It's an ill wind...

From your perspective, everything I have to say here is good news. I'm going to be getting a lot more time to work on finishing Midnight Dark and even to get back to creating more content for Zero Dark and Infinite Dark. I'm going to be making some more videos and taking a good hard look at whether to continue maintaining the podcast site (your thoughts are welcome).

From my perspective, this is all because I've resigned from my job having been put into a position in which I really had no other option. I am looking for a new role, of course, because this still doesn't pay enough to pay the bills but, look, I'm going to try to create as much content between now and finding a new job as possible, because the more I can put out there, the more sales I will generally make and the longer I can survive without needing to get another job!

Salute was great, by the way. I got to meet up with Dave (hi, Dave!) and Andrea (who I don't think is a patron, but is a big Zero Dark supporter and potential future partner in getting it translated into Italian). My objective for the day was to play as many games as possible and that turned out to be surprisingly hard, despite a very clear plan of attack (which, I've discovered, is a great tool when it comes to preventing anxiety in these situations). I only made it to about half the tables I wanted to and, even then, only got to play in about a third of the games in question.

First game of the day involved the Siege of Fallujah. Modern gaming of events within recent memory are a challenging area to discuss, ethically, but my position has reached the point where I think that it's important to be aware of the potential impact on those directly affected by these events, but that alone isn't a reason to explore them within the context of a game, and no reason not to have fun doing so.

We used a set of rules based on Ambush Alley's excellent Force on Force, with an amiable GM (Chris) helping keep things moving along. In just a few turns, my pair of USMC breaching teams, supported by the M1 Abrams in the foreground, cleared two large buildings, dealt with a couple of ambushes by foreign jihadists and secured a mighty 11 victory points before I made my excuses to move on.

Who doesn't love Tron? This game was an amazing labour of love by its presenter, with no commercial plans. He borrowed from the X-Wing/Wings of War "hidden movement dial" mechanic which was thematically built into a player frisbee. Our 3-player game saw one player quickly knocked out before I and the remaining participant managed mutual destruction in the final move.

A lot of people found their eyes caught by these rather natty spaceships built from pieces of leftover sprue that were brought to Salute by the Ministry of Wargaming. I had a chat through the mechanics for their Tiny Galaxy spaceship combat game and concluded that it would be a good game for children or people new to miniatures wargaming and on a tight budget, but it didn't offer anything original or innovative in terms of gameplay. MoW plans to release a selection of rules sets for different kinds of wargame, but with all rules being free always. I did have a chat with the proprietor about how, then, he expected to make money and he talked about his Patreon and Kickstarter and plans to release a set of "sprue only" printable kits for spaceships - which isn't as silly as it sounds.

This is the little pamphlet that goes with the game.

I'm not sure it's got a sustainable business plan, but I applaud their philosophy (and I love the sprue-based ships, some of which I will certainly thing about trying to build).

It was great to see Tonks! being played on the day, even though I managed to keep missing Ben to say hello to. All the same:

...brothers under the skin.

I had a lot of fun with this brilliant Frozen London Bridge game, where players had to try to have fun at the Frost Fair, complete their secret agendas and avoid the puritans. A case of well-managed chaos with playing cards dictating the order of play and simple dice mechanics that suited newcomers as well as old hands.

The game and table both won Best Participation Game and rightly so.

I also got to have a chat with the team at Anvil Industry, to discuss the challenges around their own Afterlife miniatures game, the pervasive and malign influence of Games Workshop of small designers, and their plans for the future. And I couldn't resist picking up one of their mechs (not the one pictured, but similar) as my only purchase of the day other than food.

Not a great photo, but I was interested in the levels of detail they were obtaining and their printer of choice. They did tell me, but as it was one of the sub-industrial standard jobs rocking up at about £7500, I promptly forgot the information on the grounds of it being irrelevant to me. Suffice to say that they get very, very crisp detail from their printers.

And I also took a 10mm fantasy game, called Argatoria (from Spellcrow) for a spin:

It's basically a stripped-down Warmaster in both spirit and design, with decent mechanics and rules. However, it feels like a game optimized for competitive play rather than to really capture the grand sweep of massed battle wargaming, which I tend to think is a bit of a shame when looking at 10mm and below in scale. The factions weren't anything super interesting. But like some other games I played on the day, it would be a great introductory game or something to play with children who were interested but who lacked the patience for something more crunchy.

Other games I had to miss out on, but which looked great included:

7TV (Crooked Dice)

The Silver Bayonet (Osprey Games)

Batman: The Miniatures Game (Knight Games) (I think?)

Star Wars Legion (Atomic Mass Games):

I actually took this photo because I felt that it was an excellent illustration of everything I dislike about Star Wars Legion. Squads all bunched up. Cards and counters everywhere. Custom dice. Meaningless terrain layout. Total absence of any flavour or drama.

And yet, I find myself curiously optimistic for Shatterpoint.

Here's a picture of me with Andrea to finish: