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So, we're off on holiday to the USA  tomorrow at 5 o'clock in the morning.

This means I will probably not be blogging for the next two weeks. I may pop up the occasional post, but in general I'm having a break from serious use of computers.

Hope everybody has a good time: don't trash the place while I'm not here and be good to each other.

Enjoy...

https://meeples.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/meeples-miniatures-episode-150-live-q-a/

Meeples 150 recording NOW!

You can follow along the madness on Facebook on the show group. and Twitter on hashtags #mandmisgreat and #MMEp150

Dambusters Challenge at the Festival of the Forties

The club will be taking our Dambusters Challenge game to the Festival of the Forties weekend in about 10 days time - July 25-6. It's a great day out, with loads (and I mean LOADS) of reenactment groups and vehicles, live music, trade stands, demos, the works - admission's next to nothing, and it's just five miles out of central Peterborough (postcode PE7 3DR).

You'll find us (not me, as I'll be in the US) in the marquee near the bar - as ever, look for the BIG blue table.... 

Battle Report - 13 July 2015 - Full Thrust

(Yes, my iPhone camera still needs fixing)

A nice simple introductory game umpired by Dan from our club. Initial impressions are that he core rules are elegant in their simplicity, and very very quick to pick up. While Ground Zero Games do produce sets of various factions' ships. there's also a ship design system, which would allow me to customise it for my own nefarious purposes.

In our game, the New Anglian Confederation (me, Dave, Tom) took on the New Schwabian League (Dan, Al, Reuben)- basically a battle of shields and speed (NAL) vs Teutonic brute force (NSL). We lost, largely because I think it took us a critical few early turns to appreciate the way movement worked - it''s very simple but until you've played a few moves you can't always appreciate the effect of your actions.

Good fun, though, and thanks to Dan.

A busy week....

I swear, I can't decide if the amount of stuff that now happens online for holiday bookings make it easier or harder :D I do know that if I ever find the web developer responsible for the US ESTA site, he and I will have.... words.

So, that's the mother-in-law's 80th over and done with, a mad rush up from London on the M11/A14 for James' Sunday cricket forestalled at about Sawtry by a phone call from the skipper to say "the heavens have just opened and the pitch is a couple of inches underwater".... and a visit to my eye surgeon for new drops, which I'm still adjusting to. And we recorded another Meeples podcast, which you will love :D

Been one of those weeks where I feel like I've done a lot but not achieved much for me on the wargames front. Oh well. 

Congratulations...

...to Dale from our club, who is now officially a Mantic Parhfinder. 

Kings of War 2nd Ed core rules download

With perfect timing, if, say, you're looking for a new set of fantasy rules to play with your existing figures, Mantic have announced the new Kings of War core rules available for download....

Age of Sigmar

Mmm.

Yes.

Well.

You may want to keep an ear out for an upcoming Meeples episode where that's concerned. :)

Meeples 148

In which Neil and Hobbs, with questionable assistance from your humble scribe, review Soartan Games' "Planetfall". 

https://meeples.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/meeples-miniatures-episode-148-planetfall/

Remember, it's not too late to submit questions for episode 150!!

http://troubleatthemill.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/meeples-150.html

The Great Wargaming Survey 2015

Reposting this so it gets the widest audience possible:

Hi! 

Hopefully you remember the Great Wargaming Survey we ran last year. As far as we're concerned, with nearly 8,000 responses it was a great success. It was a good snapshot of wargamers in the summer of 2014. But to be able to even start to discern trends, we have to do it again (and again and again, but that's for future years). Hence the Great Wargaming Survey 2015. 

Obviously, the answers to our questions will only be valid if lots and lots of wargamers take the time - which shouldn't be more than 5-10 minutes by the way - to fill out the survey. As a thank you, we're offering everyone a 10% discount on their next purchase from our webstore and, if you choose to submit your email address, you'll have a chance at winning some really awesome prizes as well. The full list is included in the survey and is even longer than last year. 

Please ask your friends to fill out the survey as well, and if you have a blog, please post about it. Your friends and your readers too deserve a shot at these wonderful prizes and of course, we all want to know more about ourselves. 

As last year, we'll publish extensively about the results both online and offline, that's a promise! 

Kind regards and happy answering, 

Guy Bowers and Jasper Oorthuys

Hereward Wargames Show update

In case anyone wishes to share them about here are the poster and flyer as PDFs.

You know you've been a modeller too long....

...when the wife assumes that anything useful in the paint/glue department in the house will be in your workshop, not the shed.

As it turns out she was wrong: since I don't paint with enamels, or use the Army Painter dip (I use the ink washes) any more, I hadn't stolen the white spirit :D

Audio book review - "Night Raid"

To give it its full title, "Night Raid: The True Story of the First Victorious British Para Raid of WWII", by Taylor Downing. It's the story of Operation Biting, the paratroop raid on the German Würzburg radar facility at Bruneval in northern France.

Actually, it's quite a bit more than that - it starts off with the para drop, and then flips back to cover the history of radar before and during the war, the set up of combined arms operations under Louis Mountbatten, and ranges widely about just about anything that's even remotely connected to the raid. To be fair, the raid itself would probably only merit a short book, maybe three or four chapters, but the surrounding context makes for fascinating reading (or in this case listening).

If I have a gripe, it's that the author seems to forget what he's written, and if, for example, he needs to mention an event in two different chapters in two different contexts, it's covered the second time as if he'd never mentioned it before. If I did that in an essay I'd have been accused of padding. :D

That aside? Cracking story, and one I quite fancy trying to war-game. The audio book is read by Gordon Griffin, which is pretty much all you need to know: clear, well-phrased, subtle \character' voices, well up to his usual standard.

Well worth a read or a listen. 

Meeples 150

...is coming up real soon now. and we thought it would be fun to do something different (well, I suggested it and Neil didn't argue :D).

So. episode 150 will be a listener questions show: this is your chance to find out what our Desert Island boardgames are, whether Neil and I will still be talking after the first game of the NFL season, why Rich is now a fan of Chain of Command, if Dave is really that tall, how many loopholes we've all found in our New Year pledge, what Hobbsy is painting next, and if Neil's painted anything yet! The world is your oyster. To quote Neil:

You can:

Post it in the comments [Mike: including here]

Post it in the comments section to this news on the Facebook page

Post it to our Twitter Feed @mandmpodcast with #ep150

Send it to meeples.miniatures@ntlworld.com with a subject of EP150.

Cut off for questions is around the 13th of July – we look forward to hearing from you!

 All yours, ladies and gents. Have fun!

The Great War

Well, you were going to get an unboxing series on the PSC Great War box which arrived today (OK, it arrived Tuesday but I only picked it up from the sorting office today) but my camera's flat, the wife has nicked the iPad charger and my iPad's flat, and my iPhone camera needs to go back to Apple as its autofocus has stopped working....

... so you'll have to wait. :(

Also. watch out for a fun announcement for an upcoming Meeples episode :D

Kickstarter Watch - One. Two. Twelve.

Not the typical Kickstarter I mention - this one's an art-relaed Kickstarter from my good friend Tim's wife, who is .... kinda talented :D

I'll let her explain:

Hello, my name is Jackie Duckworth. I am an artist and illustrator based near Cambridge. 

As an illustrator, I love working to a brief - taking a client’s ideas or words and finding ways to make them into an image. But as an artist, it is also important to spend time on developing my skills, my artistic vision, by working on my own projects.

I want you to come on a journey with me, to see a year through my eyes. I want to be able to respond to images and turn them into ideas. I want to show you how I think, photograph, sketch and make work. And I want to share that with you, in an affordable way. 

My project is to make 12 hand printed linocut postcards, one per month. Each one will respond to a place that I have visited, a person I have met, or an event I have been to. I will choose all kinds of different of subjects and interpretations, challenging myself by compressing my ideas into such a tiny format.  

She also says:

Two of the events I am going to illustrate are the Folk Festival, and the Battle of Waterloo re-enactment, if you have a particular interest in either of those.

It's lovely work - go treat yourself.