I wasn’t shopping for anything in particular this year, but there were the usual plethora of tempting trade stands, and I did actually end up buying some very nice “clumps” to use on my big element bases.
Magister Militum were conspicuous by their absence (being in the process of being sold) and as I wandered past where they usually were, I remembered that I bought something from them at their first show ever. Can’t remember what it was, but I’ve been a regular customer since, and they have always given excellent service. Let’s hope the enterprise goes to an equally good new home.
I thought that the display games were better than usual this year (there’s a gallery of some of them below) and I even played in one of them: the soon-to-be-published mini-skirmish game set in the Edo period of Japan currently known as Bonzai Bonkers or, perhaps more properly, To The Last Sword or similar. Incidentally, Sid, if you’re reading this, my 16-year old thinks the latter is too generic and that Bonzai Bonkers is the way to go! Kids, eh?
The game is excellent fun whilst, as with all Lardy games, really engendering the feel of the period/theme it’s designed to replicate: here, all the jidaigeki/chambara films that I love. The rules are very easy to pick up (my opponent, Gary, and I were working out our own combats etc within ten minutes) but involve a suitably fiendish amount of decision-making.