Warfare 2009: Reading

Vietnam PBR 15mm versus a 10/12mm model.

Today was spent at Warfare, a games show in Reading, which is rather good. I went to buy stuff, look at the tabletop terrain action, and hang with a couple of friends. Met up with Martin from Manchester, and Clive came over last night to travel down in the car with me today.

Like all good friends we chatted about our mutual obsessions including playing Contact!, which is a live role-playing game, or LARP, whichever floats your boat? Contact! It is best described as a full size one-to-one wargame that uses airsoft to simulate combat. No die rolling, just screams of "stop shooting at me I'm dead."

The plot of the game, can be loosely described as Stargate meets the X-Files, with various scenarios being generated from the consequences of the previous mission, which then creates the campaign in real time, so to speak. We've all had a lot of fun running around the wood at night hunting down, or being hunted by the bad guys.

Anyway, after looking around, and having a coffee, I got down to the serious buying that had to be done.

I went and made Martin at Peter Pig's day by buying a shed load of 15mm militia for AK47 Republic. I have this grandiose plan to run a three way game inspired by Blackhawk Down, with two warlord gang factions and a bunch of US Marines. Lots of technicals, RPGs and the like. 

After what Clive described as money pouring out of my iPod, which I had the list of things I wanted on it, I then we went to see the guys at Pendraken. However, I only came away with a few items, because they mostly bring army packs to shows. Even so WW1 tanks and stuff were bought, along with a Vietnam PBR, and a pack of their SF range tripods to try out for size. .

Great things iPods, as they are like Palms, but play music and do a shed load of stuff with third party apps. I use Momo for my lists, which makes keeping track of things you've bought, or want to buy quite easy.

I've been re-evaluating the game-scales I choose to buy, probably because as I get older I need glasses to see things, and while I love 6mm, 10/12mm is a lot easier to see what the figures are. Of course I could play just in 15mm, which I love, but I also love big action games. For me this is lots of figures.

Yes, I know that BattleTech is hardly the best set of rules for big action games, but I consider BattleTech to be a skirmish game between battlemechs (one can justify anything, if one tries hard enough).

So the picture at the  top compares a 15mm Vietnam PBR with a 10/12mm scale PBR (I use scale advisedly, because size is not a scale). The picture below is the smaller PBR on a piece of my river terrain. I quite like the look and feel of 10/12mm, and may well go down the Vietnam route in the future.

On the BattleTech front there was a heap load of books at the Bring & Buy. They had tables set out with stuff that pretty much occupied a whole hall at the show. I'm not a big Bring & Buy person, because I don't carry large amounts of cash around with me. 

I'm the kind of girl that likes to get her credit card out. I saw a whole bunch of stuff that was tempting, both BattleTech and other miniatures. However, all I ended up buying was a copy of the Comstar Sourcebook for £5.00, about $8.00 for my US readers, which I thought was a good deal, given it is in pretty fair condition. 

So much BattleTech happiness found, as I had been wanting to get hold of this for a while, and copies can go for a hell of a price on eBay.

After that, Clive and I went around looking at the games, and there were lots of them.

A Flames of War competition was also being run, so lots of WW2 action. Personally, I'm into the oddball stuff, so very early WW2 is fun, Spanish Civil War too (which is like Monty Python's Life of Brian for real), and other interwar periods have a charm that comes from seeing the people in command pioneering new technology on the battlefield.

Funnily enough I quite like Korea, Vietnam and the wars in the Third World too. Go figure? All I can say is that I have eclectic tastes.

Finally, while looking around the show I saw some really fabulous resin building from Fieldworks (no longer available), but you'll see mine I used for my Newten Town project.