It's like waiting for buses.

 

 Y'know, you're there for ages and then two or three turn up at once*.

So GW have decided to expand their plastic DKK line and also launch plastic warp spiders and pheonix lords at around the same time.  And there are plastic striking scorpions I havn't bought yet.  

It does make me think that I should just not ever look at the interwebs at all for anything.

Another couple of hundred quid to sit in the garage for years just at the time I'll be paying for Christmas, probably.  

I'm gonna see if I can't just 'not buy any more'.  These things fall outside of my usual rules of aquisition (ie they are not bits to finish existing projects) so they shouldn't be bought.  

And no-one needs a Valdor with Leman Russ tracks conversion, do they ? Not that I've been thinking about that for twenty years.

 *for context, for those who have genuinely never see this, it happens in London when the traffic patterns are distrupted (by traffic light failures, roadworks, other distruptive vehicles and/or deliveries on bus routes).  The buses cannot pull out for whatever reason until someone lets them out, and sometimes this is the next bus.  So you end up with a little packet of two to four buses all arriving at the same time. 

 

Amarillo Pattern LeMan Russ

As shown a couple of posts ago.

This is the same two tanks with their basecoat on.

With a unified colour on the model, they look more homogenous. 

I'm liking this look, these are turning out as imagined.

 

Tiny Leg Ends DKK sappers

You'll recall me mentioning that Tiny Legends also produced a DKK Engineer kit.  This is half of the kit put on to Anvil bodies.

All of the comments and observations I made about the Grenadier kit hold true here as well. 

This guy is digging with his entrenching tool. There are other possible arms with axes and picks and hands with shovels. 

Having said all of that, there are weapon options and I've of course chosen the revolver action shotgun. 

There's plenty of actual engineer kit as well. 

And these Anvil bodies, "Gorka Suit Bodies" have the knee pads and plenty of belt kit.  It may not come out in the picts, but the PLCE has stabilisation straps as well.  Excellent work, Anvil, beautifully done.

And the match between the kit and the bodies is great.

 Five more to do

Book Reviews 'n'such

This was generously loaned to me by Admiral Drax, when I saw him last in the flesh.  It's two soft cover volumes in a slip case with interviews with some of the key people from the early years of GW, starting in Sunbeam Road.  A lot of it seems to be almost the transcripts of podcast episodes, but I might have been imagining things.

The interviewers are two of the protagonists of the time anyway, so it really is a whole load of old people trying to remember things together (I have a lot of sympathy with that) and some interesting anecdotes of where some of the more interesting ideas ("Mad Shit") might have come from.  I'm not going to buy my own copy, but it's well worth sticking your nose in if you come across it on a friends coffee table.

Dave Taylor did a book called Armies, Legions and Hordes which is absolutely fab.  Love that book.  It's success obviously got his over creative mind bubbling away again and to prevent his pot boiling over, he came up with another jolly wheeze - get artists he likes to layout some content in a coherent manner and he'll publish the books.

Now, to be fair, the people he's spoken to are all top notch artists.  And the books are produced in batches of three (why not ?) and done through Kickstarter.  So if you sign on, you can get your set in a slipcase.

The backs of the three slipcases for the first nine books/artists are here, if you want you can click the pick (thanks Inso) and it'll give you a flavour of what's inside.  Some of them I've looked at once, some of them I keep going back to.  And then I drift off and want to give up work and just finish Devos IV and stuff. 

The front cover.  These are possibly not the most affordable thing ever.  And I'd hate to recommend one just in case someone bought it and then didn't like it.  But there's a fourth one coming (volumes 10 to 12) and yeah, seeing who is featured, I'm in again.  I can stop any time I like though.

Just 'effin' stop Dave, you're killing me.

This is also a KS related book, Carbon Grey.  It's an Alt History of a very early twentieth centuary Europe.  They did a whole game system with minis and everything.  There's possibly copies of the game stuff and the fluff stuff on ebay or Noble Knight Games now, as it's a couple of years old.

 I found it quite entertaining in it's own right.  The layout, storyboarding and so on match the pacing and narrarive well enough.  There are little bits I can pinch and slide into my games background, which is what I got it for.  

I hope that someone out there found this interesting.  Back to minis next time.

Tiny Leg Ends DKK grenadier conversions

It is a sad fact of existance that things wear out, that stuff that used to be part of the fabric of our lives, Woolworths, stable government, peace in Europe, road bridges in the USA, all eventually disappear, leaving us wondering where we could possibly buy pick'n'mix, 45 singles and ironing boards in the same shop.

On the Brick of Scrutiny today: 

Most of my DKK was bought, over the phone, during a break in a clients rest area in about 2008.  Come about 2020 people on the interwebs were a bit vocal about the non-availability of some of the DKK range (whilst utterly oblivious to the disposition of the Tallarn and Elylisian model lines).   It's not that FW didn't want to to stop making them, but those moulds must of given up the ghost.  So ignoring that FW has been folded back into GW for a minute, the advent of the plastic DKK Kill Team box set reignited interest in the whole DKK catalouge.  

Into this breach steps a guy in Estonia, one man banding a conversion set, to let you change your Kill Team into a Grenadier squad.  "Ha," I hear you say, "Zzzzz, I see where this is going, you don't really need any more minis at all, you're right outta space to keep them in, you never build them all anyway and then you just twine on about the amount...  What ?  already ?!?!"

 

You're quite correct gentle reader.  But yeah, I did.  Bite me. 

The website is pretty good, the kit you get is crisp, complete and competantly thought out and modelled.  There are little guides as to which of your new sets of arms and heads will match which bodies.  Once you get around that, it makes sense enough to use the kit properly.  The armour bits are at the limit of current resin technology.  If you look hard, even some of the filter/power backpacks are for the left handed variants.  You are not going to notice in a game if someone has used the wrong one, it's only noticable if you pick 'em up and look hard.  These kits are great 10/10, would recommend.  

As well as a rough rider to Death Rider kit, he does Engineer kits as well.  Obvs FW's DKK moulds had all given up around the same, except the Line Infantry ones, which, producing more models, had been refreshed some time before, which is why they're still going at the minute.  It says quite clearly on the website that for the engineer kits, you might a result you like better, using the new Cadian box.  So Tiny Leg Ends is paying attention to aesthetics and technical compatability with the kits, which must be harder than concentrating on one of these aspects alone.  Kudos to such a craftsman. 

Valour Korps Bodies with FW resin weapons

 

Valour Korps bodies with GW Plastic DKK arms

 

Colours 2023 - Newbury Race Course Sat 09 Sep 23

Well for a start finding the right car park at Newbury Race Course is not easy.  And visiting the alternatives means fighting your way back onto the main trunk route through the town each time.  But I suspect most people research the location a little more rigourously rather than follow the 'race course' signs.  Like that'd work ! 

The following is full of wild generalisations in order to make an arguement, it's not intended to be a dig at a certain demographic (within which I'd probably be counted) or even a certain games system: it's just my perception.

Anyway, I went to meet Admiral Drax, who is now to found contributing to Wargames, Strategy and Soldiers.  So he goes to a lot of these as part of his contribution.  Newbury is an hour south for me and quite a trek north for him, so the chance to meet at Colours 23 seemed to serendipitous to pass up.

But you're here for the show, so a few words about that.  I managed some snaps, the first groups were two very impressive Vietnam tables, one out in the boonies centered on the downed Huey and one set in Siagon itself.  The detailing on the Siagon table in particular were worthy of a diorama, let alone being used as wargaming scenary.  

The ground floor was packed with stands for vendors, but I have perviously learned by lesson when it comes to these shows, invariably something bought here is never used or ends up being passed on, so the only thing I did buy was a book.  For research.  

I have noticed that prices for things have generally increased.  Which makes things pricey for me and I'm not badly off.  If I was me of even ten years ago then a single purchase or two might be ok, but I couldn't afford a new game system/army/whatever.  This is relevant for my later diatribe.

The clientele was overwhelmingly white, male and at least middle aged.  Which is perhaps not a surprise, as we noted at the time, these are the people with the cash resources to fund a pricey hobby like this in the first place, the time resource to actually build and paint their armies and tables and the space resource to store all of the this stuff and also get it all out and play with it.

This in and of itself is not neccessary a problem.  As long as there are more old white men coming into the hobby to replace those who get too old (or just keel over).  But that might be a problem in the future, it is almost certain that those people have been wargaming for decades, so didn't enter the hobby as 'around retirement age'.  ie twenty years ago, the demographic of a historically based wargaming event like this would have included a significant tranche of persons twenty years younger than those present in 2023.  The average age of the historical wargamer would have been lower. Fight me.

40K, as we all know is specifically targeted and marketed at new players, who tend to be in their teens.  People who might ot might not explore wargaming more generally, who might or might not wargame consistently thoughout their lives and who might or not 'leave the hobby' for years or even decades and then return.  And the constantly changing meta encourages behaviour like having the prime army for each edition or update of the rules, rather then what we see in hisotrical wargaming where the same army might be used in multiple rulesets or formats.  So the paradigm within which the games are played is different.  And some people might struggle with that.  If you start a conversation with someone about 40K they will assume that you're both talking about the latest edition.

So then there's the general state of society and the economy (stoopid).  The next potential generations of wargamers for this type of thing are much much less likely to have the resources (money, time and space) as the current players, even when they get to the same point in their lives, perhaps they will be short on one of these at least.  

So given the likely constraints on their future resources, the 40K paradigm of  'sell your army and get another one each time the rules change' makes sense: less space, some ROI.  You only have to look at ebay each time there's a new edition or new flavour of the month codex.

This constant churn is possibly the antithisis of historical wargaming.  Your ECW army might be good for multiple rule sets and be used for more than one depending on what type of game you want to play that day.  And by adding in or leaving out cerrtain units you could use most the ECW army in the Wars of Spanish Succession or even 30 Years War.  A markedly different paradigm and one suited to the more available time and space for it as well as the cash to acquire it in the first place. 

So perhaps in the future there is going to be less appetite for historical wargames, new wargamers are not moving into it: I see the evidence of that everytime I visit one of these.  Salute (not been for years) has a much stronger SciFi and Fantasy vibe and has much broader demographic.  It's still almost all male, still almost all white, but there is a much broader age range.  And there are historical wargames there.  And historical wargamers (still oldies) so it superficially looks like 'wargaming' as a healthy future.

But I would contend that what is seen at events like Salute is not the real picture, that events like Colours show that there is very real chance that historical wargaming in the form it currently has (and it's a great time for the hobby with new manufacturers of just about everything and 3D printing as well) is unlikely to survive another twenty years.  It's just seems not to be getting new players.

Do I think its doomed ?  Amongst all the new stuff there is a lot to appeal to those who are fed up with the revolving door nature of 40K - a host of new games in short play, skirmish format based on commando raids, weird WW2, Dr Who, Blakes 7, Flash Gordon and so on. Currently a lot of these games appeal to certain demographic (Dr Who, Blakes 7, Space 1999 and so on certainly date us all to between Quatermass and the Pit and Star Wars).  But products like the Star Wars games, like the GoT game by CMON and others which may follow on might just be enough to spark some interest in historical gaming and keep it alive.