PARTIZAN WARGAMES SHOW MAY 22

Thoroughly enjoyed donning the Midgard T shirt and joining James and the chums to put on the Battle of Degsastan -  Saxons of Northumbria taking on some unruly Dal Riada celtic types.. (see here for James'  pre-game brief).

Partizan was great- it seemed very busy and was loud and warm all day.. I only managed until lunch time anyway, having had a rather long couple of days scooting to Cornwall and back..

The game drew a lot of interest and I spent most of the morning talking to visitors about the rules, the figures and the battle.. James won the 'best demo game' (again?!) , so it must have gone down well!

Had a moment today where I stopped and looked around and was truly grateful for being able to enjoy the hobby like this. We almost take for granted being able to play such great games and I imagined young teenage me, counting my pennies to buy half a dozen 15mm minis from Tabletop Games, seeing pictures of the games I've taken part in and posted on this blog in recent years.. Partizan was absolutely buzzing today and honestly no sign that this hobby is 'dying', not anytime soon anyway!

Pooped, so enough words for now.. some pictures, along with a number of some of the games on display.. as ever, only a small sample of what was on offer..

Morris and Chums - Battle of Degsastan

Today's crew before battle commenced

There was a lot of interest from visitors

figures pooled from our joint collections, we think around 1,000 ?

Battle is joined!

The Saxons sacrifice predicted an inauspicious day, it was not to be..

The Dal Riadan army prepares to meet the Northumbrians

Final checks before the doors opened

Best Demo Game! (and a Saxon victory)

Perry Miniatures - Battle of Dorking 1870

No apologies, they were next door and always put on a gorgeous game..

Steve Jones - Freemans Farm AWI

Also next door, Steve is also guaranteed to always put on a gorgeous game..

Steve and Henry Hyde sharing a chuckle over his new book?

Some other games

There were so many more that I missed or didn't get good photos of..

Anschluss Wargames 12mm Sicily, looked great!

Absolutely stunning table

Simon Miller's Roundway Down.. on quite a slope

Lovely ACW Riverine.. all scratch-built models, very impressive

Modern wargaming is a broad church...

Barry Hilton's beautiful naval game, very hard to photograph

Nick (Toofatlardies) and his perfect dutch houses

Like a Stonewall group playing Hougoumont

Partizan.. an actual show.. in real life! (El Cid battle of Bairen 1097)

On Sunday I had the great pleasure of joining James and the chums (Scrivs and Tom), to 'help' in putting on a beautiful El Cid demonstration game at the Partizan show.

I've been going to Partizan for many years (Grove sports centre .. so 1980-something!) and it's always been my favourite, so it was great that this was the first 'proper' wargames show in England for a very long time.

My contribution was small.. I performed my usual function of Tshirt designer (quite like this one) and I've been 3D printing some rulers for the 'Midgard' rules, which we used on the day.. but really when you look at that gorgeous table and the spectacular armies.. small potatoes!

Anyway, as well as enjoying playing the game (James rules work very well even on this epic scale), it was great to meet gamers old and new again and we're all very grateful to Laurence and the team for arranging the show and taking care to make sure we felt safe

Many more pictures and information on the rest of the crew's blogs:

James Morris (mogsymakes)

Scrivsland

Tom's Toy Soldiers

The team sporting the El Cid T shirts; James, Tom, me, Scrivs. (we 'masked up' soon after this photo, and stayed that way for the day)

setting up

And some pictures from around the hall. Typically, I miss half the games at the show and spend the next week viewing blogs and Youtube declaring "I didn't see that!", so not a very representative collection!

Simon Miller and pals 'To the Strongest' scaled up!

the participation game zone always has some oddball treats!

HUGE Zama battle

A couple of gentlemen looked to be playing Rapid Fire with 54mm figs

The Perrys gorgeous South American game

I really like this idea of raising the table.. in model railway circles there is often debate over the height of a layout, but wargames tables tend to all be pretty standard

I didn't really get any good photos of this neat 1870 game from the Stonewall group

I'm still not sure of the value of the Blog.. whether anyone reads it, but I had to share ;-) Off to Tom's tomorrow to play Chain of Command and make a start on our 'Fighting Withdrawal' campaign.