Wednesday 4 December 2013

Salute 2013: Demo Game and Set Peices (24/04/2013)

So yeah, as I mentioned on my last post there were some absolutely Cool demo games and some real disappointing ones too. Here are some Photos! (Some will even have writing)

So, upon getting to the Excel Centre I had to marvel at the size of the queue just to get into the show. This was about half an hour before the doors were supposed to open, and both the pre-paid line and the on the door line were amazingly massive.

This was the queue in front of me when I got into the line.

This was the queue behind me 10 minutes afterwards.

More line! It was of an impressive length

Some Hammer's Slammers gaming. This table was absolutely huge, loads of tanks and other vehicles going on. You can see the length of the table with this shot but it still doesn't put it properly into perspective.

Zoids. I stopped and did a double take when I saw this table.

Yeah, I wasn't imagining things. Someone had done a Zoids tabletop wargame with some ancient looking zoids toys that they must have bought online or from specialist collectors. I don't know about you, but for a good couple of years when I was younger Zoids were the coolest toy if you were a bit nerdy and weren't one for football.

WWF wrestling match game using WWF action figures. Man, The FiancĂ© kicked herself that she wasn't here to have a go on this. She loves wrestling!

Sadly, I think the amount of models they brought was completely un-nessicary as I didn't see more then 2 games going on at a time. But the table still looked hilarious as, as you can see many of them have been posed to look like they're backstage.

It was a kind of dicebidding game, I think - where at the start of the game each player drew dice out of a bag. Different coloured dice and different coloured symbols did different things... It was a bit like King of Tokyo but not quite!

A close up of some Snits

This was the most impressive demo game of the event - It even won an award for the most innovative so clearly I wasn't the only person who thought so!
Snit's Revenge is a game about little monsters climbing up a giant monster's bum and kicking its internal organs to death while the giant monster's immune system fights back.
It was amazing.

The Bolotomus in all its glory.

Some HUMANS

Apes (Some on Horseback) Chasing down an Astronaut as he tries to escape. This was a planet of the apes games using Akula's Rules: Skirmish Edition (Cunningly Referred to in this instance as 'Monkey AR:SE). Looked very good fun and sadly while I'd been watching the ape cavalry had caught up with the poor hero.

YOU DAMN DIRTY APES

Some freaking sweet spider-tanks

Freaking sweet spider tanks in alternate WW2 wargame

Rather generic fantasy 15mm battle. The models were relatively nice and i'm attracted by the use of hex grids in games :P

Close up of the models from above... They definitely look nicer when you aren't zoomed in.

Generic Medieval, again using the same Hex grids

The same Japanese historical wargame that was there last year.

Some cool alien flying ships take on the colonial british, as far as I could tell...

Yep. Definitely the brits. Pip Pip!

This caught my eye. Remember a game called 'Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven'. This was basically a miniatures version of that, where several people tried to achieve several different goals all at the same time as a ninja with special rules. The guys running it seemed fairly enthused, but No-one was playing it when I got there.

Generic sci-fi game

Dreadball, which is basically futuristic Blood Bowl, as far as I can tell. The models were, in fact gorgeous and as you can see the (optional) stadium is pretty freakin' sweet. But the thing that baffled me the most about the Dreadball stand was...

The Booth Bunnies. These poor girls looked so absolutely bored that they might as well have been naked for the fat lot of good it did them. They seemed utterly un-interested in interacting with anyone and with what was going on in general and seemed genuinely surprised that people were ignoring them in favour of looking at tiny plastic men. But hey, what are you going to do, right? Nerds are gonna nerd.

Some MDF terrain, which was pretty sweet.

Ok, so this is what you get in a dreadball box - A cardboard game table and two teams of plastic models. The models are of exceptional casting and as usual, I was utterly happy to discover that Dwarves had received some love. (Space Dwarves, no less!).

DWORFS
 
This was an interesting looking game - It was Odysseus escaping from a slowly shrinking island which was presumably getting swallowed up by the ocean which it looks like the various players had to loot items and get to their home island to win. Pretty swanky.

The 731st were there, asking for citizens to stand aside as they patrolled Vader around. hee!

A really sweet looking castle.

Some guys dressed up in WW2 gear. The guy dressed up in the german uniform was trying to do a german accent which made me cringe a little.
I really hope he wasn't actually german, otherwise I'm going to get hate mail.

The table accessories from the above picture. Pretty cool.



This dude can rule my dungeon any day.

Ok, so this stood out as a bit different - As you can see there are clearly little floating islands all over the place and some form of flying ships ready to traverse them

... Now, this was a bit clever. Notice what the ships are on there? Car antenna. You could lower them up and down to show how high your ship was flying from the gas. Innovative!


The Jason and the Argonauts Table. I was slightly disappointed when the Argonauts were the same size as the colossus. That would have changed the film significantly.
Yes, the Argonauts and the Skeletons were freaking massive. Action Man size.



This Malifaux table was damn popular. I don't know if its obvious from this photo, but this was actually two separate games being played at the same time - the train was splitting the board! Nice!

Terraclips stuff is seriously fucking pretty, guys. I was hella tempted.

The Road to Berlin

More Road to Berlin


The Dropzone Commander table

This thing was utterly amazing. That's all constructible card cityscape, that the company was selling for what I felt was a pretty reasonable price. Pity its all 10mm really. They had a pair of binoculars so that you could zoom in on the buildings and the really great painted models they were selling. Serious pretty.

This was also fantastic - all the little purple crystals were LED lit and illuminated the whole thing in this awesome dim purple glow.


This guy was sweet. Those LED's flickered like he had a fire in his chest.

Full Thrust Space Race game - to the Fast Food Joint at the Centre of the Universe!

And finally... The Trebuchet! It was in the doorway. Verrah nice...

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