Pendraken 20th Birthday Bash

Today I secured a full day pass and headed down the A19 to the Pendraken Birthday Bash. This was to be my final capitulation as I succumbed to the lure of 10mm! What can I say about the day. I got there just before 11 and the games were in full flow. And I can say with confidence they all looked bloody great!

The Border Reiver club demo’d a brand new SCW game made purely for the event, the ‘Fight for Madrid’. This looked excellent and was a great showcase for the range.

The Brompton Bankers displayed their fantastic Ratshire game. This looked excellent with some lovely vignette bases (Irn Bru facility!), excellent terrain and a superb info board.

Goat Major and GavinP ran an excellent little AWI participation game using Black Powder. The figures were lovely and the painting did full justice to Clib’s lovely scuplts. I managed to take part in the afternoon game of which more anon. Fun game and nice to see Simon and Gavin again.

Hoka Hey Wargaming‘s Rorke’s Drift participation game looked good too. I didn’t really get chance to stop and chat though.

Burnley Wargames Club displayed the Battle of Jarama, 1937, another piece of SCW action! This looked great fun with excellent figures and terrain.

Section 8 Games club had Morocco 1908, as the French try to relieve Fortress Soixante Neuf. It was nice to see a Colonial game that wasn’t Sudan. Some very nice figures and terrain.

The WWII Pacific participation game by Rubicon with the USMC attempting to seize a couple of bridges from the Japanese was an excellent little game. The board was only c.4’x2′ but it really showed the benefits of 10mm. It used the Blitzkrieg Commander rules. I had a nice chat with Rubicon(?) and was very impressed with the terrain and the basing (nice use of tufts). Unfortunately my other photos all came out blurred!

The games really did justice to the Pendraken range and there are more pics in this gallery. All of them were well presented with excellent terrain and figures. And it was a friendly day. Everyone willing to chat. Inevitably I spent more than I planned. I was intending to get the first of my 1st Schleswig-Holstein figures so I collected them. I also grabbed a load of bases for assorted projects from the Minibits stand. And some static grass. And some orange paint. Oh…and a small army pack totally unrelated to any period I am currently doing! 🙂

I had an interesting little chat with Goat Major at the end about using 10mm for skirmish gaming and I have a feeling my planned IABSM games will end up in 10mm and not the 6mm I had planned. But not ’til next year!

The afternoon was spent playing an AWI game with GavinP and Goat Major using Black Powder. I’ve never played the rules before and we had some doubts over their use as stands for AWI. Especially re skirmishers. I recognised a lot of the mechanisms from my Cold War Commander games and did enjoy them. I can see them working well for bigger games with a few ‘period’ tweaks. There are some pics from the game and a more detailed writeup here.

So all in all a very good day. I have resisted 10mm for quite some time. I almost slipped into Colonial last year but resisted. But I fear this is the start of something…:)