October comes round again, so we’re off to Newark once more. We’d missed the early Partizan this year, so I wanted to make sure we got to this one. Especially as we had the Edgcote wargaming booklet to launch, although the pre-publicity fell a little bit short of what I intended.

Northamptonshire Battlefields Society had a crack team for this event: Chris K, Tim, Steve and me. We were taking two games, an NQM scenario from Chris and the simple Edgcote game by me. Judicious packing meant we got all the kit AND the four of us in the car, so we had a full team to set up on arrival. We had a prompt start too, getting away before 8am, and the roads were mercifully clear.

We shared space with WD Display Team North, who were doing a quick Arnhem game.

We were a bit spread out, and we had a good footfall all day. I didn’t have much time to get round the rest of the show. Purchases were just a pack of paint brushes from ABCbrushes, which is a regular thing for me now, due to the quality and the value they offer. The display game end of the show was packed, with some real space huggers. The Battle of the Five Armies display was enormous, as was the 6mm Omaha Beach game up near us. It seems to me that clubs are getting into the equivalent of an arms race for size of table and number of figures. At this rate there’ll only be room for two “games” in the future. Consequently people like us who operate at the smaller scale of game tend to get a bit overlooked. The Edgcote game is 6′ x 4′, and we use foam hills and a Deepcut mouse mat cloth to save space for transportation. We’re big on easy to follow explanation and quick, playable rules suitable for all ages, skill levels and memory retention for rules. The white cards have lots of snippets about the battle, and in an earlier life served to hold down a light weight cloth when we used the display in the open air. Those who found us were very complimentary.

I played the game three times, all Rebel wins. I’d have played more, but a lot of people wanted to talk, and we shifted nearly 50 copies of the booklet.

We took both of our Edgcote banners to sort of make the point about what we were promoting, one by the game and one behind the stand.

Where we are, down the “participation” end of the show, we get fewer video bloggers and the like as there’s less eye-candy on display, but Barry from the Warspite Youtube channel stopped by, shot some footage and was very complimentary. We didn’t see the show judges at all, unless they came round when I was in the gents.

Chris has been working on his Longstop Hill scenario for a month or two, and was hoping to promote NQM and sell a few copies if asked, but his printer had let him down.

He got in more games than I did.

Martin Rapier of The Games We Play blog turned up to play, as he’s been doing quite a bit of NQM recently, and wanted to test his skills out.

And then it was time to pack up and return home. We’d had a successful day, I would say, with a good amount of interest in the new booklet. Hopefully the word of mouth will spread and it’ll become a “must have” for every Wars of the Roses wargamer.