The HAWKs staged Barrage XXIX (really, 29?) on 26 and 27 September, at the Havre de Grace Community Center. Things suddenly got busy after that, so this has taken me longer to write up and post than I had hoped. I have been finding that things have expanded to fill most of my available time in retirement, so I’m not sure how I used to find time to go to work and still get anything else done. But here we are …
Since we became a 2 day convention a few years ago, we now set the hall up on Thursday night. We generally have about 20 tables set up for gaming in the main room, and there’s also a side room that gets used for an Art de la Guerre tournament on Saturdays. I believe there were about 50 scheduled events and we had about 190 attendees overall.
I had the opportunity to play in one game on Friday, a session of an ancient naval game using the Thalassa rules and some 1/300 scale 3-d printed ships, hosted by Walt Leach and a couple of his friends.
A convention is always a nice opportunity to play some games I wouldn’t have time to prepare myself.
Both of my sons came up from the Washington D.C. area on Saturday and helped me run a 40mm Not Quite Seven Years War game with
Charge!. Once we had it set up we had a little time to spare, so
Norman set up a quick game of DBA using his most recently completed armies, and William and I played it out.
For the NQSYW game this year I dipped into my standard resource, C.S. Grant’s Scenarios for Wargames, and selected Scenario 15: Reinforcements in the Defense (On the Table), a scenario I have used many times before.
The attacking force was provided by the Pragmatic Coalition (forces belonging to myself, Norman, and William) and the defenders by the Northern Alliance (forces belonging to Chris Palmer and Duncan Adams).
The defenders occupied a large hill, seen here in the far center of the photo, and the attackers need to clear it before reinforcements arrive. As is common in this scneario, both side’s cavalry ended up in a scuffle in the clear area on the near side of the hill (from the point of view of the photo above).
The Pragmatic assault eventually carried the hill, but not without ferocious casualties.
Everyone agree that the Pragmatic Coalition would not be able to hold the hill against the counterattack from the Alliance reinforcements which had deployed:
I did get a chance to add my most recently completed unit to the Alliance defenders, seen here shortly before they broke:
A few musketeers of the North Polenburg Queen Jennifer Regiment have become intermingled with them in the swirl of the battle. Overall, it was an unusual run of this scenario; the forces on the hill held out longer than expected, and my sons and I were discussing the possibility of doing a little mathemtical modeling to see how unusual that was, but we haven’t done it yet.
I had good luck with the flea market this year. I sold almost everything in the three boxes of stuff I brought, and went home with a few books and a couple of small bags of Airfix figures to add to projects befopre actual and potential.
Now it’s time to prepare for Cold Barrage in March …