Tag Archives: Salute

Salute 2018

The weekend before last I went to the 2018 Salute show in Excel in London. This is the only wargames show I regularly go to. I am now a member of the South London Warlords that puts the show on, though I have as yet played no part in organising it or helping on the day. Too much else going on in my life (which is also why this article is so late).

So much that I couldn’t stay long this year. I arrived at about 11am and stayed until about 1pm. It says a lot about the show that I could have stayed longer if I didn’t have other places to go! The show is big. This year it seemed bigger than ever. Certainly from the point of view of the trading stands, which increasingly seem to be the point of the show. The games did not look as numerous as previously. There were quite a few empty tables, gratefully seized by visitors as somewhere to sit down and have a rest or chat with friends. Star of the show was a replica WWI British tank, which you could peek inside of.

There was some spectacular games, which people had taken a lot of trouble to put on. But there were some rather underwhelming ones as well. Worst was a case where the intended English Civil War game could not be put on due to illness. Instead there was a WW2 demonstration that looked pretty dire even by the standards of a club night. The reason was clear enough, but I’m not sure I would have put anything on in those circumstances. I didn’t like a couple of others more due to my personal taste. One was a Battle of Tewkesbury (1471) game. The board was small but, even then the small scale figures only took up a small part of it. The terrain was an abstract expanse of pale green base, with some darker bits to represent wooded areas. As it happens I had visited the Tewkesbury battle site over Easter (on Easter Sunday in fact). It is claustrophobic, dominated hedges, rolling ground, with streams and lanes and the general shape of the ground playing an important role in how the day played out. The recreation conveyed none of that – and the armies looked much to small in relation to the ground. The lesson there: I don’t want to do a historical game that is presented so abstractly that the historical feel is completely lost. And if you are using small scale figures, the role played by terrain matters more to the overall presentation. It would, of course, have been very hard work to put together the complex system of hedges and lanes and streams that make up the Tewkesbury battlefield – but it has the potential to be visually stunning. Although the area now is currently ruined by new developments, it shouldn’t be too hard to get close to original layout. Field systems stay much the same until modern bulldozers flatten them – as can be seen from the fraction of the field that has survived, which has changed little. Besides the battle is much studied and I expect somebody else has done the hard work already.

A second battle I found underwhelming, or at any rate demonstrating a direction I don’t want to go in, was a recreation of Aspern-Essling (1809). It used hex based terrain system and 28mm figures. The villages were represented by large building models, with one model making up a small village, and units were small groups of figures in rather loose formation. This is the danger of these popular large scales. The effort goes into doing up the miniatures and buildings to look good as individuals, but the effort required for doing large numbers is too much. The effect en masse is dire. It looked nothing like a big Napoleonic battle with dense masses of troops confronting each other in villages with streets. I don’t think the hex-based system used helped either. Whether I can achieve what I want to with 15mm Napoleonic figures on a large scale remains an unanswered question.

One good-looking table was presented on a WW2 1943 theme – featuring 20mm scale figures and aircraft in a Mediterranean setting (the battle for Leros 1943). I think it was showcasing Battlegroup rules (more of which later). But after a couple of passes I realised that nothing was actually moving. It was diorama and not a game. I remember the same thing last year with a 1941 desert war “game” to coincide with Battlegroup Tobruk. I don’t really approve, but the presentation did succeed in drawing observers in, so I’m sure there’s something to be learned from it.

Part of my purpose for the day was to get inspiration. I’m afraid, though there were some attractive games, it was mostly showing me what not to do. My tastes are rather out of kilter with the rest of the wargaming community – and so far I have failed to put on anything that demonstrates the sorts of things I want to see.

Apart from inspiration there was shopping. Here things went better. I resisted the temptation to buy models or figures (there is too much unpainted stuff at home), or books on history (too many unread ones). Instead my books were squarely focused on wargames projects. First I bought the newly published Battlegroup Torch. I am less than convinced by the Battlegroup rules themselves, though they have quite bit going for them. But their author, Warwick Kinrade, does a wonderful job of historical research and works much harder than most to create an authentic feel. I have his books on Kursk and Normandy because these were the closest I could get to the 1943 Mediterranean theme. I let the 1941 Tobruk book go; this early desert war is far too far away from what I’m looking at. But this new book starts with the various battles of El Alamein in 1942, when more modern weapons started to play a role. Better still it includes Tunisia, which is one of the three campaigns that I am particularly focusing on (Tunisia, Sicily and Salerno). I have read it, and I’m not disappointed. So much better than the rather lightweight Bolt Action book I bought last year on the Mediterranean campaigns. I do hope Warwick gets on to Italy. It is promising that he says that Tunisia proved much more interesting that he thought it would be. Indeed so. The terrain is quite different form the desert, which has never attracted me for tabletop battles, and there is an interesting array of troops and weapons, with hard fighting on both sides.

Still on the WW2 theme I bought some Iron Cross rules, which I’d been encouraged to try after a magazine article. These might well work well on a club night, where my friends have come into a stash of WW2 20mm models and are taking an interest. They are a bit simplistic in places, but actually look very interesting. Alas I can see that no WW2 rules will meet my tastes, and that I will be writing my own. Not yet though.

I also bought a couple of books for Napoleonics. I am trying to think of ways I can get my metal into club games (though the main problem for now is that the basing is all over the place and they don’t look good enough). I looked at two options. One was a new divisional game: Over the Hills. This looks quite interesting and easy to play – I saw encouraging reviews on TMP, though the reviewers also said they were poorly written. On a quick review I can see what they mean. But they are still full of a lot of the tropes that affect most wargames at this level. Built up areas are treated much like individual buildings – which fails to capture the flavour of street fighting. Squares are vulnerable to infantry attacks (more vulnerable, at first glance, than catching a line in the flank). The soldiers of Bachelu’s division at Waterloo might beg to differ. Still the treatment of skirmishers is rather better than many, and I need to give them a proper chance. I will give a proper review another time.

And finally I bought a scenario book for Chris Pringle’s Bloody Big Battles. This is post-Napoleonic but I’m thinking of trying BBB on a club night, as another option. One of the big problems with club games is creating interesting scenarios, and Chris has a gift for turning historical scenarios into interesting wargames. I’m hoping I can do something with these (and the Franco Prussian War ones in the rule book). Since BBB is the closest current system to the rules I am trying to put together myself, I’m sure there is much to learned from this. I am trying to resist the magnetic attraction of putting together yet more armies to run some of these scenarios in their intended format…

Reflections from Salute 2016

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.