Warfare 2012: Reading

 

Another Warfare show, and I felt a very good one this year with a good selection of games and traders to buy stuff off. No one was grumbling. My plans involved giving Jon at GZG some Hound Dogs that I had reworked so he could cast them up, if he felt that they were good enough? Expect variant models to be added to the range, and you heard it here first.

Jon very kindly said nice things about them, and I reassured him that it didn't matter to me if he had to cut them up to mould them. I got given a box with two Takara F144 VOTOMS as a present, so Xmas sometimes really does come early! I was really pleased as the two models were ones I don't have. I will post pictures when I have assembled them in due course.

I also saw these rather nice grav sleds with lots of gribley detail. I'm not a big fan of anti-grav stuff, as I think it is the technological equivalent of magic, but these look very nice. Also spotted in passing were these rather lovely WW1 aircraft on offer from Skytrek. Couldn't afford to buy them, or at least buy them and then have to make and paint them. No wonder Wings of War/Glory sell so well.

Then Timecast blew me away, and got me to open my purse, with their new 10mm Vietnam riverine monitor range, which I was told was specifically made to fit with Pendraken figures. I was going to make some masters of these monitors for Pendraken, but there is no way I could make anything better, so I've given up on that idea.

I bought the command and control boat, which is the third from the left. I really wanted to buy a whole bunch of these, but my budget is tight, and buying six more would have been too extravagant a purchase at this time. So my plan is to buy one each time I go to a show where Timecast are trading. The added bonus for me was that I could see me using this for my Mummerset campaign too. Oh yes, I will have to write a post on riverine operations for the blog now.

I also bought some paint, and got a show deal on six bottles for six pounds. I also bought some D4s and D20s for the next Mummerset game, as I only had one of each at the last game, and using dice for missile allocation is just so much quicker than reading off a table. Also, while perusing the stands, one of the traders had some cheap Takara 1/144 tanks, so I bought a German Porsche Tiger for parts. Big spender me.

Moving on to the games I saw.

First off was the Spectrum versus the Mysterons game called Scarlet Thunder - Road race with Violence. Dum, dum, dum... I spoke John and Peter  from South London Warlords, as I've known them both for many years. It was good to catch up and have a chat.

Lots of lovely toys on a rolling terrain table, which I thought was a nice homage to the original Gerry Anderson shows that used rolling roads for their car chases. I talked to Peter about the toys, and stuff from Konami, and a super 1/50th scale Terror Fish kit he had found. John, was looking a lot slimmer from having had major surgery. Good to see him in fine form though.
 
Another SF game that caught my eye was from the RAF Wargaming Association called "Blinkin' Cakewalk" they said!

Very nice work on the terrain for this game, and much fun was being had with opening and closing doors to escape the opposition. Next, was Space Vixens from Mars, run by Gary Mitchell as part of the Southbourne Tabletop & Board Games society. A busy table with lots going on.

 

Spent sometime talking to Gary, who is the author of the Dark Horizons column in Miniature Wargames. He is also a member of the SFSFW, which I have shockingly allowed my membership of to lapse, and me being one of the founder members on the original committee and all. Anyway, Gary made some kind comments about my review of Firestorm Armada Planetfall by Spartan Games that appeared in Battlegames issue number 32.

So, a nice show, which is well worth visiting. I was there for five hours and still didn't get to see all the games as I started to flake out and needed to drive home.