COW 2023 Friday Evening

After the stopgap of Shrivenham last year, WD has been on the look out for a new venue following the closure of Knuston Hall. The organising committee settled upon Missenden Abbey. This is a bit of a further drive for me than the local venue - and it includes the M1 past Luton and the M25 as it was Silverstone Weekend. As it was we had a fairly good drive down, and I was accompanied by Phil and Test Match Special.

Missenden Abbey is a wedding/conference centre, with a big newish block tacked on to the side of a former "stately" home. It isn't as compact a venue as Knuston, and I don't know that I ever got the layout fully sorted in my head, but I'm sure after a couple more visits that won't be a problem. The rooms were comfortable and modern, as were most of the rest of the facilities. The catering was excellent, if a bit slow on the first evening. We'd have liked the bar open earlier and to run a bit later, but no doubt that can be improved over time as well. From my point of view it was a more than adequate venue, that ticked pretty much all of the boxes. If I hadn't been to Knuston, I would have said it was perfect (and better than Madingley, where the SOA holds its conference), although I would also remark that we did have our issues with Knuston over the nearly 40 years we used it.

Enough of that, and on to the games.

The Plenary Game was by John Bassett, and was based around the factional fighting/politicking around the set up of the Weimar Republic.

The plenary session begins. WD members try to make sense of their briefings 

Dinner had overrun quite badly, and we ended up starting the game about 90 minutes later than intended. What with one thing and another we just needed to get on with it. My faction - the Independent Socialists - started off in the power sharing interim government. Alas as a group we were slow to assemble, and never had a chance to discuss what we were doing. We were well into the first turn before one of the team arrived and pointed out we hadn't had a chance to sort out a strategy. His then subsequent defection to the Spartacists rather upset the delicate power balance. 

To create that vibrant atmosphere of the period, John had arranged for us to have cabaret singers (didn't have the heart to tell him Mack the Knife dates from 10 years after the events of the game), an excitable Albert Einstein, and a passionate Otto Dix convinced that art is the answer to everything.

As a group we got thrown out of power towards the end, but we achieved many of our objectives around the form of the constitution and even the National Anthem.

With the plenary game over, it was time to head off for some mysterious adventures, as another "Footfall" team were despatched on a dangerous mission. Tom Mouat's "Footfall" teams are like the X-Files team with extreme prejudice. There's normally a shady civil servant (me!), some scientist and a group of lantern jawed SAS types. And in this case, a psychic teenager. For this mission we were sent to a disused oil rig which had been the subject of scientific research, and it had all gone quiet...

The game reaches its climax, as the young psychic covers his face in horror, amidst some serious pointing.

There was a large amount of blundering around in the dark and tripping over corpses. I won't go into too much detail, should Tom ever wish to run it again, but we all got out alive with enough information on what we'd found to make a coherent report. Alas who knows what unspeakable horrors we may have unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. 

But it was 2am, so, honestly, I took it as a win, and we all went to bed.