Planet Wargaming

I have attended two conventions this year as a trader /demonstrator. These were:

Valhalla

This is organised by the Farnborough Wargames Club and has been running for 30 years. I organised a participation display by the Guildford Wargames Club in 2001 as the first show game that we had ever run. This was Darkest Africa and went down so well that we have been back every year since.

In 2002, I was away and the rest of the club put on a Marlburian demonstration game.

In 2003 I organised a GASLIGHT Victorian SF game that won a prize for best Participation game (a surprise to me as I didn’t even know there was an award!) and in 2004 I ran a Four Musketeers participation. All with plenty of help from other club members with figures/scenery/rules suggestions.

In 2005, for commercial reasons, I wanted to run a Martian Empires demonstration game, while Ian ran the Fighting15s trade stand and sold the figures. The rest of Guildford were happy to help out with the game, but I did end up painting nearly all the figures myself and creating the scenery for the game. It was a very hectic 2 months!

The day went very well, with a lot of interest in the rules and the figures. Farnborough is a small show and in recent years seems to become quieter and quieter in the afternoons. This isn’t helped by it being held on Father’s Day.

Even so, I will continue attending as it’s close and a fun show to go to. Next year though, I will be taking a break from running games and will just be selling..

Phototgraphs from the Valhalla game are on the Black Hat website

Bifrost

This is the Society of Fantasy and Science Fiction Wargamers open day held in the Midlands. This was the first time I had attended the show, either a a punter or trader, and I was very impressed by the organisation and the whole day.

The emphasis is very much on gaming, with a Horde of the Things competition, and a lot of participation games. This meant that people seemed to come for the whole day, rather than a few hours (as at other shows) and although there were only 200 attendees, we sold well over 3 times what we had taken at Valhalla.

That is the advantage of a targetted audience show, I guess, as we knew that only SF and Fantasy stock would sell.

We were unable to get into SELWG as a trader and I am away, so won’t be attending as a punter, so the next show will be Warfare in Reading, where we first launched Black Hat Miniatures last year. And this year we will have another new range to launch as well..

The Monday after Salute and I have just about recovered.

I usually have a very civilised approach, turning up at 11am and staying until 3pm and thus avoiding the rush.

This year, howver, I had to deliver stock of Martian Empires figures and our new Martian Empires Vehicles to the Stronghold Miniatures stand when the show opened. This meant that Ian Marsh and I were up early and caught an early train (last year our train failed to stop at Clapham Junction!) and after a very smooth journey arrived at Olympia at 8.45!

We grabbed a coffee and a snack and joined the Q-busters queue at 9.30, getting inside just before 10am. We went straight to the Stronghold stand, met up with Mike and his wife Mary, and once Ian had met up with a couple of Belgian customers to drop off some Eureka figures we were relatively free to wander.

The show was less crowded than last year, due to there being a 4th florr that housed a lot of games and the fantasy re-enactors (and was incredibly hot and sticky). I didn’t even bother fighting my way to the Bring and Buy - even at 2.40pm it was still 2 deep.

I bought most things on my shopping list - tents, baggage and mealie bags for the Martian Empires demo game at Valhalla, some Cotton Jim’s Flags from Stronghold for my British troops, 5 bags of War of the Roses figures from Old Glory to bulk out my WAB army.

I was very good and only bought the Beyond Golden Gate supplement from Gripping Beast, rather than the Sassanid Persian army that I really wanted but I did give into temptation of the Hasslefree stand and bought a number of figures - including the best NOT Lara Croft I have seen.

The games were all a very good standard - the Stalingrad Grain Silo in 20mm was very impressive and I liked the layout on Ebob’s Great Escape game.

The vehicles proved very popular and we took home a lot less stock than we had brought with us.

We finally left at 5.15pm when we were kicked out by the Warlords, and staggered of home in time for Doctor Who.

I am thinking about going back next year as a trader as it is now at Excel….

I can’t believe that it’s nearly 4 months since I posted something here.

You can put it down to a combination of being very busy and being quite ill. As some of you will know, I’ve been ill on and off for the last year and it is showing no signs of getting any better - but at least I now know that it is some form of M.E.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on Black Hat Miniatures sorting out new sculpts and new ideas for games.

We have a lot of great figures (sculpted by Alan Marsh) coming out in the Martian Empires range over the next few months and I hope to have the rules whipped into shape to publish sometime in the next 6 months. Then there are vehicles coming, probably some flying ships, more characters and a whole host of other things…

Our second range is finally coming into shape after a false start and some money wasted and is looking good. More news once I have some greens to show.

I hadn’t realised quite how long a range can take to build on the initial interest and turn that interest into orders. The Martian Empires range has only been out a few months (though I have been working on it for a year) and we are now starting to see regular interest and orders. Hopefully the advertising scheduled for the next few months will stir more interest and it will become self-sustaining. Who knows, one day it might even make a profit!

I have been mostly painting Martian Empires figures for the demo game I’ll be running at Valhalla in Farnborough on June 19th, but have managed to get a few more LOTR and some Gripping Beast ancients done.

Gaming has been sporadic, but I’ve played a few games of LOTR, including a Battle Companies try out last Monday which was fun and seemed to work well. Though the promotion options seem to mainly consist of the more expensive figures in blisters!

The Sword and the Flame seems to be taking off at the Guildford club, along with WAB WOTR, and we have a Boxer rebellion game next week. I’m still very tempted to do a full Peking Legation game after seeing the Staine’s Wargamers 55 minutes at Peking game several years ago.

That I think is something that will have to wait a few years though…