Northamptonshire Battlefields Society was back at Milton Keynes Campaign this weekend just past. This show is one of my favourites for meeting the public as it is free to enter, and takes place in a shopping centre. Consequently you meet a lot of members of the public who know nothing about the military history of the area or wargaming. For an organisation like us this is a great environment to work in as we aren't simply preaching to the converted. Everyone we talk to, everyone we inspire, adds to the body of people who know enough about our heritage to care.
We had a pretty much scratch team. Due to circumstance the mainstay of the stand was Chris K and me with most of our regulars missing. We were supported by Tim and Richard from Shedquarters, and Grant and Alex from the NBS committee who dropped in on and off throughout the weekend.
We had our Middleton Cheney model, plus our small Edgcote and Northampton 1460. This is our table configuration on Saturday. That long run of tables was too long.
Here's Chris, Tim and me putting the final touches to the display. Well, that's my story. We're actually having tea and cookies.
Our participation game this year was 10 minute NQM scenario, featuring the Northamptonshire regiment in Italy.
On Sunday morning I tweaked the layout to give us a corner so we weren't walking up and down so much.
It's great to see how much joy simply putting a 15th century replica helmet on a small child can bring! This was Grant's first ever wargames show, but he soon got into the swing of things.
Holding that big sword is always popular too!
I did a run around the other participation and display games, but as ever didn't have enough time to play. I love the idea of the Playmobile jousting game, however.
The competition tables were busy all weekend too, which is good for the hobby. Alas the trade stands were down to an absolute bare minimum. They've been declining for a while, but the Coronation bumping this event to the week before Partizan can't have helped.
We had a really good weekend for the Society. Besides bringing on some newbies to the stand helping out, we recruited a couple of new members and sold a good cross section of our books. We handed out so many leaflets we need to do a reprint of our 2023 programme leaflet. And we're nearly out of Edgcote books. First job on getting home was to stick in re-orders for these.
The bad news is that the removable camp section of the Northampton 1460 game board went missing between covering up yesterday and stating this morning. It's unlikely to have been nicked, I think, so perhaps it has been tidied up by someone in error. Anyway, that puts the board out of commission until I can build another camp insert. That's a real nuisance as I've got a couple of things on the modelling side I need to do in the next fortnight, and I don't even have the components to rebuild this bit. Which means it won't be at Partizan next Sunday. I expect we will be, however.
See you there.
What a fantastic way to get the word out. Inspiring, even! I ran a 40K game last week at work, and am hoping to run a couple ACW games to promote state history during the summer.
ReplyDeleteI never thought of using Playmobil knights to run Full Tilt before - I've been trying to find a way to run it, since each player can build, paint and customize their own knight. I'm torn between paper minis and plastic.
The Playmobil guy is keen on using anything to get people wargaming with minimal barriers to entry.
DeleteThanks for the link. That's a bit later than we normally cover - or a bit early for the ECW! - but it might be worth a look. HEMA has grown a lot in the last 10 years, which is great news for our understanding of the period.
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