It's that time of year again to head north into the lead belt for The Other Partizan, only this year with some slight trepidation.
I'm beginning to realise that in some areas of my life I don't really like change. I didn't like it when the organisers put us all together in "The History Zone". I preferred it when shows mixed different things in together. I'm still not sure if we were better or worse off from the change. I think, broadly speaking, that we suffered from being put together in a history ghetto and that we were less likely to be "stumbled upon". Still, we developed what we did to make best use of the space.
This year, a week or two before the show we were advised of another change. The "History Zone" was to go, and all Societies were moved into the entrance gazebo, between the bring and buy and the main hall. This is needed to accommodate the every increasing and ever enlarging 28mm "demo" games in the main hall.
My initial reaction was that we should see more people go past the the stand, but that area is definitely a corridor you use to move in and out of the building. Getting people to stop was going to be a problem, unless we already knew the people stopping ("Oh hi! It's you!!") or they'd come with the intention of finding us.
Which is sort of what happened straight off, with the arrival of Dr Gary Sheffield, historian, wargamer and member of WD. He immediately declared he wanted to play our WW1 game, as he missed COW and he'd also never played NQM.
Tactically he was faultless, as you'd expect from the man who wrote "Forgotten Victory". Alas he did roll some terrible dice and lost the barrage in places. However, his judicious use of armour enabled him to keep things moving.
He succeeded in taking the all the main objectives, but failed in his attempt to win a VC.
He rounded off the game with some gratuitous pointing.
Chris was running a D Day NQM game down the other end of the stand. You can see from this picture the issues we had with the set up. The space was a bit more cramped, and we didn't have room for all of our banners, as the roof struts were too low in places to put up the full set. You can see from the first photo on the blog that the Ronssoy banner ended out in the thoroughfare, which wasn't ideal. It was also not safe to let people handle the weapons, and trying on helmets was also more difficult as people made their way past us.
Chris had sorted his issues out with the D Day game, and it looked good on the end of the stand. Unfortunately it turns out there were no Northants Regiments of any type landed on D Day itself, so it's back to the drawing board for next year.
I managed to get away from the stand to pick up some paint I needed and have a very quick look round, but it was very busy and we were a bit adrift, so quick trips weren't really an option, even with four of us running things (thanks to Chris, Steve and Jason).
Were my fears born out? Well, for the first time in my memory we didn't sell a single book or anything. We didn't take enough cash to cover the cost of the bacon butties for the team. By comparison we sold 10 books at Partizan in May, which is around about what we expect. The only thing different was where we were standing. I checked with the organisers and was told that this is it for the future.
So we will need to look very seriously at our offering for next year. Chris says all the copies of NQM he brought up for Dave L to sell went, so that bit worked for him, but it clearly isn't working for us. Whilst our presence is as much about telling the story and sharing the message about the need for battlefield protection it is good to be able to cover our costs, but without a doubt not only didn't we do that, but we had considerably fewer interactions with people too.
I get why this is happening. We don't pay for our tables, traders do. Traders want to be in the main hall. near other traders and the high profile figure fests in the "Demo Zone". If they'd been where we were and had the sort of day we'd had and paid for a location, they'd not be happy.
The Society of Ancients, who were next to us, had a much better day, selling quite a few games. This even included some of the ones I designed. We need to think about what they were doing that we weren't.
Much to ponder, with no obvious solution.
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