Sunday 22 April 2012

Salute: Where did all my money go?!?!

This year was my first Salute and I had a great time, even if my wallet came back a lot lighter. I made quite a few purchases and these will no doubt surface on the blog in the near future. I bought quite a lot more 15mm scif-fi to flesh out my forces ( and a few mercenary units), invested in some 28mm Victrix british to practice my 28mm painting, picked up some bargain 15mm PSC Stugs, and bought various other odds and ends which I couldn't resist (such as Hasslefree's Caprica 6).

As a (very new) member of the SLW I was there on the Friday and after the Con helping setting up an taking down. This was great as I managed to get in some some chat with some of the traders. Jon Tuffley of GZG is a very nice man; I had the honor of being the first member of the public to see all of his new releases this year and got a few free samples to boot! However, I forgot to take pictures, sorry!

The Pictures

Here are some of the games and stalls I managed to get photos of, unfortunately, there are less than intended as I managed to blur and unholy amount of them (stupid phone camera...).

This was a great set-up/diorama of the Retreat from Corunna. The table was a huge L-shape with the board to the rear being a port complete with warships and ferrying boats. Beautiful paint job on every single figure. I took many more of this, but few came out. 
The French perspective
The French Camp, complete with dancing beauty.
I had a chat with the owner on Friday and these ships were adapted from mantlepiece ships with stands bought in France. They looked fantastic with some weathering and 28mm crew. 
The columns snaking away into the port in retreat. 
This was a great game of force and force between the Russians and Hungarians(?) I believe. Looked fantastic, I think many of the figures were from Red Star.
Stunning weathering on the armour
That Hind is some serious kit on a table this size. 
 This was Victrix's 54mm Peninsular participation game, showing off their figures and rules. All of them were beautifully painted, as were the farmhouses, which were stunning.


This was a diorama showing the British assaulting a Russian position in the Crimean War. I had more photos but none survived, sorry!

This was a FOW Vietnam participation game I managed to get in in the afternoon. A very fast playing system and lots of fun. The scenario was basically a tone of US armour and helicopters rolling in on an NVA infantry company dug in armed with RPGs, AA and Recoilless Rifles. Me and my opponent had a great game and merrily threw our forces at each other, by the end there were only a few bases left standing and we called it a draw.

A quick shot of a pretty Zulu War game from the Afrikaners perspective.

A very eccentric VSF game complete with walkers, flying ships and all manner of crazy and weird machines, almost all scratch built.


I loved these little models, they're made from Defiler legs, GW paint pots (the old hexagonal ones) and an R2D2 head for the cockpit. Marvellous stuff. 
Blurry war machines...
The next set are pictures are of Dropzone Commander - a 10mm sci-fi line - by Hawk Games, a new player on the field, who will be releasing officially in July. These were my favourite mini line of the Con and were incredibly impressive. The amount of care and attention to detail in the design, sculpting and painting was incredible.  My photos simply don't do them justice but here they are anyway.


The infantry sculpt were incredible, easily as good as the best 15mm. 







I had a chat with the designer after the event (I was helping take stalls down) and these are the produce of 2.5 years of very hard work. Rules are on their way but are still in the development stage. The idea of 'dropzones' will feature heavily, scenarios will focus on multiple objectives, often in hard to access areas e.g. cliffs, over water bodies, and maneuver and fast reaction will be key. Often there will be no 'player boardedges' and units will arrive from multiple fronts/dropzones. Mechanics wise I didn't find out anything crunchy except that the rules will be written to be 'flavoursome' and faction specific. They will not be generic or allow each faction to be played in the same way, which is good. They will not resemble Epic closely, the designer dislikes that system as too bland, i.e. predators and land raider are statistically very similar with little differentiation (his opinions, not mine).

Suffice to say, when these come out, especially if the ruleset is as good as the rest of the work put in, I'll find it impossible to resist them! They remind me a lot of the PC game Supreme Commander and I think the ruleset could do worse than to consider this game as a source of inspiration/ideas for scenarios and overall feel. 

Well, those are the pictures I got, another post will follow soon on the games I played (Critical Mass, FOW Vietnam and 7tv) and how they went/what my impressions of the rules were. 

Adios

2 comments:

  1. Glad you had a good day. I reckon the show was even bigger and busier this year.

    Some great pics there, thanks fo sharing. Can you believe I took my camera but spectacularly failed to take any photos? Ah well, will have to relive it from all the pics appearing on blogs!

    We drooled over the 10mm SciFi too. A lovely looking range. Wonder if some of those vehicles will work for 15mm.

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  2. Sounds like you had a fun day. Jon T is a great guy, just a shame his stall was so busy yesterday because I didn't get a chance to chat properly with him.

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