A Weekend's Campaign-ing at MK

Wow! Doesn't time fly? It's May again and we're back at Centre:MK for another Campaign show.

This year the spine of the team was me & Tim from SHQ and NBS committee member Alex who did both days. We were joined by Chris A, Richard L and Grant across the weekend too.

Photo by Alex Howes

We were outside John  Lewis as usual, which is handy for toilets and the key retail outlets for us over the weekend: Greggs, Costa and Pret a Manger.

The showpiece game for the weekend was the 28mm Edgcote stuff I've been working on. I wrote a bespoke set of rules for the show, called "Edgcote Express" *, designed to get the whole thing done in 20-30 minutes, with lots of player interaction and loads of dice rolling. Target audience based on experience is 8 - 12 year olds with a parent, so the mechanisms are aimed at them. It is mainly a design to tell the story of the battle and involve the participants in it.

We also had the old favourite of the Northampton 1460 game out too. I played it a couple of times on the Sunday, which is something I don't do a lot of these days.

We played Edgcote 6 to 8 times over the weekend, possible a bit more. Pembroke had a good weekend, winning quite a few games by routing Robin of Redesdale before Clapham arrives.

First game I played against Tim to get warmed up. He's a relatively new wargamer and hasn't got the hang of pointing yet. I think Pembroke lost this one, mainly because he wasn't bold enough.

I then played a game against the target demographic. They won as Pembroke.

As did the next young participant too.

The "Dance of Death" casualty recording system went down well.

By the end of Sunday Tim had graduated to running the game himself.

Footfall at the show is still a bit odd by historica standards, and patterns of when people are there or not have not recovered and are not back to replicating pre-Covid. Trade stands were up on last year, which was good to see, and the two traders I spoke to both had very good weekends, which is good to hear.

We were less successful compared to previous years, with sales down and we didn't pick up any memberships either. We may get some by post/email over the next week or so but that's a faint hope really. If you don't close the sale at the time it is usually too late. 

Regardless, it is a show worth doing because of the general public you get to interact with.

We will be back next year, I'm sure.

* The rules went down quite well, so I will try to do a pack called "Edgcote Made Easy" with orbats, game layout introduction and rules over the next few weeks.