The main hall, Brendan defending Malta in the foreground, Greece behind
more pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dom_gamer/ (thanks to Andy Smith)
Pitiful showing in terms of blogging here recently , so I guess I'd better make an appearence.
For the past week, and indeed the previous month has been taken up with the annual pilgrimage (and planning) down to Cornwall for the annual mega-game.
This has been going on for TEN(!) years now.. It consists of a week long WWII campaign in 1/285th and this year involved about 30 players.
There is a lot of pregame planning and decisions (which is my pathetic excuse for not blogging)-this year was a mediterranean 1941 campaign. Consisting of 3, 3 month strategic turns, which produced games in the widely varied theatres. In order to make it work, there were a few fudges, not least of which was that the Germans kicked off Barborossa in about march 1941!
This way they could run 3 games on the Eastern front during the week, simultaneously with Balkan, Desert, and middle eastern scenarios.
Overall, the system worked. In the past there have been games which have been run as a more conventional map campaign -previous games have included Kursk, D-Day (twice) France 1940, 2nd Kharkov. Personally I think they (we?) should go back to a conventional map game though it appears there is a groundswell of opinion to continue with this broader system, I hope not, but come what may I'm sure I'll be there. Not quite sure what will be the game for next year.
I had great time, fighting 2 games over Malta, the first with an Italian airborne division which after 2 days ended in the prison cages. This was then done again with the German Paratroopers showing how it should have been done. This was a cracking game which went down to the last die roll of the last turn.
For the third game I went to the desert - still commanding Paras- where I was a speedbump on the road to Bardia for 2 rather immense Commonwealth infantry divisions. It was a bit bizarre to spend a whole week fighting with micro-armour and not actually command a single tank or vehicle model.
There were a few command mistakes on both sides, and the umpires missed a couple of major tricks, but on the whole it had a good feel. This was indeed the 1oth game and quite a family atmosphere has developed, it is a very amenable week both on the tables and off it.
Blog here:
http://megagame-holidays.blogspot.com/
During the week I was also able to hand over the first 2 Wurtemburg battalions to Noel, like a twat I'd not taken any pics of them, which is a bit annoying. The next batch are now ordered and I'll start those in the next couple of weeks, those will be photographed.
Currently on the painting table is ......some Perry plastics! This quite surprises me to be honest, but I'm enjoying painting them. I'll follow up on how these turn out.
I'm getting a little bothered about my lead and plastic mountain, normally I'm pretty good at buying stuff and then painting it. Right now however I have 4 btns of Wurtemburgers plus a battery still to do for Noel, a burgeoning amount of Perry French infantry (between 4 and 6 btns, On top of this there are about 10 Soviet 20mm vehicles requiring attention, MORE tank riders (about 30) a couple of kits to make - on top of all this, I've discovered that Elhiem have done a range of 20mm infantry for Pzr Lehr (in the pzr battledress) which are going to be a purchase in the very near future.
Going to be a busy painting Spring.
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