Salute Number Ten

Another Salute, the UK's biggest wargaming show, has been and gone and it only occurred to me on the day that this would be my tenth. My first was in 2006 and I have been to every one since.

Cloudships of Mars Salute 2006

In last year's post, I described Salute as "a pop-up wargaming superstore that trades for only one day each year." I still think that's an accurate description, but I don't think it's a negative thing. Salute is essentially a trade show, but one that gives small producers and traders representing what is, still, a very niche hobby the chance to reach the largest possible audience. At the same time, it gives hobbyists a chance to buy products they would struggle to find anywhere else.

But ten shows has left me wondering if their have been any major trends or developments? My Salute 2006 experience was dominated by Privateer Press who had just launched Hordes and had a huge stand set up at the front of the show to reflect that. Also present was Wizkids games, producers of Heroclix and other pre-painted miniatures with dials in their bases. Despite their medium-sized stand, their foot print was greatly increased by row upon row of demo games.

 SF30 Salute 2009

Both were largely absent from Salute 2015. Privateer press long ago gave up running a personal stand, although their miniatures are still represented by a number of traders. Since being sold by their parent company Topps, Wizkids has become smaller and more US focused, and their presence at Salute has dwindled.

Games Workshop too has given up running their own stand. They are clearly comfortably represented by independent traders and it is unlikely they ever did much business given the amount of discounted Games Workshop products available elsewhere. Forge World was left to fly the Games Workshop flag, and was still doing well this year, although they had eliminated their usual disorganised mob in favour of an orderly, if extremely long, queue.

Lego Star Wars Salute 2010

In contrast, independent trader Wayland games have seen their presence expand year on year to the point where they are essentially running a their own wall-less games shop from the centre of the Excel centre, offering proper checkouts, carry bags and the chance to pay with plastic, a dangerous temptation for many wargamers.

This year, however, they were challenged by the Troll Trader who were offering a similar open-plan shopping experience, combined with even sharper discounts and an extensive range of bargain bins.

Trebuchet Salute 2013

If there is a trend here, it is the character of the show has shifted from being dominated by big producers to the larger independent traders. That is not to say that producers do not have a presence. A great number including, but not limited to, Perry Miniatures, Heresy Miniature, Hasslefree Miniatures, West Wind productions, GCT Studios, Crooked Dice and Warlord games, have been attending Salute for years meeting enthusiasts and diligently plugging their latest games.

But the biggest players, by which I mean those with the largest footprint and the most visible presence have shifted. With Games Workshop and the largest US companies gone, the place has been taken by traders, but they can only offer what the producers supply. Wayland and the Troll trader may get the bulk of the business, but the shopping experience is likely to be brief. If this gives the small producers more time to actively engage with their customers this may be no bad thing.

Stingray Salute 2015

One significant shift made only this year was the change to the Salute grand prize. Previously this had been a raffle held at the end of the day in which a random ticket would be drawn and the winner given a large prize of Salute vouchers. This had the effect of keeping a lot of attendees at the show until they end and ensured that a large crowd gathered for the shows gaming and painting awards.

This year, the prize draw was replaced with golden tickets hidden in three of the shows goody bags. The winners, and the much larger number of losers, knew where they stood much earlier in the day,  but it removed one incentive to stay to the end. Whether this lead to a tailing off as they day progressed I don't know, because for the first time in ten years, I didn't stay until the end.

Exponential Growth

The UK Games Expo was one of those events I always seemed to miss because I thought it was later in the year than in actually was. By the time I got round to looking at tickets it turned out to be the following weekend, or worse, the weekend just gone. But last year I finally got my act together and booked tickets for Saturday and Sunday.

The Expo is a very different event from Salute. While Salute is, essentially, a shopping experience focused on wargaming, the Expo is a multi-day event which is as much about roleplaying, board games and card games as wargames, if not more so. It also a broader event, taking in tournaments, roleplaying events, seminars, family rooms and even some weird new electronic games.

 You can tell this isn't a wargames convention because the Forge World stand isn't buried under the bodies of the dead and dying.

It also takes place in a hotel, which lends it a very different atmosphere to Salute, which is to say it has one. That isn't entirely fair to Salute, which does have atmosphere, but one that is entirely imported, the location itself being essentially a huge sterile box. The Expo has spent the last two years in the NEC Metropole hotel in Birmingham, which gives it more the feel of a convention or conference.

 Raising funds for world conquest through begging in a hotel lobby. How the mighty have fallen.

I had a great time last year, playing and buying a bunch of different games. Having a room in the hotel meant you could retire from the bustle for a rest, or drop off your purchases so you didn't have to drag them around and there was plenty of space set aside to simply sit down and game. The organisers even offered a game library, which was a nice touch.

Given how much I enjoyed last year, I made sure to get myself organised this year, booking time off work so I could take in the whole event from Friday to Sunday and booking in for a tournament and a roleplaying session as well as making a point of attending some of the seminars, as I had ignored them last year.

 Some strange new game that runs on electricity. I doubt it will have much appeal.

This years Expo was even better attended than last you could see it was a big success. Though not everyone seems to think so - take a look at this blog post and then come back.

To be fair, Saturday was by far the busiest day and things did ease off considerably by Sunday. The bring and buy sale was accessible and the trade halls much easier to navigate. That said, I wouldn't have wanted to try negotiating the Games Lore stand mid-morning on a Saturday with a child in tow.

 Annoyingly, I forgot to take any photos until Sunday, so these make the event look positively sedate.

The organisers had taken into account the increased numbers and booked more space in the hotel. This meant there was a third trader hall, many of the tournaments were moved into a separate area and the amount of space for roleplaying events increased. But some parts of the convention couldn't be or simply weren't expanded. The seminars were still held in the same room as last year. This space had little ventilation and the air-conditioning struggled to cope with the mass of bodies. The trader hall increased in size, but so did the number of traders so there wasn't any more room to move. And, weirdly, the breakfast buffet, which had been a relaxed affair last year, was left with queues to get in and then again to get food. Again, to their credit, the hotel had recognised the problem by Sunday morning and opened up a second area.

All of this illustrates the paradox of these kind of events. The more successful and popular an event, the more attendees it attracts, but the more this increases crowding and reduces the enjoyment for those same attendees. Eventually, the event has to move to a bigger venue, which costs more and so demands even more attendees. And so the cycle continues.

The organisers of the Expo seem quite relaxed about this at the moment. In an interview in the show guide they talked casually about attracting as many as 10,000 attendees. However, the organisers of other shows have adopted a very different attitude.

The Salute guide included a half page advert from Newbury and Reading Wargames society announcing that their annual show, Colours, would not be taking place in  2014. Apart from the weirdness of advertising the non-existence of a show, the advert neatly illustrates the paradox of success. The advert is quite blunt, the event had simply gotten too big for the society to run comfortably and they would rather take a year off to plan than face a potential disaster.

 Colours 2014

Nor is this a problem unique to wargaming. Hyper-Japan is a Japanese cultural festival taking in elements of fashion, food, manga, anime and any other bit of Japanese culture it can find, including Yakult. It has always taken place from Friday to Sunday, but this year the Saturday event will be further divided into two seperate events divided by a one hour gap between 14:15 and 15:15. This was, apparently, to avoid the huge queueing problems created because the show had more attendees than insurance would allow into the venue at any one time. I've booked a ticket for Friday and it will be interesting to see how many others make the same decision.

Similarly, I have skipped the MCM London Comic Con (Formally the London Expo) for the past two years, because what was once a reasonably relaxed event had grown to the extent that you could expect to queue for over an hour for entry, even with pre-booked tickets, and could expect the same level of gridlock experience at the UK Games Expo Games Lore stand on Saturday, at the whole event.

Is there a solution to this? I think there is, of a sort, though it's a fairly brutal one. Either a show reaches the point Colours has, where its organisers decide its all gone too far and decide to kill it or rest if for a while or it grows so big that the experience stops being fun and the show dies on its own. I'm not sure that has happened to any show I know of yet, but it remains a possibility.

 Well-attended or over-crowded?

But doesn't that mean the show is dead? Well, yes, after a fashion. But if the demand is there someone, somewhere will step in and set up a new show, starting from scratch and the business of watching it slowly grow begins again. And so we retain a kind of equilibrium in which shows come and go, but the experience of them remains constant. Where is the Expo in this cycle of growth and decay? Who knows, ask me again next year.

A gesture or other action used to display respect

So Salute, probably the UK's biggest wargaming convention not run by Games Workshop, has been and gone a few weeks now, which gives me enough time to reflect on it (or alternatively I've been too lazy and disorganised to write this until now). It's a strange beast of a convention, larger than almost any other and yet oddly specialised and lacking elements of the others.

Let us take a look at the venue since 2006, the Excel centre in the heart of London's regeneration zone, spitting distance from Canary Wharf, where high finance feasted on the corpse of the old working class. It is essentially a huge empty space in which things happen. It has no character of its own, but imports it through the events it hosts. So while other conventions occupy schools, hotels and leisure centres and somehow take on some of the character of the locations into themselves, Salute takes place in a characterless void. Which is not to say it has no character of its own, simply that what it has it has to bring with it, giving us the purest vision of the character of a wargames event, uninfluenced by anything around it.

 The queue is now big enough that it gets its own convention space, creating a kind of pre-convention, convention. Albeit a rather dull one.

Excel is also staggeringly vast. On the day of Salute it was simultaneously playing host to registration for the London Marathon, an event for property investors,* and some kind of baking convention. Given the overwhelming male bias towards wargaming and the lesser, but still existent, female bias in baking, I like to imagine the possibility of a husband and wife combination attending the same location on the same day for different conventions, meeting up at the end of the day and possibly for lunch. That the largest wargaming show can occupy only a small part of its venue says something about the nature of wargaming as a minority pursuit.

The Excel centre also provides convention attendees with a range of refreshments through booths arranged between conventions which, this year, included a pop-up restaurant. An apt inclusion given that Salute is, in essence, a pop-up wargaming superstore that trades for only one day each year. This is why it amused me to see a Salute guide posted on the Miniature Page that suggested arriving late to avoid the queues and to go to the gaming table while everyone else is buying. As if gaming is the primary purpose of Salute.

Lord of the Rings played with large scale figures. Achievable for most gamers in a smaller scale

Which isn't to say that the gaming isn't important. It is. But it's role is similar to that of the open tables in Games Workshop stores, to make the hobby manifest. Wargaming is a hobby that offers much more than it initially supplies, relying on its enthusiasts to add much of the value to the component parts supplied. The games show us what the hobby can be. The simpler games show us what we can do, the more complex, something to aspire to. Without them, we are simply buying lumps of metal and plastic (and the odd nicely decorated rulebook). There are no tournaments at Salute, so all games are a form of demonstration, even if its a demonstration you can interact with.

 Most gamers probable couldn't or wouldn't do this

So what is the appeal of Salute if it is, essentially, a huge shop with highly restrictive opening hours and a charge to step through the door? In the Internet age there is nothing at Salute that can't be had with a few minutes web-searching and a few days or weeks wait by the letter box. What's lost in postage, is regained in not paying for tickets or train fairs. And yet, even as I cut down on the amount I spend at other shows, I still strain my budget to take us much as I can to Salute and come home with a bag bulging at the seems with new metal and plastic bits. Why is this?

 Jugula, Gripping Beast and Tomahawks new Gladiator game. Demo-games are already part advertising

Wargaming is fundamentally tactile. Its minority enthusiasts a hold out who still insist that their gaming experience must be actual and not simply digital. Given the hobby's origins, how could a virtual shopping experience satisfy? Of course we use online stores, the opportunity is too good, but at heart we will always want a physical experience of shopping, one that excites with the physical possibilities of our hobby before we have paid any money. And that is what Salute offers, for one day of the year

*There's a glorious juxtaposition here between an event for people who expend a considerable physical effort for the benefit of others and a sense of personal satisfaction and one for people who intend to make money off the back of a necessity without contributing any real value to it.

Colours at Newbury Racecourse - A Show Report

Before we start, apologies for the poor quality of the pictures. I forgot to take my regular camera so these were taken with my IPhone.

Colours, hosted by Newbury and Reading Wargames Society, has been always a show that I thought was too far away and too small to be worth the effort. This only goes to show my poor geography skills as I discovered earlier this year that it was only two short train journeys away and so, with My Little Brother in tow, I set out to see what it had to offer.

Colours certainly takes place at a slightly unusual venue. Rather than the more common school hall, convention centre of leisure complex it takes place at Newbury race course. Or rather one of the substantial hospitality buildings set up to watch the races. It certainly provides ample space, but in a building designed for height and view rather. The end effect is three long and thin floors. In fact it was rather like taking a conventional hall, slicing it in three and stacking the three bits on top of one another with quite a lot of stairs in between. This still left plenty of room for games and stands, but did leave a few rather squeezed. Simple Miniature games had inadvisedly brought an extra stand up display rack which meant getting to their stall was like squeezing down a narrow alley. Atmospheric, but not very convenient.

The Venue - in its rain-soaked glory

I had thought of Colours as medium-sized show, but that probably comes from comparison with Salute which is insanely massive. In fact it was quite big, with over 70 traders in attendance including plenty of familiar local faces but also a few bigger names like Warlord and West Wind. I was surprised not to see Mantic, as they had sent a stand to the much smaller Valhalla earlier in the year. But there was no shortage of their products on offer. In fact the bigger companies may have suffered on the day as they generally stick to official prices while stands all around undercut them. Why pay full price for Warlord miniatures when you can save a couple of pounds by walking to the stand next door?

The show format put the traders at bottom, working up to a level of half traders, half games and then to games, tournaments and the bring and buy, with a few exceptions for contrary traders putting on demo games, like West Wind showing off Mercs and GCT demoing Bushido (of which more below). I thought the layout worked quite well, allowing you to get your shopping out of the way before ascending a few (well quite a lot) stairs to play some games.

I went along with no fixed purchasing plans and allowed myself to get lost in the ranges on offer. GCT games and Bushido caught my eye. I had been vaguely aware of them from news items on TMP and TGN, but never paid very much attention. They were another fantasy skirmish game and I had plenty. Sadly a good display demonstrated that you can never have too many games and their fantasy take on Medieval Japan was an immediate draw. Both MLB and myself left satisfied with a starter pack each to try.

Gaming wise there was a good mix of Historical, Fantasy and Sci-Fi games and also of participation and demo games, though there seemed to be fewer quick 'pick up' games then I have seen at other shows. Many of the participation games seemed quite long runners requiring you to dedicate an hour or two of your time. Though perhaps this was more about timing and I simply missed the shorter games.

A few games caught my eye. Crooked Dice's 7TV demo looked impressive and quirky as always. 7TV uses the same basic engine as their previous Doctor Who miniature game, but with a theme based around cult TV shows and films from the 60s to the 80s, like the Avengers and James Bond at its camp height. The rules make reference to episodes and cast, rather than games and armies. It also has the advantage of needing no licence and so they can actually sell it, unlike the Doctor Who game which remains determinedly unofficial.

This set up saw a team of heroes face a villainous alliance in their lair in a dormant volcano (where else). Obviously a great deal of work had gone into the board, with the obligatory giant missile and the little yellow helicopter a particular highlight.

MLB and myself spent enjoyable hour with the RAF Wargames Association playing a Stargate themed games searching for missing scientists in an ancient Egyptian temple. The scenery for this came from a Playmobil set purchased on Ebay which shows that you don't need to spend ages on bespoke terrain to produce a good looking game.


A couple of other demo games stood out from the crowd. A stone age people hunting mammoths scenario by Lincombe Barn Wargames Society featured some striking mammoth models and well made fire templates. And I finally saw a game based around the opening scene of Gangs of New York by Maidenhead and District Gamers, something I have been wanting to see since I first saw the film.


On a side note, the food on offer was also slightly better than normal for a show of this size. Taking advantage of the Race course catering facilities there was a range of pasties and paninis, albeit with a long queue, and a licensed bar. Definitely a perk for some gamers, though as a non-drinker not so important for me.

Overall an enjoyable show with a good range of traders and games. My only regret being that I missed it in previous years.