Salute 2015 - Post 1

Well, I'm back home from Salute and have had a chance to rest my weary legs, top up with coffee, take pics of my loots, download all the pics I've taken and make a start on re-sizing them for the blog.

I got to the Excel Centre shortly after 9, made a quick pit-stop and then made a big mistake. I decided to buy myself a coffee from one of the stalls in the concourse. Ten minutes later I finally got it - the stall was hardly busy and they had almost as many staff as there were customers. I then toddled off to the queuing hall and discovered there were (at a guess) 2000 or so people ahead of me. Having now seen some pics on Facebook, it would appear that if I'd skipped buying that coffee I'd have only had abut 3-400 ahead of me.

Eventually I got in to the main hall at about 10.15 and proceeded with my cunning plan which rapidly went to pot. I had intended to just go round all the gaming tables taking pics, pop out for a smoke and a pit-stop, go round the traders for my on-the-day odds & sods purchases, pop out for another smoke, pit-stop and to buy some lunch, head to the middle of the hall for the bloggers meet-up, go for a smoke, pick up my pre-orders then help out with the Agincourt game Donnington Miniatures were running.

Yup, like that plan was going to work. With hindsight, what I should have done was head straight to the far end of the hall and work back - that would have allowed me to avoid the worst of the crowds.

Lunchtime's bloggers meet-up was very well attended with a number of new faces. It was very nice to meet Legatus and Eric the Shed. I'm sure there were a lot of other newbies. As has become traditional, pics were taken. Here are the ones I took.

I'm sure that someone else will be posting a pic annotated with the names of various folks, but I'm too whacked to faff around with that right now.

I did manage to join in at the tail end of the second Agincourt game. There was a young lad who was rolling dice for the English and proving the old adage - kids roll high. As a result, several French units were routed by the archers before they could charge in. His dice rolling for melee was equally good and he managed to score enough hits on the unit that the Dauphin was attached to to allow a chance of killing him. He needed an 11 or 12 and quite handily rolled an 11. Four nearby units had to test for seeing him killed and two (already disrupted or fragmented) managed to break! The next round of shooting was enough to break the French army.

I then spent a while chatting with various folks who came to look at the game (we'd moved all the figures back to their starting positions) before saying my farewells and heading home.

It was while I was waiting for the DLR train that I realised I have the start of a cold. I'm really hoping it's not a nasty one as I have far too much to do over the next few days.

On getting home (and after making myself a coffee) I unpacked my bag separating loot from rubbish. So, here's a pic of all my loot:

Tomorrow I'll do two more posts - one of the games I actually took pictures of and a detailed run-through of my lootz.