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)