Yesterday I went to Britain’s foremost wargaming show: Salute, by South London Warlords. As it happens I joined the Warlords a couple of months ago – so I might have been one of the team of helpers. However I decided that I could put aside my other commitments for a day and turn up only a week ago.
Salute is held in Excel in London’s dockland district, to the east, not far from City Airport. It is massive and rather overwhelming. I have been going for a number years, off and on. My impression this time was that there were fewer games, but more commercial stands selling things. I’m sure the second of those is true, but the first may be an optical illusion. Most of the crowds were around the stands rather than the games. People largely came to look at and buy stuff. We may buy mostly online, but you can’t beat the physical presence, I guess.
And the show covers the whole range of the hobby. That means a lot of fantasy and science fiction games. I’m not keen on these personally, but it is drawing younger people into the hobby, and there is quite a bit of crossover and symbiosis. So I’m not complaining. Some of the fantasy games had quite a following – queues at some of the stands.
As to the games, there weren’t that many of the historical sort. My interests now extend to postwar armour battles (I hesitate to use the word “modern” since the 1980s seems to be a popular time point to represent, with two games at the show), and World War 2, as well as Napoleonic, with sidelines in early 18th C (Great Northern War in particular) and Bismarck’s wars in the mid-19th C. There was a scattering of Napoleonic games (but not including the currently popular Blücher rules), in 15mm, 28mm and 54mm, but many fewer than previous years. Likewise with WW2. Little or nothing on early 18C (not actually ever well represented at this event) or 19th C – I saw an ACW game, and one colonial one. Looking at the directory, somehow I missed a Königgrätz game.There were some references to Garibaldi’s uprising, but not a proper game that I could see. In addition there was at least one Seven Years War game. Much more popular were the various flavours of fantasy and sci-fi, often played on quite small areas – no doubt in response to often limited space that people have to play in.
Thin pickings, but enough to help me with some ideas as I ponder my future direction in the hobby. What I don’t want to do is what I saw quite a bit of: tables packed with model soldiers lined up for a slugfest. This is really just an excuse to display and use lovingly collected models, leaving little opportunity for a proper test of tactical skills or appreciation of historical dynamics. I want a game where the terrain is a star, and shapes tactical choices, rather than being dealt in a abstract and secondary way, as seems to be the case so often. As ever, Bruce Weigle comes to mind, though not necessarily with the huge effort he takes to put together his playing tables. This puts the challenge onto scenario design. One challenge in the shorter term is how to create interesting games, say using Blücher, for a club night, using the club’s standard terrain pieces, that can be put up and taken down in 10-15 minutes.
This leaves me not much further forward in terms of Napoleonics. Except that I am haunted by the thought that 15mm doesn’t really work – and that I should be in 6mm. That anyway is my conclusion for postwar armour games, which is were it is easiest to find games at the club at the moment. I am thinking of putting together a couple of 1980s/1990s armies in micro-scale (probably the GHQ 1/285 – the Heroics 1/300 items on display didn’t quite pass muster for me, except the aircraft). Of course such armies should be quick to build. But the smaller models undoubtedly work much better on the tabletop too.
Meantime I am struggling with similar issues for WW2, which I am also tempted to reenter after leaving it aside as a teenager (I still have some of my Airfix figures and tanks in the attic). I love the look of 15mm models (and I have a handful of US M10 tank destroyers from a free offer). But I have nagging doubts. Interestingly a couple of players at the club have put on good looking WW2 games in 15mm, using the same rules as we are on micro armour (a Fistful of TOWs 3 – a horrid name!). They populated their table with a lot of terrain items (hedges, woods, buildings), which is surely the way to go. But, as with the Napoleonics, the temptation is to put too many troops on the table. We even do that with our micro armour!
I made a number of purchases. The most interesting is an English translation of Pelet’s memoir on the French campaign in Portugal in 1810-11. I had heard of this because it has some important descriptions of the battle of Bussaco. Histories of the Peninsular War are dominated by British accounts, who tend to ram encounters between the French and British infantry into a rather formulaic narrative, revolving around French columns being taken apart by British lines. This formula has its roots in contemporary British accounts – it was refined but not invented by later historians. French accounts are few, but not constrained by this formula, and so offer fresh perspective. In Pelet’s case he, apparently, suggests that encounters between rival skirmishers played a much more important role than is suggested by British accounts. It will be interesting to see if this emerges from this book, and what other insights might come out.
I also bought a new book the battle of Barossa; I haven’t read reviews of the book, and I don’t know the authors. The quality of much recent historical writing is not good, so my expectations are not high: but it is an interesting battle, and under researched , so this looked worth a shot at half price. An even more speculative, but cheap, purchase was a paperback version of WW2 German General Raus’s account of tank fighting on the Eastern Front. This had been recommended as a friend. As I am inexorably drawn back into the period, this might offer me some insights into tactics.
Other stuff I bought included static grass basing materials, in various colours. I have a lot of base decoration to do, especially on my French units. I’m not short of materials, but the static grass I have is a bit long, so I went for shorter material, some of which may be useful for 6mm. I bought some beige, or “dead”, coloured grass, thinking to mix this in to reduce the intense greens of standard materials. Finally I could not resist buying some more dice: a box of D10s, and a couple of packs of 7mm D6s. D10s are quite popular in many rules systems, and I only have four. I may start bringing tem into my systems, perhaps as markers, so I though it useful to have a few at hand. The small 7mm dice might be useful as markers.
However, wargames is going to have a back seat in my priorities until the summer. I will invest available time mainly in the club, slowly building on my contacts there, and understanding what works best in this format. I had forgotten how much fun this sort wargaming is, so absorbed have I been by the historical side. I have much to learn.