Back from Kelham Hall

A nice easy run up to Newark for The Other Partizan: we arrived just after 10:30, beating the worst of the queue. They've moved the entrance from the usual for Hammerhead, and it now pretty much opens straight into one of the smaller side rooms. I'm sure this did Andy at Last Valley no harm for business, as you pretty much walked smack into an eyeful of lovely scenery, but it did create a bit of a logjam.

Most of the usual suspects were there: no Fighting 15s, which was probably good for my wallet, and surprisingly little Flames of War. In fact, I'm pretty sure the only FoW boxes or blisters I saw were some Soviets and Japanese on the Caliver Books stall. Surprising.

I'd mistakenly thought Foundry weren't there, but they were, which was bad for my wallet, as I have a
plan for a Chain of Command army involving their rather nice Home Guard minis (sculpted by the Perry's). I was going to wait for a sale (since you don't buy Foundry at full price if you can avoid it)... I was even going to wait as they didn't appear to have the character figures in stock, but I came back a bit later and spotted a single blister of that particular set that had somehow appeared since I last visited. Six blisters at show prices? Not that bad, actually.

Had a nice chat with Rob on the stall about CoC as well, once I'd explained what the figures were for. Probably sold a copy as a result.

The main thing that the group I was with noticed - there was an awful lot of 28mm scale display games and not much else, scale wise . One major exception was a rather superb 20mm "Raid On Entebbe" game from the folks at The Bunker, taking full advantage of what's available in the scale to include a Boeing 707 and, I kid you not, FOUR C130's, as well as loads of support vehicles and some nice airport buildings. The latter, it appears, are actually Scalextric 1/32 buildings with modified doors!

As far as 28mm stuff goes, there was a very nice Western Desert Bolt Action game, although the table did perhaps have a shade too much scenery.

I failed to grab pictures of the War of the Roses battle or the War of the Spanish Succession one (using almost entirely Wargames Factory plastics, and for whose terrain many teddy bears had given their lives).

Ran into PanzerKaput of this parish running a very nice looking VBCW game, which I was going to pop in and have a better look at, but our route back through the show once we'd done didn't take us out that way. Sorry, PK - great to meet you, hope it went well. Also ran into a couple of WD3 folks, and Mr. Shuck.

The other thing I was very tempted by was the Dead Man's Hand Wild West skirmish game. It was being demoed by Chris Hall from GCN (unless I've completely got my names mixed up!), and had the prettiest of 2'x2' tables using some of the awesome 4Ground buildings. Like I said - very very tempted.

All in all? Great show. I'll be back.