The Other Partizan - part the second

Welcome to  the second and concluding part of my report on visiting The Other Partizan show at Newark last Sunday.  In the first part, I showed pictures and commented on about half of the games I managed to see, so in this post I  will cover the remainder and make some general comments and draw some conclusions - which may be boiled down to  'too much to see!'  I hope you are interested to see the games and enjoy the pictures - there were some really great tables!  Without further ado..

Chesterfield Old Boys presented a 28mm ACW game   The Battle of Richmond 30th August 1862  - Richmond, Kentucky that is, as Confederate forces tried to capture the Commonwealth of Kentucky.  A large table of course, but straightforward - nice unfussy terrain, lots of well-painted figures. In what became a common theme of the day, I omitted to find out what rules they were using.. 

Now possibly my favourite game of the day -  Messrs Metheringham and Miller's   "Rascals, would you live forever?” Kolin 1757    40mm Seven Years War battle.

 Loads of just beautiful  Prince August home-cast figures, lovely old-school style, it looked great! The 'Miller' in question was Simon Miller (in pale blue shirt, above) of To The Strongest renown, and it seems this was a giant playtest of a new set of rules for he is working on for horse and musket 'big battles', which he hopes to publish next year. Having just acquired quite a lot of 25mm Minifigs 7YW figures,  that sounds an interesting idea. Meanwhile, here's some rather lovely toy soldiers! 

 

..and note well-used casting tools

The Boondock Sayntes group can be relied upon to stage an impressive-looking game; this time they moved from their usual setting of India to Sudan, and presented a 28mm game, Gordon or Bust  :

 

 

the British are coming..

my compadre Dave spotted an intrepid boy reporter (from Belgium?) and his faithful dog, doing some eyewitness journalism from the Sudanese stronghold.. 

As you will have seen, 28mm scale seemed pretty dominant especially in the Demonstration Game zone,  but there were some honourable exceptions, including that of the Forest Outlaws and Kallistra's 6mm Napoleonic game Battle of Salamanca 1812  

The hexed terrain looked great, lucky they were being sponsored by Kallistra! And it looked like a 'proper battle' - I suspect that from the Napoleonic period onward, you really need 6mm to do that on a single table (albeit quite a big table still needed!).  I was impressed, and inspired to press on with my 6mm 1859 Risorgimento project..

    

 

 

Like a Stone Wall wargames group showed their Black Hawk Down  28mm 'Back of Beyond' game, Action at Badama Post, Afghanistan, 30 July 1919 as British forces try to rescue the crew of a crashed Bristol Fighter in rebel territory 

it's somewhere out there..

 

the cause of all the fuss.. 

hmm.. 'Keema' sounds a female name? 

Seven Years War fans like me were doing well, as the League of Extraordinary Kriegspielers put on The Battle of Leuthen 1757 in 28mm.

I liked the snowy scenery especially, and the figures were very nice indeed, rather slender and elegant  - not sure what make they are?  Splendid stuff, anyway.

 

Skirmish Wargames Collective brought us their 54mm Great Turkish War Siege of Vienna Skirmish featuring the famous Polish Winged Hussars  ( memories of the cover of the George Gush WRG rules, anyone? ) . The figures were quite spectacular. 

 

lovely figures, lovely painting 

Steve Jones  ( Steve's Painting Shed )  presented  an  AWI game of Breeds Hill   ( aka Bunker Hill ? ), using 28mm Perry figures and his home-brewed Bloodybacks rules, which are available on his blog page , if you're interested  ( btw from the blog I see Steve presented the impressive 6mm Wagram 1809  game at Partizan in May this year ). Anyway, another good-looking game:

and an eye-catching flotilla of ships in the harbour... 
 

                           

After spending (possibly too much?) time in the Demonstration Games zone, and stopping for a lunch break in the cafe, we finally reached the Participation Zone : but we were already running out of time, and some of the games were already starting to be packed away! So, a rather abbrieviated selection of games from this zone follows.. 

Nick Hindley presented 'Giant European Risk', which looked frankly rather eccentric, in a good way! 

general view..

Italy contested

Nick's QRS/rules 

Doncaster Gentlemen Gamers scored the second best game title ( runner-up to Orc's Drift ) with Dad's Army : The Seagull Has Landed  28mm WW2 1940 game

 

Caseshot Publishing can be relied upon to present a nice looking table, and on a manageable scale - this time 15mm  War of the First Coalition game,   Wellington at Leems Kuyle, Boxtel 1794  (billed as the 'Sepoy General's first command in Europe) , which I think was another scenario from Garry David Willis'  excellent Throwing Thunderbolts book. 

 

Doncaster Wargames Society  put on  Snoopy vs the Red Baron   WW1 Air Combat game - I really liked those ( printed MDF? ) aircraft, not sure who makes them and the guys were busy teaching the game to a very young girl 'pilot', so I didn't want to interrupt! 

 

Wargame Developments  brought their 'Alexander The Brief'  20mm Ancients game using Dominion Of The Spear rules ( or at least, one of the Dominion stable )  - having played the Pike and Shot and Bismarck versions, I wish there had been time to have a go at this! We did chat for a minute or two anyway - I think it was John Armatys ( left ) and is that Martin Rapier ?  I like his The Games We Play blog.  It was a nice presentation of these very simple but quite subtle rules, and I should give the ancients version a try, since I have DBA-size armies for Alexander and his Persian opponents. Also interesting to see the 'Lulu' printed versions of the booklets, which looked very nice, and probably worth investigating.   And they gave me a free copy of The Nugget.. 

 

Next door to the WD guys we had Northamptonshire Battlefields Society,  and member Chris Kemp running an Invasion of Crete 1941  operational level game with  his Not Quite Mechanised rules - the link being that the Northants Regiment was involved in the campaign.  Again, I really wished we'd had any time at all to join in with the game, but it was getting very late by now! 

Having previosuly seen (and rolled a few dice in) Chris' version of Monte Cassino at Partizan in May, I have a bit of an itch to maybe try these rules out, to play something in the Sicily 1943 area, perhaps? 
 

 And the very last gasp,  Blitzkrieg Miniatures  60mm scale Ancient Battles game Mighty Empires - Alexander again ( or his Successors ) vs Indians.  My picture probably doesn't do them justice, but Elephants in 60mm are very impressive!  

 

And that was all the games we saw!  Phew.  By this time there was about 15 minutes left to look at traders as they packed up, and as a result I bought nothing - I admit I had not made a shopping list in particular, but I probably would have bought something given a bit more time! I did try looking for an Osprey or similar book on the Hessians in the AWI ( thanks to  Dave Lanchester for some helpful hints, at least ), but had no luck.  We left the show on the very stroke of the 4pm closing time - by which time most games and traders where well-advanced in packing up  to leave. 

My thoughts on the day? Well, that could be summarised as 'it's great, but a bit too much to take in!'  There are a LOT of games, and really there are too many to see them all, if you want to devote a reasonable amount of time, chat to players and presenters etc.  We didn't see all the games by any means ( really only skimmed the Participation Zone and didn't even make it to the TooFatLardies 'LardZone'. Thinking about it, was it a mistake to try to see ALL the Demo games first? I do wonder if I should have spent some time before the show making a list of 'highlights' to see, or maybe done a very fast walk-round on first arriving, then going back to games that looked interesting? Maybe starting with the Participation Zone would be a good idea - the big Demo games look amazing, but I wonder of the 'Parti' games can actually be more inspiring, in that they tend to be a bit more like the sort of game you might manage to achieve at home?   On a more prosaic level, I should have got up earlier and arrived at 10:00 am  rather than 11:00 !  But it's more than 2 hours' drive, and it's a Sunday.. I know Postie's Rejects drive from even further away and get up about 4am, that's dedication!

Speaking of them, it was great to meet several gaming friends - Postie's Rejects (Ray, Big Lee, Richard, Postie and Steve ),  old friend Tony from Whitstable ( another long journey!),  and Neil Patterson  (who introduced us to Andy McMaster and Dillon Browne, nice to meet you in person, gents!).  However, the 'time pressure' thing applied there too.  I'm afriad I was all too aware of how many games I hadn't seen yet, and as result I didn't stick around for a longer chat with people - I feel rather bad about that. Hmmm.. some re-thinking required before attending the next large show like this?  Or just an attitude adjustment, don't worry about what you might be missing, stop for a chat, and just enjoy what you do see - there will never be enough time to see it all!   

I should say it was of course a really good day, anyway!  Thanks to 'the other Dave' for joining me too, and for putting me up that night at his place, where we had a good old chinwag over food and wine!  Also a big thank-you to 'Postie's Reject'  Richard ( see his excellent blog My Wargaming Habit ) who most generously gifted me a copy of  the 1st Edition Black Powder rulebook - many thanks indeed, Richard, that will be very useful indeed ( another option for the Minifigs 7YW/AWI collection, I think!).  So I didn't buy anything, but didn't come away empty handed. 

                                                 

Having not seen all the games, I can thoroughly recommend (as usual ) the brilliant reports by Ray 'Don't Throw a One' ( in two parts )  and Lee   'Big Lee's Miniature Adventures' - both with more games and more and much better pictures than mine - not sure how they do it, though I suppose the 4am start must help! 

Next Partizan is scheduled for May 2026 - I will hope to be there. Next show for me perhaps 'Warfare' at Farnborough next month?  Meanwhile, with some inspiration from this show, back to the gaming/painting/reading etc.   Next time, I think we still have some more vintage Minifigs to show.. Until then, keep well, everyone.