Border Reiver 2025 - A Very Truncated Show Report

A couple of weeks' ago, I was able to pop in to the Border Reiver show in Gateshead. I had been busy doing something else hobby related, of which more anon, so I was only able to get in towards the end of the show. Border Reiver isn't a particularly big or busy show, and by the time I got there (about 1345)  - which took a bit longer than it might, the roadworks around Gateshead are a bit confusing - there was only an hour and a bit before the end, so it was definitely on the quiet side (although outside wasn't particularly quiet - there was a Women's Soccer League match on at the same time! - Howay the Lasses!)

The first game I saw was just being packed away - pike and elephants always give a hint of Raphia!

The details of this one have totally escaped me, I'm afraid. Looked good though.

A FPW game; BBB continues its long march through the "big battle, modest table" institutions of C19 wargaming...

Some kind of SF (possibly VSF) flying game

A very nice, wintry WW2 game; Chain of Command, I think

Warmaster! Very nice-looking game. Makes me wonder why I don't see more Warmaster games, given how influential it seems to have been

A great WH40K scene; the models were really nice, the guy said it had been one of his lockdown projects, to make the terrain look great

A big WW1 aerial game, with British fighters intercepting the German Gotha bombers.

Glorious-looking Gothas. They are big things!

A game company show case, with really nice volcanic terrain - there are little lights in the crevices to provide the glowing effect: it was genuinely awesome, well done them. I can't recall the name of the game, although I think it began with Chrono-.

At that point I ran out of charge, so I didn't get to take pictures of many other games, although since most of the games and traders were packing up by this point, I guess that doesn't matter too much. I missed taking some shots of a really big Punic Wars game, which was a shame. One of the guys was showing me some of the Fernando Enterprises painted figures they were using, they did look really nice, so if you were thinking of sending some figures off to Sri Lanka, I guess that is some evidence you should do so with confidence.  

I was then at that slightly difficult moment of whether to ask traders if I could look at/buy stuff whilst they were packing up (this was about 1430). I did it a couple of times, and people were fine, but I got a bit less confident as the packing up intensified, so I bought a very nice cake (Border Reiver has the best cake stall!!) and then left. I have been to shows near the end before, so I do get it, but I wonder what I would have made of it if this had been my first show. Anyway, I guess I can spend my pocket money at the Other Partizan instead. Everyone who I did talk to was very friendly, and I got a good rundown on some of the games, including plenty more praise for Bloody Big Battles.
 

Generative AI and Wargames' Scenario Generation

 I was very interested to read Norm Smith's latest blogplost on 'Battlefields and Warriors' on generative AI within gaming, specifically in terms of scenario generation, 'The Impacts of AI'. To make sense of my post, it will definitely be worth your while to read his first. 

 

The central claim is that generative AI does not really create, but it basically just steals stuff and reformats it.  This felt testable, so I have had a go, but before I link to the results, I held a few things in mind:

 

If I were asked, even if just asked myself, to create a Wars of the Roses scenario, to what degree would I fall back on things which I had read and then slightly re-package them? How would I come up with a creative solution which wasn't also a very unlikely scenario i.e. the scenario had to be both creatively different but also highly plausible? What, in terms of generating non-historical scenarios for historical miniatures games, would I consider to be sufficiently different to be not merely copying? In Norm's test, the differences between his own internet-published games and the AI-generated scenario, seem to be minimal (he didn't link to his own scenario directly)...what would happen when I tried it? In short, I would try to apply the same standard of judgement to AI behaviour and performance as I would to human behaviour and performance.

 

The results are here. Essentially, I asked the LLM (ChatGPT5 - Thinking mode) to create three scenarios. I have included the prompts I used, but to summarize:

 

Scenario One - a Wars of the Roses scenario for about 5000 combatants per side, each with a roughly even chance of winning.

 

Scenario Two - a scenario appropriate for Norm's own Piggy Longton campaign.

 

Scenario Three - a Wars of the Roses scenario, no further guidance. 

 

And then I posted them up as a page on this blog, with no changes and some very light formatting.

 

I am no expert on The Wars of the Roses. I would say I have more than a passing acquaintance, but no expertise at all, so I don't know if these scenarios are minimally repackaged historical battles - there are no battles immediately springing to mind. I also don't know if they are repackaged human-written and published scenarios, although again, nothing immediately sprang to mind, but my knowledge is even more limited here. So, if anyone can see through a thinly disguised historial or imaginative scenario please let me know! The challenge, to be clear, is not to find points of contact, it is to find something which has been basically been copied and very minimally changed - i.e. if a human had written it, you would have considered that human had copied it.

 

Disclaimer: I don't use AI to generate the scenarios I play personally.

Planning Armies: 6mm War of the Spanish Succession

Quite a niche post follows, even by my own low standards! It is about miniature army planning and scope - including scope creep...it might be of some mild interest to that tiny subset of gamers who are currently pondering the War of the Spanish Succession in 6mm; or perhaps, slightly more widely, gamers thinking about new horse-and-musket armies more generally

 

Model manufacturers are probably well aware of this, but it is definitely true that nice figures and models will help to persuade us to buy more than we might have planned. My 6mm War of the Spanish Succession collection is a case in point. The original scope of the project was quite tight: it was to be a 'tabletop teaser'-type force, with two armies, each just large enough to refight all the sources of 'Tabletop Teaser' type scenarios I possess. That amounts to, more-or-less, the Tabletop Teaser series in Battlegames magazine; Grant and Asquith's 'Scenarios for All Ages'; Grant's 'Programmed Wargames Scenarios'; and Neil Thomas' scenarios in One-Hour Wargames. And, in terms of playing, this is more-or-less exactly what has happened. Roughly speaking, the following forces will cover you for all of this:

 

BLUE FORCES:

4 units of Artillery

1 unit of Light Artillery  

1 unit of Engineers

3 units of Heavy Cavalry

3 units of Medium Cavalry 

3 units of Light Cavalry 

2 units of Elite Infantry 

3 units of Light Infantry

10 units of Line Infantry

 

RED FORCES:

3 units of Artillery

1 unit of Light Artillery  

1 unit of Engineers

3 units of Heavy Cavalry

3 units of Medium Cavalry 

2 units of Light Cavalry 

1 units of Elite Infantry 

3 units of Light Infantry

9 units of Line Infantry

 

1 Pontoon Train 

4 Supply wagons 

 

So this was my target. And it was achieved quite easily. I themed the 'Blue Force' as French, but with a very high proportion of foreign units, especially Irish. The 'Red Force' was themed as British, with as high a proportion of Scottish units as could make sense. The rationale for the above was using them as the regular troops involved in the various Jacobite rebellions, as well as for the generic Horse and Musket scenarios.

 

But, it turned out that efficiency be damned, I really, really liked painting WSS figures!  So The Red forces also got a brigade of Dutch Foot (which were Scottish), and another brigade of Dutch Foot (which were French), the French got a couple of Spanish units too (mainly Irish regiments). The Manchester Regiment, The Royal Ecossais and various Jacobite units were also done as if they had been raised for the '15 rather than the '45. You get the idea. As the armies expanded, I looked to the couple of sets of rules I had for the WSS which included army lists to give an indication of what a reasonable-sized complete army might look like.

 

Firstly, the army lists in Horse, Foot and Guns:

 

The Imperialist Army: 1 x Headquarters, 1 x Command Post, 5 x Cuirassiers, 2 x Dragoons, 1 x Hussars, 28 x Infantry, 1 x Field Artillery, 1 x Heavy Artillery 

 

The Anglo-Dutch Army: 2 x Command Posts, 11 x Horse (3 x Dutch, 2 x British, 2 x Danish, 4 x German), 9 x Dragoons, 2 x Guard Infantry (1 x Dutch, 1 x British), 3 x Grenadiers, 49 x Infantry (15 x Dutch, 12 x British, 2 x Danish, 4 x Prussian, 16 x German), 7 x Field Artillery, 2 x Heavy Artillery. (n.b. The British Horse become Cuirassiers in the middle of the war).

 

The Franco-Bavarian Army: 1 x Headquarters, 1 x Command Post, 2 x Elite Horse (1 x French, 1 x Bavarian Cuirassiers), 6 x Horse, 8 x Dragoons, 4 x Guard Infantry (3 x French, 1 x Bavarian), 2 x Grenadiers (1 x French, 1 x Bavarian), 39 x Infantry (34 x French, 5 x Bavarian), 7 x Field Artillery, 1 x Heavy Artillery (n.b. I don't think there can be strong objections to replacing some French units with Spanish, to taste)

 

There were a few surprising things in there to me: the lack of Imperialist artillery, and the preponderance of Foot over Horse were perhaps the most obvious. Grenadiers don't seem to have played quite as big a part in the WSS as these figures imply. In any case, these armies did represent a significant expansion over my originals! However, I am nearly there for the Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Bavarians, I think I am only missing some of the German Foot for the former, and some of the French Foot for the latter.  

 

The other set of army lists I have for the WSS are those in the 1e of the Polemos WSS rules.  They imply much bigger forces, big armies by anyone's standards, even in 6mm:

 

Ansbach (1 Foot, 2 Dragoons)

Austria (36 Foot, 28 Horse/Cuirassiers, 11 Dragoons, 4 Field Guns, 8 Light Guns) 

Bavarian (12 Foot, 13 Horse/Cuirassiers 1 Field Gun, 2 Light Guns) + 2 Guard Horse 

Cologne (3 Foot, 3 Horse, 2 Dragoons)

Denmark (13 Foot, 8 Horse, 3 Dragoons)

France (67 Foot, 45 Horse, 11 Dragoons, 2 Hussars, 8 Field Guns, 10 Light Guns, 4 Siege Guns) 

Franconia (3 Cuirassiers, 2 Dragoons)

Hanover (13 Foot, 6 Horse, 6 Dragoons, 2 Field Guns, 4 Light Guns)

Hesse (7 Foot, 5 Horse, 3 Dragoons)

Holland (21 Foot, 22 Horse, 6 Dragoons, 1 Field Gun, 4 Light Guns)

Holstein (2 Foot, 1 Cuirassier, 4 Dragoons)

Ireland (4 Foot, 2 Horse)

Italy (1 Horse)

Mainz (2 Dragoons)

Mecklenburg (1 Cuirassier, 1 Dragoon)

Munster (3 Foot, 1 Horse)

Upper Reich (Oberreich) (8 Foot, 2 Horse)

Palatinate (10 Foot, 6 Horse)

Portugal (9 Foot, 12 Horse, 1 Field Gun, 2 Light Guns)

Prussia (14 Foot, 5 Horse, 4 Dragoons)

Savoy (10 Foot, 4 Horse, 3 Dragoons, 1 Field Gun, 3 Light Guns)

Saxe-Gotha (1 Cuirassier, 3 Dragoons)

Scotland (4 Foot), 

Spain (11 Foot, 16 Horse, 5 Dragoons, 2 Field Guns, 3 Light Guns),  

Swabia (2 Cuirassiers, 2 Horse, 1 Dragoon), 

Switzerland (4 Foot), 

Britain (18 Foot, 6 Horse, 3 Dragoons, 2 Field Guns, 3 Light Guns),  

Walloon (4 Foot), 

Westphalia (2 Horse), 

Wurttemberg (3 Foot, 1 Horse, 1 Dragoons), 

Wurzburg (2 Dragoons), 

[Allied artillery totals (12 Field guns, 18 light guns)]

 

(the bold is just to indicate the larger contingents involved)

  

So I have enough units to paint for a very long time, if I want my games to be accurate to the individual facing colour level. This is not however what Heretical Gaming is all about! So my actual target has evolved into having sufficient forces for the HFG lists, plus functional extras as they come up (so a few units of Spanish Horse for Almanza say). 

 

The other way to approach this would be to look at the overall forces one would need for the battles listed in the ruleset, viz.:

 

Chiari 1701: 

Imperials: 27 bases Cuirassiers, 36 bases Foot, 9 bases Dragoons, 4 bases Field Artillery, 8 bases Light Artillery 

French: 34 bases Horse, 66 bases Foot, 5 bases Dragoons, 5 bases Field Artillery, 10 bases Light Artillery  

Luzzara 1702: 

Imperials: 28 bases Horse, 35 bases Foot, 12 bases Dragoons, 3 bases Field Artillery, 5 bases Light Artillery 

French: 31 bases Horse, 39 bases Foot, 14 bases Dragoons, 4 bases Field Artillery, 6 bases Light Artillery  

Speyerbach 1703: 

Allies:13 bases Horse, 30 bases Foot, 6 bases Dragoons, 2 bases Field Artillery, 4 bases Light Artillery French:17 bases Horse, 27 bases Foot, 3 bases Dragoons, 2 bases Field Artillery, 4 bases Light Artillery  

 

Blenheim 1704: 

Allies: 26 bases Horse, 43 bases Foot, 16 bases Dragoons, 2 bases Field Artillery, 7 bases Light Artillery Imperials: 20 bases Cuirassiers, 10 bases Horse, 21 bases Foot, 19 bases Dragoons, 2 bases Field Artillery, 3 bases Light Artillery 

French: 11 bases Cuirassiers, 50 bases Horse, 88 bases Foot, 8 bases Dragoons, 4 bases Siege Artillery, 6 bases Field Artillery, 10 bases Light Artillery  

 

Ramillies 1706: 

Allies: 43 bases Horse, 74 bases Foot, 19 bases Dragoons, 12 bases Field Artillery, 18 bases Light Artillery 

French: 48 bases Horse, 2 bases Hussars, 70 bases Foot, 17 bases Dragoons, 8 bases Field Artillery, 10 bases Light Artillery  

 

Almanza 1707: 

Allies:14 bases Horse, 23 bases Foot, 4 bases Dragoons, 3 bases Field Artillery, 5 bases Light Artillery French:20 bases Horse, 26 bases Foot, 3 bases Dragoons, 4 bases Field Artillery, 6 bases Light Artillery

 

One could then create a 'Blue' Army of the maximum number of bases to fight as the French, and a 'Red' Army of the maximum number of bases to fight as the Allies or Imperials. In practice, that just means sufficient bases to refight Blenheim and Ramillies, everything else fits inside. 

Helpfully, this family of Polemos rules also includes options for Smalland Medium-sized games based on the above. Broadly speaking, they imply forces of a third to a half of the above figures for Small, and around two-thirds for Medium. Even for 'Small' battles, it is noteworthy how much proportionally more cavalry and artillery there will be on a Polemos battlefield than on an HFG battlefield. The 'average' small armies work out as follows:

Chiari:

Imperials: 14 bases Foot, 9 bases Cuirassiers, 3 bases Dragoons, 3 bases Light Artillery, 1 base Foot Artillery

French: 22 bases Foot, 10 bases Horse, 3 bases Light Artillery, 2 bases Foot Artillery 

 

Luzzara:

Imperials: 9 bases Horse, 13 bases Foot, 3 bases Dragoons, 3 bases Light Artillery, 2 bases Foot Artillery

French: 9 bases Horse, 13 bases Foot, 6 bases Dragoons, 3 bases Light Artillery, 2 base Foot Artillery

 

Speyerbach:

Allies:   6-7 bases Horse, 13 bases Foot, 3 bases Dragoons, 2 bases Light Artillery, 1 base Foot Artillery

French: 12 bases Horse, 13 bases Foot, 3 bases Dragoons, 2 bases Light Artillery, 1 base Foot Artillery

 

Blenheim:

Allies: 27 bases Foot, 17 bases Horse, 12 bases Dragoons, 3 bases Light Artillery, 2 bases Foot Artillery

French: 26 bases Foot, 22 bases Horse, 3 bases Dragoons, 3 bases Light Artillery, 2 bases Foot Artillery  

 Ramilles:

Allies: 23 bases Foot, 15 bases Horse, 6 bases Dragoons, 6 bases Light Artillery, 4 bases Field Artillery

French: 24 bases Foot, 15 bases Horse, 7 bases Dragoons, 3 bases Light Artillery, 3 bases Field Artillery 

 

Almanza:

Allies: 10 bases Foot, 6 bases Horse, 2 bases Dragoons, 2 bases Light Artillery, 1 base Field Artillery

French: 10 bases Foot, 6 bases Horse, 2 bases Light Artillery, 1 base Field Artillery  

 

Roughly speaking, these armies are about a Baccus Army pack plus a couple of extra individual packs in size, with the exception of Blenheim and Ramilles, which are more like an Army pack and a couple of reinforcement packs.  That might be a good target for the average gamer. The Polemos 'Small Armies for Big Battles' lists are similar-ish in size to an HFG army - which makes sense, when a base is Polemos WSS 1e is ~ a battalion, and a base in HFG is ~ a brigade.

 

An Allied Army would come out as  27 bases Foot, 17 bases Horse, 12 bases Dragoons, 6 bases Light Artillery, 4 bases Foot Artillery, which would be:

1 x Generals Pack (£4.32)

2 x Foot Booster Packs (£47.52)

1 x Foot Pack (£8.72)

1 x Horse Booster Pack (£23.76)

1 x Horse Pack (£10.08)

1 x Dragoon Booster Pack (£23.76)

2 x Dismounted Dragoon Packs (£8.64) 

2 x Light Artillery Pack (£8.64) 

1 x Foot Artillery Pack (£4.32)

Or about £130-140 all-in. 

Hobby Update 22 Sep 25

A very short follow-on from my last hobby post: a few pictures of other stuff I have finished working on recently. First up, Warlord Roman Auxilia (for my youngest son):

 

 

And then some extra Baccus 6mm WSS troops:

Prussian infantry in the foreground (Markgraf Christian, Alt Dohna, Holstein-Beck, Markgraf Albrecht)

Hanoverian Horse (Gardes du Corps, Croix de Frechappel, von Goden, Noyelles) and Foot (De Charles, Bernstorff, Leib Infantry)

And a base each of British (35th), Dutch (de Waes) and Spanish (Toledo)

 

I have also been given some painted 6mm Ancient, GNW and WSS armies. They will require a separate post to do them justice, but they are a very useful set which really expands the number of battles, particularly, ancient battles, I can refight with something close to the correct troops. Next on the painting tray for me are some more WSS: Bavarian Foot and some Spanish Horse are closest to completion.

Not Quite Dead...

The summer has seemed to pass in a hot fug of work and family stuff to so, so ages since I have been able to post, or game very much. Starting my own business has been a real roller-coaster! So just a short, proof-of-life post... 

More pictures to follow shortly, but I have managed to get some painting done. This has mainly been a bunch of Roman Auxilia for my youngest, but I have also done some more troops for the War of the Spanish Succession: some Hanoverian Horse and Foot, complete except for the flags, with some Prussian and Bavarian Foot underway, with a couple of odds-and-ends units from other nations too. Earlier I completed a bunch of Baccus WW2 stuff, which I don't think I have posted before:

 

US SP artillery and anti-aircraft, plus some 105mm Shermans

German SP anti-aircraft artillery, plus an SP gun and a Desert PzIII with the long 50

Some Nebelwerfers (critical for doing Normandy!) and a few Achilles SP AT guns

The Nebelwerfers

Some German guns

and the whole lot in one go

Some Crusaders and some Valentines, plus some more SP AT guns

more German SP guns, Panzer IIIS, and some Sd222s.

And some more US tanks, including an ARV

And for something completely different, some Cataphracts! Realized I was missing some, but they are a very versatile troop type for Roman-era warfare.

I have played a couple more battles in my shadowing of the Polemarch's 'War of the Stuart Succession' campaign, but not had time to write them up properly. However, as a snippet:

A French invasion!

 

Fighing amongst the coal pits!

 

Hope springs eternal, and I have been promised a bit of a break next month, so I should be able to complete a few more models and get some more games to the table, whereas the majority of gaming time in the last couple of months has gone under the category of 'pondering gaming' rather than painting or playing. Still, that's not nothing and I have managed to at least refine a vary disparate list of things I was vaguely considering to something more like a plan, with an attached shopping list. But we shall see! We have also had a bit of a change-around at home, so I might have a little more storage, painting and gaming space to use, which should help a bit too.

 

Joy of Six 2025

Today (Sunday, 13th July), I went off to Sheffield to visist the Joy of Six show at Sheffield Hallam university.  A show which concentrates heavily, if not exclusively, on 6mm models, I always make a point of trying to get to this one!

 As ever, there were lots of games showcasing 6mm models: 

The (kind of) Battle of Champion's Hill (1863), by the Leeds' club. Lots of Adler miniatures. I think it was with the Picket's Charge rules.

The Maidenhead and District ('MAD') gamers put on a game of Alam Halfa, using Rapid Fire:

It is a desert cloth with Hexon terrain underneath, to get the contours looking natural, which works well. The dark areas are depressions.

The British awaiting the attack. The game is played with 'standard' Rapid Fire measurements, which makes the game look visually truer than playing it with 1/72 models.

 

If there was a trend at the show, it was the use of Bloody Big Battles to play grand tactical wargames. This is the Retreat from Mons/Le Cateau battles, put on by Chesterfield Open Gaming Society:

If you can just see the Imperial German flag at the edge of the board on the top-right, that shows the progress of the Germans on the flank. This gives the British something to worry about on the flanks, but which they can mitigate by falling back/refusing that flank. The players made the point that this was one of the things that made this specific period interesting to them, the possibilities for manouevre at the beginning of WW1.

This next game was put on by the Penarth club, featuring some kind of Cold War participation game set in 1989. It seemed quite busy, lots going on. Very vivid colours! I should have asked more about this, but it seemed quite well-attended later on whenever I popped my head around to check.

 

Next one is another Bloody Big Battles' game, Gravelotte-St.Privat from the Franco-Prussian War, put on by Per Broden. Nice-looking terrain, but this was the 'substitute' solution, the real terrain having gone missing in the post.  Anyway, it still looked great:

This is the position early on, so you can see the French in their positions - the Prussians will arrive from the Right

 

A bit of an unusual one next, from the Cold War Commanders. This is a game of Operation Vijay, the Indian invasion of Goa in 1961. It wasn't that much of a fight in reality (although 2-3 dozen died on each side), shades of the German invasion of Denmark in 1940, but the game was based around the Indian training/planning for the operation, which assumed the garrison would defend it quite hard. The CWC added in a bit of air support to spice things up. The Indians are basically a late WW2 British Army, the Porutguese have cast off French and British kit.

The Indians are advancing from the Right

Another Bloody Big Battles game - this time, Waterloo.

The French attack from the Left, the Allied Army defending to the right. The Prussians will advance from the bottom, when they arrive.

Quite simple terrain. the contours do give a decent shape of the layout of the battle.

Next up, a Bastogne participation game by James Mitchell and Brendan Dolan. James often puts on neat-looking paricipation games at JoS and this was no exception. You will have to take my word for it, but nice camo schemes on the tanks! I really liked the look of this game overall.

My attempt to get a sot which captures something of the German camouflage scheme

The US' scheme was a bit suble to pick up this way, but really well done for the naked eye. In any case, you can pick out the terrain effects quite well here.

Next is the Battle of Bouvines by the East Leeds Militaria society, using Hail Caesar IIRC.

French to the left, Imperials to the right. The heraldry was really well done. Most of it was real or very close to it, with each base being a particular retinue, to show something of the unity of knights and retainers acting together. Anyway, it looked really smart.

The Total Battle Miniatures' team put on Lobositz. Eye-catching terrain!

And now for something completely different, a series of smaller participation games. This is C&C ancients converted to War of the Three Kingdoms by the Wyre Forest gamers. This is Adwalton Moor.:

They use a die behind each base to show strength (and losses), which is quite a simple way of doing it, rather than messing around with groups of smaller bases. I should copy this, for this kind of game.

 A hardy perennial of this show is 'Tank Hunting for Vets' from SeaBee games, as the desperate Germans try to knobble Soviet tanks in a stylized built-up area:

And finally, even more stylized of man versus Emu, by the Doncaster group:

 

Next up we have the Battle of Lens, put on by Baccus. The point of this game was to showcase the practicability and look of using big bases on a normal-sized table. 

It does a really good job of cleanly showing the 'look' of a mid-C17 battle, since the big bases allow for a more accurate modelling of the positions of squadrons, pike, shot, officers and NCOs and so on.

For some reason the lighting conditions weren't really helping me get a very clear shot of this game. Partly location, partly an effect of the the white border on the table perhaps? Don't know. But the troop positions are very clear so you can see point that it does actually work very well with the larger bases.

Not a game this, but since it was all out to see, this is some of the stuff on sale from Rob's scenics. I am not really a buyer of pre-painted stuff, but if I were, this looked great!

 

This next game I had seen before in Newark, although none the worse for that, done by the Winterpig/Rapier team. This is the Greek mythic 'Quest for the Fleece' game, on the 'stairway' type board which I have seen a couple of times for different fantasyt games now. Really well done.

A game of Undaunted: Pacific Air War. Looked lots of fun, but always busy whenever I went near it!

This next was a small participation game for Chickamauga, I think. Bijou, but very well done I thought.

Commission Figurines always do a couple of showcase set-ups, rather than games as such, to show off their Napoleonics:

Romans:

and ACW:

And last, but by no means least, James Morris, he of big, spectacular games at Partizan (as well as the Midgard rules), put on a somewhat smaller but no less spectacular game at JoS, this time set in Glorantha. This game was very busy until the end of the day as far as I could see, so these shots were very much 'through the crowd'! Although I love the backdrop, the walls, the river and the figures, there was something really compelling about the effect which was even greater than the sum of its parts...I am just not an artist, but I think it is to do with the effect of the colour? It just kind of draws the eye.

Here are a couple of extra shots from later in the day, of some of the tables:

Prussians!

And also, Prussians!

And also, Prussians!

 And a few more shots of the Midgard/Glorantha game, when there was space!

 The show felt bustling enough, but perhaps not as busy as it has been on a few recent years. There were a couple of demonstrators (Robert Dunlop, Charles Rowntree, the Milton Keynes' club) who typically put on very big games who weren't here this year (although Robert Dunlop was in the show programme to do Cambrai, so I am guessing something happened late in the day to prevent it. I thought I saw him around the show early on). There were plenty of traders there, all seemed to be doing steady business as far as I could see. I bought a few things - some more Napoleonics and WSS from Baccus (just filling out a few gaps, don't you know?...), some WW2 Japanese from Scotia, some Zouaves and Parthians from Rapier, and some 1/4800 WW1 ships from Three Decks Dockyard, who I only found out about recently. H&R was always a bit busy whenever I went near, so I can sense a mail order going in...I resisted some very 28mm gunfighters from The Pit, and some additional 6mm SF from Brigade. There are fewer traders now than a little while ago, mainly due to changes in the hobby rather than the show, I think: Irregular's 6mm range has gone to someone else, Grumbler miniatures seem to be defunct or in permanent hiatus, Leven is in hiatus, Wargames Emporium don't seem to be selling GHQ anymore...Turner miniatures came last year IIRC, but not this time, Butler Printed Models don't do shows AFAIK...

Peter Berry had asked me a couple of weeks ago to be one of the panel members for the show Q&A forum! I was a bit nervous about it, and did wonder if I was the right person to do it, but I did say yes and it seemed to go okay in the end. The other panel members were Per Broden and You Tuber Big Lee, from Big Lee's Miniature Adventures. We covered a good spread of topics (periods and genres most and least suitable for 6mm, 6mm games and terrain, converting or not converting rules for use with 6mm models, the ethical implications of playing recent conflicts, etc.) , most of which hadn't necessarily come up before in these sessions, so hopefully attendees found it interesting.

In between the roving reporting, panel attendance and shopping, I did get a chance to have a chat with a few people, some old friends, some new acquaintances and some of the demonstrators, so a very nice day, all in all.