Salute 2012: The Haul

In the aftermath of Salute plenty people are blogging about their day and purchases. And here's my trifling haul. From the top:
-Two Battlefront plastic tanks (free with a demo at FoW, since passed to someone who plays 15mm WWII who can make use of them)
-A bumper set of Colours from Flag Dude. Enough for all my finished Napoleonic Brits and Spanish.
-Free samples from GZG. Fantastic 15mm SciFi sculpts, I was chuffed that one a great likeness to Mal Reynolds from Firefly.
-Movement trays for Saga from Warbases
-A part-box of Wargames Factory Greek Hoplites, for my Brother's next project (more on that later)
-A small preorder from Pendraken, giving me enough WWII British to play Blitzkrieg Commander
-Salute 2012 miniature, which looks fun to paint up
-Stock up on MiniNatur tufts
-Redoubt miniatures Helen of Troy and Trojan archers (Brother's project)
-A lonely pack of Perry Napoleonics
-Otherworld Miniatures Minotaur (can you guess the project?)

Not a completely successful day, not only did I return home with fully half my spends, I was desperate for new matt varnish and white undercoat but could only find Army Painter and GW sprays which I'm avoiding. I was interested in a new big battle, small-scale project and didn't pick anything up, though most tempting was some 15mm SciFi from GZG. I'll paint up my samples and look into buying online.

Salute was a great day, a massive show and busier than I've ever seen it. So big it took two hours to do our first circuit of the hall! I don't feel like I managed to do the show justice, as the clock ran down it became a spend-athon and I didn't pay enough attention to the frankly amazing demo tables. I did take my camera but spectacularly failed to take any photos. So I'm reliving the through other people's great snaps, like Samulus and BigLee.

I also failed to get to the bloggers meet-up, my fault entirely as I got my timings wrong. I didn't start well in this regard, being half an hour late on arrival which put me in a flustered mood. So apologies to those Bloggers I missed wandering around the hall, I hope you all had a good day and hope to catch you at another show soon!

Blitzkrieg Commander at SLW

So, went to South London Warlords again on Monday and got a demo of Blitzkrieg Commander. Using 10mm early war French and Germans borrowed from the hosts. All in all, i thought it was a light, quick and fun ruleset. It reminded me of the bastard love-child of Warmaster and Epic, with a dash of historical accuracy. Not necessarily a bad thing!

It seemed to work smoothly with minimal rules-consulting, all information in one table and seemed to have relatively good balance. Those German tanks aren't invincible - especially after a battering from my pair of Char B's!

Play time was about 2.5 hours including setup which is pretty much the top end of an ideal time to my mind. We played with quite a few house rules, though not having played the core rules I couldn't recount what they were. I did have some ideas for further streamlining of the system, by trimming the number of phases. Pity I struggle to play a ruleset without thinking of how I can 'personalise' it - especially given I've only played one game through!

All in all a great visit out to SLW and really good to get a game in - now to look at how to tweak (read: expand) my 10mm late war British without having access to the BKC rule book!