Derby 2014 The aftermath!

Its was that time of year again and the Derby show was upon us,

This year it was the brainchild of Dan to run a saga zombie themed game and simply using the set up from the expo board earlier in the year with a couple of buildings scratch built by the machine known as Phil and painted by the lovey Jo we were good to go!

for the Saturday it was cut short due to my nephews party, however he did have jelly and cake and that'll always be a winner in my eyes!

The few hours I was there on the Saturday the table attracted an awful lot of interest and over the weekend the best part of 10 games were ran. Not sure if this was down to the coverage that gripping beast gave us on the facebook page prior to the show or the fact that we were in the middle of the trade stands, overall the setup was far better than previous years as the demo/gaming tables were mixed in with the trade stands.

I did manage to have a quick blast around and briefly look at the tables that were on show, the standard of the tables were really high and a good mix of time periods, 

A football riot game by anisty written by one of the guys I met who ran the westwind secrets of the third reich torney at the Derby show 4 years ago,

A lovey blast from the past!

A great game of Charlie don't surf, I think this won best in show?

A cracking looking WW1 table, playing using the last man standing rules, I spent a bit of time chatting to these guys as the overall look was really nice and very well executed,

Wing of war, I liked the cotton wool clouds, very simple very effective!

A few shots of our table,

So...

2012 Honourable mention for Normandy Operation Goodwood,
2013 Best in show for Yom Kippur,
2014 Best Participation game

An outstanding concept and well executed by Dan, the rest of the guys were simply along for the roller coaster ride, We also had a number of other show organisers pop over and invite us to various shows that are coming up in the next 6ish months which is awesome feedback and makes all the prep well worth while.

So onto the "loot" for the weekend, quite a haul compared to the usual "I'll pick up a few bits" in the whopping pile you have...

1000 point shaltari dropzone army
Saga Crescent & Cross
deadmans hand the legend supplement & 2 blisters of cacti
9 addational Umann and 3 nappa for relic's
warzone brotherhood guardiani Oblati, legion Nepharite of Algeroth and Black Widow.
Valhalla rulebook, this one caught our fancy the most so will be looking forward to giving it a crack!

This lot will have a big impact on the "pledge" well thats as soon as I get the old info back on track! 

Overall this year was once again a cracking show and the overall feel was good, chatting to a few traders as I was wandering around they seemed to have a good show and numbers were very busy!

So all we have to do is sort out the TWO boards for salute and suss out what we're gonna take to Derby 2015 assuming they'll have us ;)

UK Games Expo 2014

The Vikings came and caused mayhem!

Even though I've set up the table a couple of times, I mocked it up with Isla and had a play about with the overall look, 

Last year the booking in process was a bit of a nightmare, however this year it was smooth as silk, and Mick had put us next to the pool again so we had a great view for two days ;)

the table did attract a fair few comments, however it was a struggle to try and get people to play, lots of them interested on how saga worked but not much willingness to pick up some dice and have a crack,

The attendees over the weekend were around the 10,000 people and these guys consumed a mere 1200 pizza's!

the size of the show compared to the previous years that I've attended has grown to an amazing size, the fact that its a 2 dayer is good and the atmosphere is superb and within a couple of years I'll be taking Isla & Jake to get there geek on, as I found Isla had nabbed my 7th Ed picture book,

and the deamons got lots off "oohhh" so my work is done here with regards to the corruption to the dark side! 

the best place for this!

for once I didn't take that many pics as it was mainly trade stands and demo board games, apart from the Phat cats there were 3 other table top games and I was so busy faffing around with the vikings and chatting to people I didn't snap any pictures of there boards!

but I did manage these,

I stumbled into this room and it was where all the torneys were going on, a huge room! 

 the cosplayers? had a funky stand and this caught my eye,

 some great looking sith chaps,

and Dan managing to peg one.. 

so the haul from the weekend was a loa of brotherhood for warzone,

and as usual the quaility is superb!

I also wandered over to forgeworld and picked up the two army lists books for horus heresy,

I'm in two minds what to do with this though, but I'm thinking of proxing as a marine is a marine!

I'm looking forward to see if we can do another table for 2015, but not too sure what the table could be, could be really lazy and do firestorm armada or xwing. 

Start of the Saga Demo board for expo,

Even before we'd finished the salute board I was already thinking about the board for Expo,

After the huge amount of work that had gone into the salute board we thought of what we could do to recycle one of the previous games we'd done and the brain wave was to use the saga game that I ran for the club back in March, some tweeking with regards to making it look pretty and we were good to go!

one of the guys managed to pick up a second boat and part of the deal to keep it was to paint some objective markers that would be used within the game,

After painting all the Russians I was looking forward to painting normal colours! 

so I've done 5 stands of villagers and 5 stands of livestock, and these are mixed in with the ones I've previously done, A close up of the villagers, real simple and quick paint job on these,

so all I need to sort out now is the extra ship and the actual beach head, and the board is pretty much sorted!