Heading home from Vancouver and an excellent, exhausting weekend at the Trumpeter Salute show! Good to see most of the Trumpeter regulars, many of whom I only ever see once a year at this show.
Great games all weekend, including the six player Pulp Alley game I ran Sunday, “Terror in the Thuggee Temple”, which was a gloriously confused and messy multi-sided mess enjoyed by all.
I got a good crop of photos all weekend, including a bunch of my own pulp game, and I’ll get them edited and posted here soon!
Heading off to Vancouver today for the always excellent Trumpeter Salute wargaming show this weekend.
I’ve finally gotten around to setting up the Android WordPress app on this phone so I’ll update from the field as I remember to, then do my usual photo dump once I’m home.
I’m running a Pulp Alley game sometime this weekend but can’t actually recall when it is. Looking forward to seeing all the Trumpeter regulars this weekend!
Realized a few days ago that I hadn’t even taken my photographs from the Trumpeter Salute 2015 wargame show off the camera, never mind looking at them and choosing which ones to publish. This for a show that was at the end of March, three weeks ago and counting!
We started off with “Russian Civil War + Zombies” or “The Undead Are The Ultimate Proletariat”, which was fun and silly even if All Things Zombie isn’t my favourite set of rules. I got to blunder around in this great papercraft Whippet tanks, attracting zombies just by leaving the engine idling (thing is LOUD!) and then running them over or machinegunning them. Good fun!
Saturday morning and afternoon were both full of Tomcats, MIGs, and other Cold War planes as we ran two sessions of Air War C21, which is a fast, fluid, great set of rules. Tomcats are scary aircraft.
Saturday evening I ran my actual Russian Civil War game for four players. I had two signed up as “spares” and had to turn a seventh away, which is always disappointing but it beats having nobody show up for your games! (which I have had happen at GottaCon here in Victoria…) It was a closely fought battle but the Reds succeeded in keeping the Whites out of the village in the end.
Sunday at Trumpeter is the long single session, so we get the “big” games out. I participated in the gloriously goofy Lego junkyard race game, with half of the other players under 14. The red-and-yellow pointy looking vehicle at the very back of the photo above is my racing machine. Good fun, I can’t even recall who won, to be honest!
Next table over was Thomas’ absolutely spectacular Kursk WW2 game in 20mm, hordes of Russians trying to push the Germans out of the Motherland. I spent a lot of time between my racing turns gawking at this game.
Already looking forward to Trumpeter Salute 2016. I might bring Russian Civil War back, or I might go back to my pulp gaming and run some sort of pulp adventure game. We shall see!
Thanks again to Jon for the ride over, Martin for the hospitality, and the Trumpeter Salute club for putting on another amazing weekend.
My own photos from the Trumpeter Salute show over in Vancouver at the end of March are still unsorted and unedited, but Martin has gotten his photos uploaded to Flickr, so I’ll happily show them off until I get my own photos sorted out!
We did Russian Civil War + Zombies using the All Things Zombies rules on Friday evening, but Martin didn’t have his camera with him. I’ve got some photos of that session – running over zombies with a light tank was a lot of fun…
We did modern air warfare Saturday morning and afternoon, using Martin’s great papercraft jet fighter models.
Saturday evening was my Russian Civil War game using Chain of Command/Mud & Blood rules. Four players total, two Red & two White, each side running a platoon plus supporting troops. It ended in a narrow Red victory but was close several times!
Sunday I played in a LEGO Junkyard Race which was a ton of fun; Martin was able to get into Thomas’ spectacular Battle of Kursk WW2 game, with an amazing table filled with great models.
I’ll get my own Trumpeter Salute photos sorted out over the next couple of days and posted here!
Just got back this evening from a fantastic weekend over in Vancouver for the Trumpeter Salute 2015 convention. Lots of great games, I got 2nd Place Best in Show for the Saturday evening time slot for my Chain of Command-powered Russian Civil War game, which was awesome.
Didn’t do a lot of shopping, just a couple of Osprey books related to the RCW and a couple of small packs of figures – except for the 40+ fully painted and based WW1 Turks I bought from a friend who has moved over to Vancouver and is downsizing his figure collection! He gave me a fantastic deal on them, too, and I’ll get some photos up shortly. I’ve had a group of British infantry in tropical kit for several years now that are terribly underutilized due to a lack of a proper opponent for them, so the Turks will provide that. I’m sure they’ll also appear in various pulp games, too.
Photos and a proper writeup in a day or three, tonight I need sleep!
Victoria’s GottaCon is running this weekend, and as I’ve just flown back into town from a work assignment elsewhere in the province, I’m missing the entire thing! I’d go for Sunday, but having been away for five weeks I’ve got too many errands to run and non-gaming real life to catch up on.
Worse, it looks like I’m going to be on a short turnaround and leaving town yet again for another work assignment later in March, so there’s a very good chance I’ll miss Vancouver’s excellent Trumpeter Salute convention this year, for the first time in four years. I was looking forward to doing either pulp gaming or Russian Civil War, too. There’s a great group of gamers and friends over in Vancouver, many of whom I only see at the Trumpeter show.
That aside, I am painting again, both Blood Bowl teams and other stuff. I even took paints and figures with me on my recent field assignment, and got some decent painting done in the hotel room a couple of evenings. There’s a great group of random thugs from Pulp Figures on my desk right now, and I’m going to be stripping the paint off my Amazon BB team and re-doing them from scratch because about half of them had the primer go on sort of rough. It was an old can and I was spraying on a colder than normal day; it’s the first time in years of spray priming I’ve had that sort of finish!
Martin, an long-time friend who now lives in Vancouver, has been slowly posting his photos from the recent Trumpeter Salute gaming convention. As I mentioned in my writeup, he’s got a significantly fancier camera than mine, a fairly recent Canon DSLR, and he also hauled a lightweight tripod to the show, so many of his photos are really excellent.
Bolshevik forces laid out before setup. Cavalry & armoured car, then the Red Sailor platoon, then a mixed platoon of Red Militia and Red regulars.The Red’s left flank as the game begins. The sailors on the extreme left have already started to advance.
We headed over from Victoria Friday afternoon, making good time and even seeing orca whales from the ferry, which I haven’t seen in years. Friday evening I spent flying in Rene’s perpetual World War One air combat game. I was doing fairly well until a Fokker Dr1 slipped in behind my Camel and blew me away in one savage burst!
Smoked Camel! Attempting to defend a Brisfit bomber, I let a Fokker Dr.1 triplane slip in behind me and he blows my engine clean off it’s mounts! Click to view larger over on Flickr.
Saturday turned out to be “Soviet Saturday” for me! I played the 30mm Dust Warfare skirmish system with Martin (an old friend) and his nephew Riley (this was Riley’s first gaming convention!) and another gamer in the morning, Weird War Germans vs Soviets over cardboard ruins Martin and I had been up until 2am assembling! It’s a fast system with some interesting features, and I want to have another bash at it at some point.
Saturday afternoon it was time for my big Russian Civil War game, with a full set of six players and loads of toys on the table – the White Russians had a SPAD XIII for air support and a field gun, while the Reds had a huge horde of cavalry, an armoured car and an armoured train! The cavalry did better this game than they have ever done before, completely shattering one wing of the defending White force by themselves.
Red forces advance! Sailors on either side of the train and armoured car, and a huge Red cavalry unit in front, heading towards the woods!
We rounded out Saturday evening with more Russian-German action, this time a WW2 Eastern Front scenario of a scratch Soviet force trying to hold off flanking attacks by German panzers. The 15mm figures and vehicles were really well done, and the terrain was elegant. It was a close fight, with the Germans losing a fair number of tanks to Soviet infantry but being positioned by the end of the game to push their untouched reinforced infantry units into the Russian villages with their remaining tanks in support.
Sunday Martin and I played Colin’s very nice and well-run War of 1812 scenario, a re-creation of the Battle of Crysler’s Farm 200 years after it actually happened. I played the invading Americans with two other gamers, and we got our asses absolutely handed to us by the British/Canadian/Mohawk defenders. Nevertheless, we apparently did better than the Americans had actually done historically – we did manage to drive one of the two big British infantry regiments from the field, but the effort wrecked my brigade, while Canadian militia light troops and British cannon drove the rest of the Americans off!
The Americans advance confidently toward the British-Canadian defenders. A few turns later they’d be lurching backward in a considerably less controlled fashion!
Trumpeter Salute, the best annual miniatures convention on the west coast of Canada (sorry, Gottacon. Your relentless focus on GW turns me off) is happening again this weekend and I am again reminded of why I come to conventions: to be inspired.
This evening found both Brian and I playing aerial games, although he had considerably less success with his World War One 1/72 than I did in Leviathans, where I fairly handily destroyed a British aerial cruiser and destroyer. Our third member, recovering GW player Sean, was evolving. Or something involving tails. I didn’t ask.
And the spending has begun. I picked up some Saxons for my eventual Dux Brittanium, Sean some ECW/30 Years War and Brian also managed to spend a great deal of money. And we haven’t even hit Pulp Miniatures yet.
But now, pictures:
Leviathan cruiser on cruiser action
German World War One aircraft, 1/72 scale
British World War Two aircraft, 1/300 scale
More photos tomorrow, including of Brian’s RCW game.
We track basic visitor stats here at the Warbard, as most websites do. What people are reading, which links they’re following, the usual stuff, including how people find this site – what inbound links they’re following, and (to some extent) what search terms they’re using to find us. We use the open-source web app Piwik for most stats, and the built-in WordPress Stats for a few details.
Over on Flickr, both Corey and I can track views on our accounts in a similar fashion, which photos are being looked at and what search terms people are using.
We’ve both noticed, this year and last (in other words, since we rebuilt Warbard in it’s current format) a mildly amusing thing: every year after the huge Salute wargaming show in London, over the water and far away in the United Kingdom, we get a big jump in viewership stats. The reason? About a month before the world-famous Salute show, we have the Trumpeter Salute show in this part of the world, and for four of the last five years, I’ve been there, taken lots of pictures that’re up on Flickr, and for the last two years, posted here about it as well.
So gamers hit Google looking for eyecandy from Salute, and get our blog and our Flickr photos because of the similarity in event names. Oops.
Trumpeter Salute is a great convention, the highlight of my gaming year in many ways, but it’s not the immense and justly famous show in London, which I got to in 2000 and badly want to go back to one of these years! If you’ve come looking for Salute pics, sorry to disappoint you! But have a look around, you might find something else of interest, and thanks for the bump in traffic and the minor amusement!
