Preparation for the Martian Empires demonstration game at Valhalla (Farnborough, 19th June) is well under way and I have the complete game laid out on my games table. I have spent the last few weeks taking figures and scenery off the table, painting them and replacing them and the game is finally coming together into a complete form.
It is also a good excuse to finally use the huge rocketship that I bought from Scheltrum a few years ago and have never managed to get around to painting or using. It was originally bought for a planned “First Men on the Moon” game, along wih a bunch of Selenites and some British and Prussian Aethernauts - which are still languishing in a drawer somewhere. Now though, it will do service as the cylinder ship The Lord Palmerston.
This will be the 4th game I have run at Valhalla in the last 5 years and the first demonstration game rather than participation. Although it is taking a lot of preparation, possibly more than the last few skirmish games we have run, I am hoping that it will be a more relaxing affair than the participation games that I have run in the past (particularly the one where a child bounced a zeppelin over his head!).
We played through an example Martian Empires game at the Guildford Club a few weeks ago to familiarise the people helping me out with the rules and it was interesting to see the new questions and thoughts about the rules that came up.
I am currently attempting to get the rules into a form that can be laid-out for publication and am hoping that we will have the full rules printed and available for the end of the year.
Apart from ME, I have been playing some more LOTR Battle Companies game and we played a very large all-day Stargrunt II Star Wars game last saturday using micro-machines figures. As the commander of the Imperial Force, we were doing well until I was struck down by a stray shot! The rebels just escaped - it was a fun game.
I like the Stargrunt rules, but still find all the clutter associated with them (the various counters, etc) slightly off putting. I like the games table to just have figures on - but it is always a compromise between book-keeping and counters.
Hope to see some of you at Valhalla or the SFSFW show Bifrost on July 3rd….