Salute 53: the shoppening

As you may know, yesterday was Salute, and we made our annual pilgrimage (although in a reduced party of 2 this year).

As always seems to be the case, I took far fewer pics than I thought I had, mostly due to spending the time walking and talking as we encouraged each other to support a variety of small businesses, as all good citizens must.

As is now tradition, as soon as we got into the hall we rushed over to the Osprey stand to sign up for a demo game, this year being Warriors of Athena. While we waited to see if anyone else was going to sign up, we got to have a look in the cabinet at a preview of the upcoming sprues:

Here’s the board of the demo game, which is basically the second scenario from the first Quest:

I selected Penelope as my Hero, who unlike the other Heroes had no companions, but did have a bow, which I figured might be tactically optimal to reduce the chance of getting my face smashed in by a Cyclops:

The game was fun, and our luck with dice seemed to be very thematic. We were there to reclaim some honey that was due to the gods, and so bundled in to wreak mighty violence on the naughty Cyclopes that were withholding it. Things started well, with us generally avoiding getting blatted with flung rocks and even taking out one of the Cyclops brothers with a combination of bonfire and carefully applied axe, but then things took a turn. My hero, finding herself with nothing unengaged to shoot at, explored a hut, discovering it to be a slaughterhouse full of meat (some of it human). My usual terrible dice rolling skills returned in this moment when I rolled a 3 and failed to hold my nerve, and threw up at this sight. The next turn, I dashed forwards to grab the honey… which again required a roll to resist eating it (which the Gods were very clear about the importance of not doing). And I again rolled a 3(hey, she was probably hungry after losing her lunch earlier). The next turn, everything that could go wrong did, as 3 of the 4 companions were killed, and a harpy appeared just as we came to the end of our time slot, so we all surmised that I had managed to curse us:

Once we’d finished the game, we then ambled around peering at lots of lovely minis. A small selection of things I took pictures of:

Scratched paintwork, a music themed mech game that caught our fancy. No minis for it, but probably worth an investigate…

A Robin Hood game - not something on my immediate projects list, but it’s probably only a matter of time…

Butt Fish!

Dreadfjord had a cool diorama that caught our eye

Barsoom! I’m surprised I haven’t had a Barsoom project at any point, as I enjoyed the novels I’d read, and have a stack of the comics too. I even liked the movie!

Which leads us to the crux of every Salute post, the loot:

• A few packs from Foundry - assorted Satyrs and ancient townsfolk for Warriors of Athena, and some Mexican Irregulars to use as Tejanos in the Alamo project 
• A box of Perry Spanish Guerrillas, because they work for Silver Bayonet Bandits, and between these and last years purchases I could probably do a reasonable Spanish Napoleonic army… 
• A freebie of a little lizard from Twilight 
• A mixed pack of tufts, as I build up my basing options
• The event freebie of Saladin. Fun fact: I read the entire Osprey about the third crusade on planes trains and automobiles coaches the day before Salute in preparation 
• The Barons War Outremer expansion - I asked whether the rumours of this book being updated in the near future were true, which they couldn’t tell me, but I bought it as I figured it was still going to be full of cool Crusade stuff, and also they said they’d give me a free sprue of Ancient civilians (that they were giving away if you bought Gangs of Rome) if I bought it, which I was eyeing for potential Warriors of Athena use 
• Crooked Dice - some Greek themed treasure tokens, the 13th Doctor, a companion for the 3rd Doctor, and the Terminator to go with my batch of them from last year 
• Super Tiny Giant Battles and two gacha from the Mammoth Minis gumball machine 
• Some GSW basing bits - crabs, that I’m hoping look good enough based up to be enemies in Warriors of Athena, and Pigeons, because my daughter is currently pigeon obsessed and next time we play D&D will probably want her Druid to turn into a pigeon
•  Silver Bayonet Spanish Unit, because… it was in front of me and I really like the sculpts! Plus, with the various Perry Plastics I have I could definitely make a unit. He says, still needing to finish his first unit… 
• Bad Squiddo vampire hunters, in case this is the purchase that gets me to actuslly finish my original Silver Bayonet Unit 
• Warlord gave me a couple of Konflikt 47 preview sprues when I bought a pot of Strong Tone at their stand 
• A sprue of Mantic Abyssal Dwarf infantry was another goodie bag freebie 
• Sci-fi barricades (for Firefly) and Amphora (for Warriors of Athena) from Debris of War
• 2 pots of Troll Trader superglue, as a pot of that lasts a year as opposed to going through a hundred tubes of terrible Poundland glue
• A Vae Victus buttfish, and a Dwarf Slayer from a company selling orange brushes 
• 3 shapeshifting aliens from Tangent, because I try to support Wayne every year 
• The Wargames Illustrated Templar and Assassin heroes, that I had previously resisted, but were in fact right in front of me which is much harder to resist 
• A Bushido giant crab for use in Warriors of Athena - expensive, but the nicest crab sculpt I’d seen all day and a good size too 
• Warriors of Athena Mythic Bees and Athena herself - after months of telling myself that I was going to find some alternative miniatures to use as giant bees, after playing the demo game I decided that maybe the official minis were actually the way to go! 
• My Gringo 40s preorder, which had a spread of minis for Silver Bayonet and the Alamo, and even included a freebie mini of an 1860 Egyptian chap 
• The final goodie bag freebies was the annual Salute die, a sample of Warmag base magnets, and then a smorgasbord of stickers, fliers and catalogues.

Before we add all of that to the Tally, a confession:

With the best of intentions, I’d hoped to wrestle the Tally down to zero before Salute, but that didn’t quite pan out. I even took minis 250 miles to Germany to try and hit that target:

Only to discover that rather than Foundry 34B, a nice dark charcoal paint that I was planning to use next, I’d packed 34A, black. 

I was able to get some other base colours done though, although I only managed to actually sit down and paint once the whole week between one thing and another.

And in full transparency, I had also picked up another issue of the new Warhammer partwork magazine since my last post, which had added 3 more minis to the Tally:

So, running all the numbers, the Tally now stands at:

20 vs 160 = -140

Not the biggest haul I’ve ever brought home, but still unlikely that I’ll get it back into the black by the end of the year!

Things with wings

You wouldn’t know it from everything else I’ve been posting about, but over the summer I decided that my next project was going to be Warriors of Athena, an obscure Frostgrave adjacent Greek Fantasy game originally released as a series of magazine articles - and then it got announced that it was getting a proper release from Osprey! The plan is to rope in some compatriots to watch Clash of the Titans while building warbands, but in the interim I’ve been painting some suitable enemies, some Foundry harpies:

You can tell at a glance how happy I was with each individual face based on how much Blood for the Blood God got splashed around. 

It’s been a while since I painted any miniature nipples, so I turned to my big book of painting for inspiration and advice:

Looking at their backs, I tried to make the upper feathers look different to the lower feathers - I think I could perhaps have gone a bit further, but I’m not mad at how they turned out:

I think I need to start varnishing my miniatures if I’m going to play games with them though, these ladies have done nothing but fall over since I got them.

Fun fact about the bases - they are decorated with bones from a Wargames Factory skeletons set that I bought years ago from a gamer that had given up on trying to get them to go together as they were so fiddly, which was fine for me as I wanted to use them for scenery. Having rejoined the Lead Adventure Forum again this year, I was looking through some of my old PMs, and realised that the gamer that I had bought them from was actually Joseph McCullough, who went on to write Frostgrave, and Warriors of Athena, the game that these miniatures have been painted for.

Speaking of wings, I’ve also painted this little chap, an excellent sculpt as ever from Crooked Dice:

I bought him at Salute just because he’s such a lovely little sculpt, it’s mostly serendipity that I actually have a use for him now.

Speaking of little sculpt, he’s tiny, that’s a 20mm base he’s on. I suspect it may be time to dig out the magnifier that I have somewhere, that got packed away back when I was young and vital and didn’t need such things.

It’s been a while since the last Tally post though, so I’ve also received some miniatures:

Last month’s GW free mini of the month was a Chaos Dwarf, which I quite fancied, but unfortunately came out the same week that I found out that if you work hard enough, you unlock extra time off on doctor’s orders (hence all of the solo games and blog posts recently), and it was a week and a half before I could bring myself to go into town, where I discovered that they had apparently run out that morning. So instead I treated myself to this pack of D&D miniatures from the games shop on the other side of town:

My daughter has made it very clear that she wants to play a Tabaxi Rogue at some point in the future because of the Dungeon Club graphic novels, so I figure I’ll probably end up letting her have one of these when the time comes.

The next month, I nipped in on day of release to grab the Deathwatch marine, because I figured there’s definite inq28 potential there:

I also took advantage of em4’s Black Friday deals - I ordered a kilo of random dice, planning to make my children dice advent calendars, although they took too long to come to be ready for Advent, so the backup plan is to do some sort of twelve days of Christmas deal instead. I had a voucher from when em4 used some pictures of minis I’d painted on their website, so bought a slightly discounted bridge (because slowly but surely, I’m working my way towards playing that next Rangers of Shadow Deep scenario), and then figured I may as well add on a mystery bag of five random minis for a fiver to qualify for free postage (although to be fair, out any mini in front of me for a pound and I’m likely to bite) and was furnished with these:

I’d admittedly assumed it was going to be some of the weirder ranges that em4 stock, but other than one prepainted dwarf that will likely get stripped so that I have a random minis for ready the next time my son wants to paint something I got 4 Grenadier sculpts, only one of which I already own (the chap on the far left). I was especially happy with the chap on the far right, as having recently finished Cyberpunk 2077 I was tempt3d to paint up a Rockerboy, and ummed and ahhed for a while over ordering the singer from the same range at the same time, but showed remarkable restraint and resisted the urge.

All things included, that brings the Tally to:

36 vs 255 = -219 

I’d need to paint ten minis a day, every day, for the rest of the year to get the Tally back into the black at this point! I’ll settle for trying to get my finished minis up to an average of one a week though.

What’s next? More Frostgrave, and more painted minis hopefully! I will admit, I did dig out some minis that can be painted with very simple paint schemes to try and game things in my favour, but on the other hand, inspiration may have struck for another new project for next year:

And then again, I rearranged my nerd bookcase earlier to try and get all my Really Useful Boxes of minis onto shelves rather than having some piled up on the floor next to it, and found myself unearthing things I hadn’t seen in a while and going ‘ooh I should probably dig out my Strange Aeons minis right?’

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: