Autumn 2002

29th Sep: Visited Essex Warriors open day. I was a founder member when I lived in Chelmsford. The club still going strong after 25 years. Small, but friendly. Enjoyed watching a DBM version of Kadesh. It was nice to see the game fought to a proper conclusion. Bought a copy of HOTT.

29th September: Finished the last Aristia battle. Quite a dramatic finish - the Carinthian army lost, but only lost 2 elements, 1 Kn and the Kn General! This concludes the campaign season on Aristia, so all armies will now return to winter quarters.

HOTT is a nice DBA style game, but I'm not entirely sure what to do with it yet. Two possibilities are: Border Reivers and War of the Worlds. Pirates? but who do they fight (apart from each other)?

20th October: went to SELWG. Good lot of traders, but the games were not that brilliant. Apparently they will not have the lower hall next year, so they will have to move the Bring & Buy upstairs to the other hall. This will remove about 10 traders. Maybe I won't go next year… Had a chat with Jon T. who said that he definitely plans to include other genres, such as western gunfight and VSF in FMA when it is finally published. We also briefly discussed the "big vehicle / beastie" problem.

Bought some toys:
Russian infantry (2nd hand Airfix, from BB Wargames)
2 T34s (resin kits from Frontline)
2 wild west figures (Kennington figs going cheap, 50p each)
Roman infantry for the Roman fort I'm doing for Cunningham School (Essex)

Tried to get some Wespe SPGs, but no-one seems to do them now that Matchbox has gone. May have to do a conversion job on a couple of PzKpfw IIs from Frontline. Frontline are definitely the cheapest source of 20mm WWII vehicles these days.

I don't know why I am doing this, but I seem to be building more armies for Rapid Fire. Maybe I just like WWII games! Shades of my youth...