a challenge, but it will be great to have some genuine old 'SSMs' on the table, as seen in the old pics of Charles Grant / Young and Lawford games. The worst-painted units always fight best anyway, don't they?

A change is as good as a rest, they say, so I am also turning to my recently-acquired Macedonians and Persian 'DBA' armies.  Reading the relevant Osprey books is interesting, both by Nicholas Sekunda who takes a pretty rigourous approach, the illustations are strictly recreated from depictions of soldiers on carvings, mosaics, wall-paintings and ceramics etc from the time, which I suppose is the only real evidence, after all.   The Macedonians seem to have a pretty limited palate, simple colour schemes on simple clothing, which suits me - but the Persians may be another thing completely, with multi-coloured outfits and quite complex patterns. They should look fantastically colourful when painted up, but it will certainly be 'interesting' to paint them! 

Ospreys for basic reference

   

Persian Immortals will be 'fun' to paint(!)

So far, I have gone as far as spraying both DBA armies with primer - Macedonians in white, Persians grey. I suppose a game of DBA could be played, as they are?  (  'Unpainted figues on the table? You'll be drummed out, sir!'  ).

Primed and ready..

 

There has been a little gaming, but you already know about it, if you follow the excellent Jon Freitag's Palouse Wargaming Journal :  I was lucky enough to be one of the players in his second game of Montgomery, 1644 a couple of weeks ago. A thoroughly good time was had by all, and we 'romantic but wrong' Royalists were victorious, albeit quite narrowly, I thought. My infantry pretty well knocked out their opposite numbers ( we did have a 5 to 3 advantage there ), while Chris ('Nundanket') i/c  cavalry just about managed to hold out against the superior Parliamentary horse - though they ended up with a couple of their regiments on our baseline, pretty scary!  Our opponent Mark ( aka Jolly Broom Man ) put up a great fight, especially since he was also probably writing orders for the French at Wavre, at the same time, in his role as Grouchy.  He was anything but a grouch with us..  ( I'll get my coat ). 

Finally for now, I am thinking quite hard about venturing northwards to Newark on Sunday, for a first visit to the Partizan show.  120 miles each way to drive will be hard work, but I have a free day and am inclined to give it a go. If so, there will inevitably be pictures in an upcoming post here - watch this space! Meanwhile keep well, everyone.