Salute 52

Yesterday was our annual pilgrimage into London for Salute! As ever, don’t expect a narrative here, but more me trying to remember what the things I remembered to take pictures of actually were!

This year there were four of us that traveled up together - Clockwise, starting top left: me, man-bun just out of shot; Heroes182, henceforth referred to as chum and companion throughout; Hasvik, a link to the works of which is in the next paragraph; and the fourth member of the team, who I don’t know whether has a pithy internet handle that I should refer to her by and I don’t feel comfortable publishing her name without her permission, so that’s that (I did check everyone was happy me posting their faces though, and give full credit to the handsome man in sunglasses for taking the picture). Edit - she does, it’s magpiecountess!

We pootled in together from Canary Wharf, and made our way to the Excel Centre, although one of us was there as press so disappeared off early rather than hanging out with the rest of us in the massive queue: 

We made surprisingly good time this year, but apparently so did everyone else as there was a solid 2000 people ahead of us when we got there. Also fun was realising that I’d taken a screenshot of my 2024 ticket that morning, as the 2025 ticket email just didn’t come up when I searched for it - luckily I was able to find a screenshot that I’d taken when I originally purchased it, panic over! 

Priorities in order, we marched straight over to the Osprey stand (although not technically straight, as it turned out I’d initially been looking at the map from the wrong angle and so we initially went to the wrong corner of the hall) to try out the new Joseph McCullough game Hairfoot Jousting:

(Yes, the guy running the game is in an inflatable chicken rider suit). We were the second pair to get there, so rather than halflings, we found ourselves playing as goblins. Looking at the rulebook, it seems that it’s actually two games in one, and turning it over and starting from the back you have a separate goblin jousting game! The basic mechanics are the same, but while the crowds in the halfling game cheer at you achieving things, the goblin crowds jeer and give you tokens whenever you get hurt…

This was also very exciting, as we got to see some miniatures that haven’t even been previewed yet as far as I can see (although do let me know in the comments if you recognise them). 

I especially liked the frog:

Porcupine:

And naked mole rat:

Much fun was had, with randomly selected movement templates ensuring that no turn ever went to plan, and a certain amount of time was spent with my valiant goblin jousters launching themselves directly into flaming bonfires:

They would occasionally careen through my opponents jousters too, so it wasn’t all a lost cause. Chaos continued for a while, and we decided to play until first blood to give other people a chance to have a go. We also decided to keep re-rolling on the random events table until something happened (as we’d rolled ‘nothing happens’ every turn previously), and obviously got a result that reset everyone to their starting positions and healed them slightly, only making the game go longer. A cavalier approach to health and safety and animal welfare ensured that we were soon back into the fray, and I was just able to knock out one of my opponents jousters and claim the win. 

My opponent immediately bought a copy of the rulebook from the Osprey stand, and Joseph was near enough and kind enough to sign it for him (I was tempted, but already have a copy pre-ordered at work). He’s been reading through the book, and it looks like we made a few mistakes, but isn’t that always the way.

Here is my roster sheet, for an exclusive preview of the rules that will make very little sense without additional context:

Then, we began the usual meandering walk up and down the aisles, which basically takes us until the end of the show and I always seem to see things in other peoples posts and videos that I managed to miss! Plus, where we’re walking and chatting (and encouraging each other to buy things) it’s fairly hit or miss what I actually take pictures of.

First is a company that I’d never heard of before, Pandyman, that made a selection of reasonably priced modern 3d prints (that I didn’t take a picture of) and some figures for a game called Trench Offensive (that I did):

My chum bought a couple of odd figures with separate heads from their bargain bin, so we’ll see how they paint up.

This was a board for Twilight, a game that we look at every year and marvel just how unique the minis are, then comment that they’re so unique they wouldn’t really work with anything we have, and you’d have to go all in on a whole new project of them.

This Atari looking game was cool (and put on by vaguely local to me Maidstone gaming club, I seem to recall). There was a QR code with a link to see how the game was created, which is a similar colour to my new shoes, both visible in this next picture:

This was an impressively large airship:

Inside the goodie bag was a sprue of Quar, and there was a nice little trench board featuring them at the show:

I vaguely remember Quar being the brainchild of the guy at Zombiesmith, who I want to say was based in Australia, making them quite hard to get originally, but with the release of these plastics by Wargames Atlantic they seem to be on the rise again!

At this point, we’d made it about half way round the show, and it was time to stop for a bite to eat (playing that demo game right at the start had eaten quite the chunk of time!). Back int’ day, there used to be a nice little grassy area just outside where you could sit and have a little picnic, but it’s all been built over now. They have built a nice benched area above where that used to be, but then fenced it off, so instead we sat on a bridge with this view:

Scenic.

Anyway, I don’t come to Salute for the aesthetic, I come to look at little men, so we headed back inside and peered at the entries to the painting competition. This entry was so far back in the cabinet, and that combined with the crowds meant I had to take a zoomed picture to actually work out what it was, which I include here for comedy value. 

I’m on a bit of a Warmachine kick at the moment, having picked back up on my original attempt to work my way through every issue of No Quarter and rulebook for the lore, but the new edition has left me somewhat cold (in the same way that AOS does - what is it with companies taking an IP that I like and blowing it up?). Apparently they’ve launched a subscription service, the first month of which is free and would net you stls for these models, which is pretty neat though:

Shame I don’t have a 3d printer though.

Speaking of 3d printers, Alchemist models do some very nice [recognisable but legally distinct from] chocobo riders that would probably work fairly well with new riders if someone were to be in the market for some sort of jousting based game:

This discount only ran until 23:59 the day of the show, so I have no idea why I took a picture of it:

Another thing that we look at every year is Bushido:

They’re lovely models, and I could definitely find a use for the majority of them in my Ronin of Shadow Deep project, but at £14 a mini for basic mooks, it’s a little rich for my blood.

Anyway, at the moment the Ronin project is in its very formative stages, so there’s really no rush. Plus, we suspect the studio paint jobs might be doing some heavy lifting, as some of the blisters I had a look at had some suspiciously soft detail…

Once we’d finished our initial walkabout, we then swung back to revisit some stalls (Black Scorpion, because the crowd was about four people deep when we first got there, and Tangent, because Wayne wasn’t there on my first pass - spoiler warning: he remains one of the nicest people in the hobby).  

On the way round, I spotted some more cool games, including this Mario Kart racing game:

And this whacking great Japanese castle, which I’m assuming was for Bushido or at the very least something Bushido adjacent:

There was also a fantasy reskin of Space Hulk called Crypt Hulk, put on by Ashford Wargames club, although I have no idea whether it was the one in Kent (where I’m working this week) or the one in Middlesex (where I am not working). 

Here’s a closer shot of the info sheet explaining the inspiration behind the game:

We rounded out the show by trying out some paint pens:

They’re kind of cool, basically being a contrast paint in a pen with a brush tip, but I’m probably not going to change the way I paint now thirty years in…

Which brings us to the crux of this post, the loot! Quite the haul this year:

I actually had a list with a breakdown of what I’d bought (for comparison in the Salute group chat after the show) but can I find it now?  

General breakdown:

• A bunch of Perry plastics this year, including both the new Spanish Napoleonic sets, both for the Alamo project and the inevitable Napoleonics as I’m evidently wading into middle age. I was tempted to get a third box of the Spanish to get the free mounted Commander, but it’s probably for the best (both for the Tally and my wallet!) that I didn’t. I also grabbed a box of ACW artillery, again for Alamo purposes, and a box of Dragoons that I can combine with heads from last year’s cavalry purchase to hopefully make some serviceable Mexican cavalry (remember kids, do your research before you go to the show, and look at more than just the fancy hat matching!)
• A box of Frostgrave cultists, because I’ve been meaning to grab a box for a while and Caliver books do a deal where you get an e tea discount if you buy three boxes of figures from them.
• A bevy of bits from Crooked Dice, because even though we’re not caught up with Doctor Who, one day we will be, and on that day I’ll have all the minis I need to strongarm my kids into playing games with me. I also bought a nice abombination that used to be released by Harwood Hobbies (fun fact - I was once googling to try and find this mini that I vaguely remembered, and the top result was a forum post by myself that I didn’t remember making many years before recommending the same model). And a little mechanical owl, which I have no real need for, but couldn’t resist going aback for when he caught my eye as I was waiting for my companion to finish paying.
• A burly Mandalorian type from Diehard miniatures, because May the Fourth is coming up soon, and while I could paint a mini that I already own, 
• A Dragonborn fighter type from one of the endless 3d printing stands, as zi need something similar further down the line in the family D&D game
• A handful of board game minis for my kids to paint, and a monster from Mammoth’s gumball machine (after remembering at 11 the night before that I’d forgotten to get any pound coins, I was able to scrounge together a handful thanks to my wife and daughter, only for there to be only a single ball left in the machine by the time I got there!)
• Some Perry Spanish guerrillas - in case you haven’t guessed, I’ve been reading Sharpe’s adventures in Spain in Portugal, as well as the book Rifles, so have a hankering to put together a British and Spanish force a la Sharpe’s Havoc (with additional guerrillas, so I guess part havoc, part Rifles?)
• A mini from Bad Squiddo that looks suspiciously like a Spanish Guerrilla leader (and also a free bunny wearing a saddle, which was a nice surprise!)
• Sharpe and Harper from Tangent, although I also came away with some additional Chosen Men 
• Some Foundry Wild West townsfolk, because several Legends of the Old West scenarios need about a dozen non-combatants
• The usual freebies in the goodie bag - the aforementioned sprue of Quar, a resin dwarf, and the show figure, a rather lovely Napoleonic chap that will definitely see use in the Silver Bayonet and potentially in actual (gasp) historical Napoleonics.
• Other than that, it was some resin barricades, some grass tufts, and the usual haul of flyers, stickers and tiny rifle sets. Also some d20s from gumball machines for my family.

Which all in comes to 180 miniatures added to the Tally (counting mounted figures as one, and artillery pieces as one too), leaving the year so far looking like this:

7 vs 204 = -197

I should probably get some painting done…

Although this morning my youngest wanted to paint a miniature, so we did:

Salute 2023!

So, after a long time away (having not been since 2018, as in 2019 my son’s due date was the same time as Salute, so I skipped it, and then a global pandemic made it tricky to attend large gatherings) this year we were back to our annual pilgrimage to Salute, this time with an additional party member, my oft-alluded to friend that derails all my projects by showing me cool stuff (see Rangers of Shadow Deep, Inquisitor…)

Said friend drove us up to Canary Wharf, so this year was a much less bleary eyed trip than our usual break of dawn coach! 

After spending almost no time at all queueing, we paired off and started our preliminary tour of the stands. I wanted to run straight to Mantic to make sure I was able to secure the show exclusive Hellboy release, and then signed up to play a game of Silver Bayonet, as it’s on the project list:

I ended up taking the Russian unit, by dint of them being closest to me when it was time for our slot to begin at 10:30:

(This is before I’d annotated the sheet with brief descriptions of each model so I knew who was who, and also what colour we were using for the skill and power dice)

After we’d had the rules and scenario (troll bridge, with a hint of zombie villagers) explained to us (as three of us had never played before), it was time to begin! Everyone else made cautious advances on the objectives, hugging cover, but I figured it was the time for guts and glory and threw everyone bar my rifleman forward (who hung back and managed to land a fairly telling hit on my friend’s officer - I felt kind of bad about that, but he was the only figure he could see!)

My poor Light Cavalryman (who had so far mostly been tasked with standing in front of my Officer as a human shield, as he was the only one of my pistol armed troops that didn’t also have oil and torches, which I suspected might be handy against a troll) was then tasked with grabbing the clue marker, which of course brought the troll into play:

From this point on my only objective was to take down that troll. My rifleman popped out to snipe it, and everyone else cocked their pistols menacingly. My Officer had originally planned to shoot it before charging in heroically to slay it in hand to hand, but then I remembered that the icy river was difficult terrain so he’d have to forego his shot to have any chance of reaching it, so instead rather sheepishly moved behind the Light Cavalryman to prepare for a slightly less courageous but slightly more tactically sound counterattack next turn. Which was probably for the best, as the troll hurled a rock at the Light Cavalryman which (thanks to my opponents on the other side of the board spending Monster Dice) absolutely exploded him (cue ‘Team Rocket blasting off againnnnn’ quote as I remove him from the board).

While all this was going on, the players on the other side of the board controlling the French and Austrian units were cautiously closing on each other, with an Occultist doing their spooky thing whilst a Dhampir charged in to fight the opposing officer only to bounce off. My friend (controlling the Prussian unit), was much more tactical than I was, using cover and tactics to try and swoop in and steal my kill:

As the guy running the game explained, it’s not who does the most damage to the troll that gets the XP…

At this point, with my counterattack poised and ready to take down the troll, our slot came to and end, and I found out I’d have only needed to do 4 more damage to have finished it off! 

I thoroughly enjoyed the game, and so Silver Bayonet might see a little bump up in priority up the Project list… one brief highlight was looking up during the game to see the designer Joseph McCullough watching us play, so I gave him an excited thumbs up! Also, that troll was quite a nice looking miniature… 

They also had a copy of the first expansion on hand, despite it not being out until next month, but I only managed to have the briefest of flicks through it after chatting with one of the other players before we had to head off to make space for the next batch of players.

Once we’d finished our game, it was time to do the rounds! The original plan was to do a lap first of all to scope things out, before swinging back to select stalls, but in the end we’d only seen about half of them by the time we stopped for lunch, and then rest took us pretty much to the end of the day! I was apparently also bad at taking pictures throughout the day, having a chum to chat to as I went round rather than my usual lone wolf approach, so what follows is only a tiny fraction of the goodies on offer at Salute.

There was a glorious Mordheim table, complete with glowing comet crater, and a ton of cool looking warbands:

Not bad for a game that’s been out of print for two decades!

Brief aside: every year, the tradition is that we have a picnic lunch sat on the grassy area just outside the Excel centre. Alas, this year we discovered that it was now a building site:

Bad Squiddo released a giant squid that is frankly impressive that it all fits in the blister:

I took a picture of this Batman game, as we were reminiscing about a previous Salute where I and another friend got overly excited and made a number of elaborate plans (and purchases!) for the Batman Miniatures Game. There have been multiple editions of that game since, and we’ve still not managed to play a game of it…

Giant barrel of dice:

The guy at the stand cut me a great deal on the fistful of dice I had at the end of the show!

Other things of note were thinking that I’d somehow missed the Hasslefree stand, only upon hunting it down after lunch to discover that they weren’t at the show (which outs a dampener on my plans for May the Fourth!) , and having a nice chat with Karl at Crooked Dice about plans for filling in gaps in their range, and the Doctor Who Miniatures Game (must remember to email him about that Preachers pdf!)

And so, to the meat of any Salute post, the loot: 

I took out a chunk of cash in the morning, to avoid having to deal with the terrible signal at the show and also for budgeting, which I only went slightly over.

I got:

The Limited Edition Lobster Johnson for the Hellboy game

A variety of scenery bits from Renedra, including an old barn and some fencing that I thought would work nicely as Mordheim walkways without their fence posts,

A sprue of Napoleonic Brits to round out my Silver Bayonet unit

A Frostgrave ruler, offered in consolation when I asked if there were Wizard Sheets for Second Edition and there weren’t

Some new clippers from TTCombat, as my GW ones have vanished and replacing them is insanely priced, as well as a pot of reasonably priced superglue

Plenty of Crooked Dice minis to fill gaps in my Who collection

A blister of Penangalan miniatures, as they’ll do nicely for my Ronin of Shadow Deep project

A 3d printed greenhouse to go with the set of gardening supplies that I’d picked up from Bad Squiddo

The same troll miniature that had been used in the Silver Bayonet game that I played in,

Some dice, including one with a rubber duck in,

Some bases, because I seem to have run down my stash of those,

A selection of minis from Tritex Games for my son to paint,

A not-who set from Tangent Miniatures that came with a song,

A selection of Burrows and Badgers miniatures to see if my daughter is ready to take the step up to metal miniatures and maybe play some games,

Amongst a number of other odds and ends!

Adding it all up, the Tally now stands at:

11 vs 41 = -30

Also noteworthy was grabbing Pat from the YouTube channel The Painting Phase as he was minding his own business doing some shopping to tell him how great I think the channel is, me being offered a peg:

Which got me a querying look from my wife when I posted on Instagram that I’d been pegged…

So, what does the future hold? Fortunately, due to the excitement of having miniatures that are explicitly his my son demanded that we do some painting today, so I was able to prep a couple of miniatures for painting at the same time…

What a mess!

As previously alluded to, I’ve also knocked something else off of the checklist! 

Loads and loads of lovely crates and food supplies - a set from Bad Squiddo and one from Zealot Miniatures, but both sculpted by the talented Ristul’s Creations so they all go together perfectly:

Technically there’s an extra piece here, as I had a duplicate piece and one missing, which was swiftly sorted once I’d noticed - I was looking for the piece with pumpkins on and couldn’t find it anywhere; I’d assumed my children had had it away, but on further investigation discovered that I had two of one of the sculpts, can you spot which one appears twice in the above picture?

So, RoSD scenario 1 checklist is tantalisingly close to completion:

• Mystery additional structure
• Trees
• Cart
• Well
• Woodpile
• Crates and barrels
• a playing surface!
• Treasure tokens

In other news, while I might be sworn off GW currently (Cursed City made me reassess my relationship with GW, and I realised that I’m not the target audience, and that I was still buying White Dwarf despite not really finding anything in it useful or interesting except for a modelling article, so I figured I should just cut ties for now and focus on more indie stuff) I’m apparently not sworn off a bargain:

Two packs, after a miscommunication, but I’m sure I can find a use for another space marine and robot lad.

Thanks to previous sales, the Tally is still looking fairly healthy:

19 vs 8 = +11

Although it’s my birthday on Monday, so it might not look that healthy for long…

Virtual Salute 2020 and lockdown hobby progres

I didn't get to go to Salute last year, as it was to close to my son's due date (spoilers: he ended up being born nearly two weeks late, a good month after Salute!), and having only missed the show once in the last however long I was looking forward to going this year.

Alas, with everything going on the world it wasn't to be, but I thought I'd recreate the experience at home by spending the day ordering myself miniatures instead (thank goodness for enforced lockdown reducing our spending on frivolities to allow us to justify a treat like this!), occasionally tweeting using the hashtag #virtualsalute2020.

Whilst it's not the same (I did especially miss the picnic that my friend Joe normally brings), my children made sure that I was suitably sleep deprived to recreate the 'up at 5 to catch a coach' feeling, and so coffee in hand I placed some orders! Then over the next fortnight (as the postal service is understandably variable currently) parcels of joy started arriving on my doorstep!

First of all was a package from Anvil Industry:

Having been enamoured with Zona Alfa and seeing a lot of cool minis over on the Facebook group, I picked up some PMC type chaps as well as a load of guns, pouches and whatnot that should allow me to convert any number of modern miniatures (as I'd been struggling somewhat, as my bits box is largely fantasy and science fiction based, with a grand lack of AK47s). I also ordered their rat swarm miniatures after seeing them on Ash Barker (of Guerrilla Miniature Games) Instagram (and he was nice enough to respond when I asked him where they were from).


Next, was Bad Squiddo Games:

I have coveted this set of resin foodstuffs for a couple of years now, but generally at Salute by the time Annie's stand has quietened down enough for me to get in there these have sold out, so now was the perfect time to acquire them. They've already seen use, but as props in homeschool math exercises (as daughter didn't want to play a math game, but was perfectly happy to come to 'Daddy's generic fantasy shop' and work out how many pieces of stock had been taken by raiding barbarians...)

Seeing everyone else posting their parcels made me wish I'd bought a few more things from Bad Squiddo, but alas there are only so many hobby funds and I wanted to place orders with a couple of companies...

Next was Crooked Dice:

Essentially, the Militia 2 set that I didn't order on their Birthday, as well as some other odds and ends, including some X-Commandos that I thought would make good stalkers for Zona Alfa with a head swap and some additional gubbins from my Anvil order. Also included was a freebie of a guy holding a crow, which was nice!

Then came Mantic:

As soon as I'd heard that Salute was being postponed, I panicked a little bit, as I hadn't ordered this last year when it was originally available, as I was going to get it from them direct at Salute. Thankfully (after a week or two of tweeting at them whenever I could) Mantic found some stock at the back of the warehouse that they made available to order (and were nice enough to message me to let me know that it was going live so that I didn't miss out). It's a lovely sculpt, so I'm incredibly happy that I was able to get one.

Then came CP Models, who wouldn't have been at Salute but I had been meaning to put in a little order with them for a while:

Some fungus faces (for the long postponed The Last of Us project), Mei-Lin the ex-Statuesque Fembot (for cyberpunk), a Batt-Ball player that I've had my eye on for a training droid for a Scarfworld introductory scenario, and a plague doctor, as a sign of the times. They also threw in a freebie set of alien heads, that I'm sure I'll be able to find a use for.

Still to come is a little order from Fenris of some scenery bits, but there's no miniatures in it so it won't affect the Tally!

Salute wasn't the only thing to affect the Tally though...

As previously alluded to, but not actualy posted about on the blog thus far, I placed a a little Crooked Dice order on their birthday:

Mostly for that cyberpunk girl with a robot arm, which is essentially the perfect sculpt for my feelings towards the genre (I walked out of the cinema after watching Alita filled with a desire to play a game where you buy robot arms). Word to the wise though - although you can't tell in the pictures on the webstore, the miniature has very prominently sculpted nipples, which is an ... interesting choice. Maybe they're also a cybernetic upgrade? I may give them a little file before I undercoat her lest they draw attention away from her aforementioned sweet robot arm... 

As well as this, Uncle Johnny (who lives not half a mile down the road from us) was after a 1/48 scale US Army helmet to put onto a smaller scale miniature to see if it looked better than the existing oversized one, so daughter and I dutifully used our daily exercise allowance to go for a walk and slip the following into their letterbox:

Obviously, as Uncle Johnny is far too generous by half, he left a bag of treats on the doorstep for me:

He'd previously asked if I fancied a sprue of German Infantry when I had bemoaned my lack of non-fantasy miniatures to kitbash bandits for Zona Alfa, and due to hating the idea that I might finish the year with the Tally in the positive he stuck in a whole box! I may have to take just the one sprue and post the rest back through his door to keep the hit to the Tally down... There's also a load of small Star Wars helmets on display stands, as apparently he ended up with a load of duplicates whilst filing gaps in his collection...

So. all in, the Tally stands at:

1 vs 56 = -55

(I only counted one sprue of the germans)

Don't worry, if you know what time of year it is you'l know that there's going to be at least one point put on the other side of the scale very soon...

Due to being furloughed from work during the ongoing lockdown, I've also managed to get some hobby time in. Not much mind, as most of my time is spent homeschooling, cooking, or doing one of the seventeen loads of washing up we apparently produce daily by all being at home, but some nevertheless.

Firstly, I've been sprucing up some Mantic ruins to use for Zona Alfa:

It took a long time to green stuff away the connector holes, but after a couple of weeks doing a little here, a little there, they're now finally ready for painting.

Then, a buddy messaged me about Rangers of Shadow Deep, and I thought 'a solo wargame that I could play using miniatures I already have? that sounds doable' so I find myself making a village:

(the eagle-eyed among you will notice that this picture was taken moments before I realized that I'd stuck the wall on upside down - I only noticed because the gap in the thatch didn't align with the doorway, not the fact that the door didn't touch the ground...)

Whilst technically I would be able to play RoSD sooner than ZA, as I have to paint all the miniatures for ZA, whereas RoSD I can mostly fill the ranks with the generic fantasy miniatures I've painted over the years (although sidenote, I apparently don't have any giant spiders, which is going to be an issue with the first narrative arc of the campaign that comes in the main rulebook), scenery is another matter, as I don't have any rivers, or bushes, or trees, so I'm going to have to make some generic fantasy terrain! To that end, although I have most of the material I'd need, I made some of my own flock:

Sawdust plus paint, simple! Given how much I want to make (and also doing it quarter of an hour at a time means fairly straightforward tasks can take days) it looks like lockdown will end before I get a solo game in, but who knows...