Warfare.. 2008

Just back from a truly splendid day at the Warfare show in Reading (ie. the show was splendid rather than the actual day, the weather for which was rubbish - cold winds and sleety rain!)

Warfare is a small'ish show when compared to Salute & Colours, but they still had approximately 70 traders there this weekend, a lot of happy people spending money (what credit crisis?!), some demo and participation games, but the raison d'etre for the show are the competitions (which I'm not really interested in though I notice that they still have a WRG 6t Edition competition - any list - and in 25mm! Now that's old school...)

From a purchases point of view the show was also a significant personal success - I managed to find everything on my list!

First off were the 'makings' for two regiments of foot for the War of the Spanish Succession from that new range of figures by Black Hat - I'd pre-ordered these so the first stop was to go and pick them up. A quick look through the box last night confirmed me in my view that these are going to make cracking little regiments, can't wait to get the paintbrushes out!

While I was there I also picked up some bottles of the new Coat d'Arms Super Shader which were mentioned on the Miniatures Page the other week. Super Shader is an acrylic version of the new army painter dip system. They are supposed to produce highlighting and shading when painted over a simply block painted figures and certainly the examples I've seen look good - I'm looking forward to trying it. Best thing is that being acrylic you can clean your brushes with water. I'm happy with blacks and brown's I've already got, so for a change I bought red/green/blue and yellow....

Next stop was Peter Pig to get some British Cavalry for the Sudan - these are to complete the unit that I showed pictures of a couple of posts ago. I picked up two bags of these as I already have enough dismounted cavalry and horse holders to make an additional troop, and this will give me enough mounted figures to finish the first unit, and provide mounted figures for the second unit...

Last stop was the Caliver stand to pick up some Vallejo "Wookstain" ink (yes it is called that on the label!), and I was done... a very successful day, with some money left over for incidentals and bargains. Being the second day of the show of course there weren't very many bargains to be had - the bring and buy had been well picked over, but I got a few more little 6mm dice for Blitzkrieg Commander (handy for tracking casualties) from EM4. I also pondered long and hard about a 15mm coach from Essex, suitable for my 15mm WSS Generals to receive their captured opponents in, but decided to wait in the end as I don't have enough victories to warrant the expense.... 

With that it was time to go and browse the games... Given this is primarily a competition event there weren't too many of these, but there were three "stand-out's":

In third place (and only because I'd seen it before) the guys from the GLC Games Club had brought along their "Battle of the Clouds" hypothetical American War of Independence game that I last saw at Salute in April - see the following as a reminder (click on any of the pictures following for a bigger view):

In second place was a game that I wouldn't normally have picked but it just looked really good.. it didn't have a name, but was a WWI game in 10mm using "Day of Battle", WW1 Corps Level, rules:


The aircraft made it for me.. lovely!

In first place however was a 28mm game put on by a group called the "Escape Committee". This was set in the Russo-Japanese War (1939), and represented a heavy skirmish somewhere on the border - lovely models and a clever use of the teddy bear fur...



I thought the little resin dice holders which you can see in the following were excellent - must get some!