Plundering York The Goodies

The Boy, Lee and myself headed up to York with little more in mind than plundering the rich pickings that were on offer at the Racecourse. We did not even get into the show before Gary Amos thrust a bag into the car, loaded with one hundred Griping Beast Vikings for the boy and me. Now my son is starting to build his second Saga army a Jomsviking Army and we will be looking at doing games with shield walls as between us we have well over 200 figures. What a gent and the boy has already started to paint up his share and doing a fair job of it too.

I bought a few bits from Warbases a couple of packs of 30x30 bases as I will use most of my stash up on the 20mm Celt's. I also got some of the 40x60 bases that will be used for my 6mm Ancients. Also for the Ancients is the small casualty markers as I plan to use the Hail Caesar rules and these will be great to track their state. Lastly, four eight figure movement trays so we can use our Saga single based mini's as shield walls. Really looking forward to increasing our forces so we can have some great larger scale battles later.

Baccus got the lions share of my attention and cash with me adding a fair few more figures to the pile for my Ancients army. Lee is coming round to the idea and may just spring for a Roman army. Well that makes me think I need to get some Celt's at some point then. Indeed I can see this getting out of hand ;-)

Now back to Gary for a moment, he told me last year that consumables don't count towards hobby fund deficit and so it's with a clear conscience that I picked up these replacements for racks. Funny thing was that most of the traders selling the paints had fairly big gaps in there stock, I wonder if this is down to most gamers now buying at shows due to the post restrictions or issues with buying from Vallejo. Two new colours included, one to replace the Panzer Aces New Wood that was out of stock (bought old wood) and Cavalry Brown.

Leven Miniatures was the other big hitter, actually bigger than Baccus in reality but these were part of a deal so kind of don't count LOL. Here we have Papelotte Farm, you can see from the A4 (Legal) sized Field of Glory army list that it's a large building.

The set comes with the option to paint up with the modern turret if you wish, I will be doing the original tile roof.

Mike can also supply Frichermont Farm though only the front right section is based on known detail as it seems no one actually really knows what the rest looks like. What is based on reality though looks great and I will be wanting to get on with this sometime soon.

On the left is Plancenoit Church which will take it's place in the village/town and the new Fachwerkhaus to replace the one I painted up a few months back. So this is almost all the Napoleonic buildings we need for Project Waterloo which is just as well as Lee is gathering his drive to push on with the boards. Hopefully both buildings and tiles will be finished around the same time, lost for both Lee and me to do yet though.

Totally different are these Middle East buildings that I will be using for our Ancients games. I just need to resist the urge to paint them up soon rather than concentrate on the Nap's.

I got a pack of the Baccus Ancient casualties, this is the basic idea for the Hail Caesar markers, if they don't grab us we will just go with small dice but I was confident enough to buy ten of the markers.

So that was all the buying, I spent almost all my time chatting with mates which my son put up with really well given he wanted to do some buying of his own and also playing of a game or three. Overall it looked a good show, not as busy as it was last time I went two years ago but that was no bad thing for me. We got in at 9.45 and left at gone 3.30 so we certainly got our monies worth.

But the best bit of the whole day was spending a couple of hours standing and watching my son play a few games with a group of younger gamers ran by History Alive. The man who runs this does workshops in the school holidays where the kids from the area he is based get to gather and wargame. He also runs a number of school wargame clubs and I think he is doing a great job of harnessing the kids interest and enthusiasm.

Not only did it prove to me that my son is not just doing this to hang out with Dad but he really loves to play, he played three games back to back and time just flew by, well over two hours in fact. So I just stood away from the table and watched him and enjoyed the moment. Much later it occurred to me that the fun he was having was very much the same as the fun I used to have when I was first into wargaming and for want of real rules we made up all sorts of stuff, used piles of books for buildings and slowly built up bits of realistic terrain and watched the table become more of a battlefield and less of a jumble sale. It's enough of a walk down memory lane to get me to sit down with my son, work out what would interest him the most and get a few packs of mini's and write up rules for fun and slowly put together another project one bit at a time.