Welcome to my blog, the story of my continuing journey into the World of Zombie Wargames.

Monday 7 September 2015

Border Reiver 2015

Great pre-dreadnought game.
I attended the Border Reiver 2015 wargames show last week-end, quite a rarity for me as I haven't attended a show for about three year's now due to many reasons. health, wealth etc.
Overall it was a very enjoyable departure from my normal Saturday and I met up with many old 'friends' (only a few of whom "blanked" me). The atmosphere of the venue was what I'd normally expect from a show, lots of friendly folk willing to chat about their games and traders showing off their wares.



Pegasus Bridge game in 28mm
 Of the current 'new' stuff, I was particularly taken by the resin pre-dreadnought models available from "Old Glory" and not too many years ago I would certainly have bought up fleets of these even though I'm pretty crap at naval wargames.
As with a lot of 'sports hall' venues the lighting was poor for photographs, which coupled with my photography skills (zero) made taking snaps that much more difficult. I've consequently cropped and enhanced my photographs to attempt to alleviate the dark yellowish hue that plagued most of the pictures I took.
Wild -west game with card buildings
Warhammer 40k ?
There were a lot of small-scale skirmish type games on as well as the big-battalions games and few participation games.
Erm....
Large scale 28mm (?) ACW
The games themselves were very varied, which is a good thing imo and covered just about every historical (and some fantasy) period, and scale of figures though ancients seemed to not be in fashion.






6mm Waterloo

Football-type stands in the foreground!
My mate Stu showed off his vast  amount of fantasy terrain that he's been working on for what seems like forever. You can see his stuff on "Captain Jack's Locker" on FB.
Is a smorgasbord of fantasy buildings showing  off his many variants on "Bloodbowl" type games (including one on that, as yet, unfinished ship!)
The other end of his terrain
WWII
Modern and WW2 warfare was well represented in both smaller scales (as in the game on the left) and larger scales (1/32 ?) as in the participation Tiger hunt game.- below.
Though who was meant to be hunting who was open to debate.






Spot the Tiger

Four against one- seems fair.
 The 'hunters' or possibly the hunted at the other end of the table.









Another well presented modern game



Naval game
There were only a couple of 'static' games like my mate's Stu's  (above) but I did note that most that were actively being played suffered from the detritus of dice, tapes, cards, rules etc littering their table  as I'm sure all our own games do. (Though there were some exceptions as in the modern game above<




Aerial game - Snoopy versus Angry Birds ?

Zulu war game in 28mm
Coupled with the my mostly disastrous attempts to capture the games digitally , in my excitement  at being at a wargame show I also forgot to note which club/group was putting on which game ! Sorry for all that.
There are a number of other blogs out there though (that also have much better photogrpahs I'm sure)  that do give credit to those putting the games on.

Batman! (10 brownie points if you can spot him)

Have you spotted him yet?
 One of the games I was most impressed with (probably for what would be considered by some to be all the wrong reasons) was a Batman game .
So what impressed me about this ?
Was it the terrain, figures or the rules ?
It was actually none of these, but rather it was the enthusiasm the players (two guys and two younger lads) had for their game.
I chatted to Ian, whom I took to be the organiser of the game for some time  and couldn't help but be impressed.
You can stop looking, he's not in this shot.
I think they did an excellent job on what was their first ever demonstration game that they'd only recently decided to 'put on'. 
 Unlike many of the other games this game seemed to have a lot of the punters around it all the time I was at the show, so they must have been doing something right!
Unsurprisingly, like most of the groups and individuals putting on shows these chaps from (Ashington) were within spitting distance of where I live, but to me what was surprising was the number of such groups, which I'm guessing was at least a dozen.



So all in all it was a good day out, shooting the breeze with like-minded people made a great change, but I can almost here the plaintiff cries of "What about the loot?". Well, I did buy some figures, a bag of Gripping Beast Anglo Saxons, that were not for myself alas, but were for my #1 son's Saga game, as a thank-you for chaperoning me throughout the day !

Next week it'll be back to normal with some new boring card-board stuff I've been working on ! 

(I've also posted the last of my big-cats post on my other blog, HERE  - just in case anyone is vaguely interested)

18 comments:

  1. Looks like a good show with lots of games that would interest me. A special mention for the 6mm Waterloo as that really does float my boat!

    Did not look for Batman. I would be cheering for the Joker though!

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    1. I was impressed with the 6mm Nap. too (as with many of the other games).

      As for Batman, I've always been a fan of the original Penguin, when Adam West was batman !.

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  2. Hi Joe, yes it wasn't a bad show. Good to see you again although I wasn't at my best health wise.

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    1. Hey Colin, I've been to a lot worse shows. I did notice your newly aquired accoutrement - not very flattering. I too went through a bad pattch earlier this year, it's no fun getting older.

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    2. Thanks Joe. I guess I don't think of myself as that old yet but at least I got to retire 8 yrs early.........and the mind-altering opiates can be fun. Lol

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    3. Compared to myself you're not old! I know only too well anout the effects drugs have had on mymind too.

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  3. Thanks mate, well done for the report.

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  4. I'm glad to read that you were able to get to a show; hoping to get to Colours myself this weekend, but it's looking doubtful :(

    I think that the pic titled 'Erm...' is a game of Pendraken's new fantasy rules - Warband

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    1. It's a nice change me getting to a show, even if I was never a regualr attendee of any but the most local ones. You're probably correct about the "Erm" game, is was opposite the Pendraken stand too iirc.

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  5. It's nice to get out once in a while, isn't it :-) ? Pre-dreadnoughts are on my "wouldn't it be nice..." list (along with samurai and pirates), though I can't imagine that I'll ever do anything about it.

    Mind you, I thought it came across as if you're a bit despondent about this and other things. Am I misreading this?

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    1. I know exactly what you mean by the "wouldn't it be nice..."-type thoughts that can precede another imminent project as I often think along those lines too. The reality though is that unless it's put on a plate in front of me then I doubt very much if I'll ever get around to anything really new, so I guess you've partially correct in that there is a bit of despondency creeping into the way I think these days.

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  6. Nice load of pictures Joe. Good to hear you had a great day out!

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    1. Thanks Bob, it really isn't that often that I get "out and about" to talk wrgames with old friends

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  7. It's great to see you got to go to a show! Do you have any idea about what kind of rules did the Afghanistan moderns game use?

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    1. It was a really good day out, pity you couldn't have made it too.
      The Afgan game (IIRC) was using Bolt action and I did have a bit of a chat with the guys about the rules and whether or not they'd considered using Chain of Command as both sets seem to have their supporters.
      I did find a very interesting blog post though giving a thorough comparison on the two sets.

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