Vapnartak !!!

At last, the moment that you have all been waiting for. What did Epictetus make of Vaprnartak having had a full week to digest and cogitate? Well, after due consideration I can say that it was OK.

The venue is of course wonderful. The previous venue, the Merchant Adventurers' Hall, is a lovely building, but a crap venue. Apart from anything else it was very dark inside. The Knavesmire by contrast, with its glass walls is spacious and airy with plenty of natural light. The attendees bring their usual accessories of beer bellies and BO, but possibly they have less impact there because one knows that the ambience would be far worse at a race meeting. The dress code at a flat race meeting is better, but there are ten times as many people and, by the end of the afternoon at least, they are all very, very drunk.

A typical wargamer

It was good to catch up with some friends. Mark Dudley of 'Ilkley Old Fashioned Wargaming' put on a game of Maurice using Prince August figures. The game with its plain terrain and large units was a nostalgia fest and the rules seemed to live up to being as good as my reading of them last year. I think that one reason it attracted the attention was that pretty much all the other display games were far too crowded. Those putting them on probably said to themselves 'I've painted it so I'm bloody well going to put it on the table'.  Understandable, but it means that the games never progress much, let alone finish and that anyone with any wargaming experience at all (which yes, cynics, does include me) knows that they're not representative of real life games anyway.