It's the time of the year for MKWS's Campaign show in Milton Keynes. If you don't know anything about it, it takes place in a shopping mall, and it's free to enter. Well, actually it's in the open plaza in front of John Lewis so it isn't so much "free to enter" as "you can't avoid walking through it". We were show casing our 2026 game, which is about 6th Northants Battalion in 1918. We're using NQM. This is the game we've been playtesting recently. I will hopefully post the various scenario rules sometime over the next fortnight, after we've been to Partizan.
I did a new pop-up banner about the battle, and Chris did a cartoon. The team for the weekend was Chris, Tim, Steve & Alex. We need to be more disciplined about not putting coffee cups on the table.
That's our pitch, on the left hand side.
The business end of the tournaments are off to the other side.
Steve and Tim shouldered most of the interactions with the public, whilst Chris and I mostly ran the game.
We played the game five times over the weekend. It takes just over an hour to run through completely, but we played one game in chunks, with different players.
The British did pretty well in most of the games, following the original plan fairly closely. As this is a game to keep show players happy some of the "bumps" that caused the British issues historically have been smoothed out. When I take it to COW I may well re-introduce some of the bumps.
The players on Saturday weren't really familiar with wargaming the period, or the style of game, but they took to it really well. Game play was very smooth, even with complete novices.
The two games on Sunday were played by more experienced wargamers that we know. They listened to, and understood, the briefing, and ran fairly flawless attacks, with a little bit of help from some lucky dice rolling, including the inability of German artillery to hit pretty much anything. Most games saw a VC won by the Northants, twice in almost perfect historical context.
The game isn't the most detailed nor the most sophisticated piece of terrain and model building to ever be out on at a show. It has to be portable and go in the boot of my estate car and it has to use kit I've already got, mostly. However, people reacted well to seeing a large scale WW1 game and it was a good opportunity to overturn the "Lions led by donkeys" trope that persists.
Otherwise chatted with some old friends and handed out a lot of leaflets.
The only fly in the ointment was a parking ticket wrongly affixed to my vehicle on Saturday. An appeal has been lodged. Very pleased I asked for a receipt in what is a ticket less ANPR car park.
Right, now I just need to unload the car and repack the boxes for Partizan next Sunday.
Busy, busy, busy.
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