1920s Pulp and WW2 Malaya at Vanquish Show 2018.

Tring Wargames Club attended the Vanquish show at Bourne End on Sunday with two games. Vanquish is a small event, held in the Bourne End Community Centre, with about 15 traders and half a dozen demonstration and participation games. It also offers basic, but good value refreshments (my breakfast bacon roll had 3 rashers of good quality bacon) and a bar serving some excellent Rebellion ales from the Marlow Brewery.

It was a fun day, both games went well, although the Mounties didn't always get their man in my pulp game.

I was particularly impressed with the mix of traders, there was an absolute minimum of duplication in the stock on offer (in recent years I have often wandered around some of the larger shows and felt that I've seen the same stand 4 or 5 times!). I was quite restrained compared some other club members, I picked up a couple of mdf inserts for Really Useful Boxes from Commission Figurines, a few nice resin scenery bits from The Square and a few paints.

Our two games were:

Winter War 1920. A pulp games set in a fiction border war between Canada and the USA using The Men Who Would Be Kings (I really like these versatile rules which I've used for Colonial games, the 1912 Balkans War and various pulp-style scenarios).

The Long and the Short and the Tall. A WW2 game set in Malaya based on the play and film from the 1960s. This used a set home brewed rules specifically designed for a kids participation game using old 54mm plastic figures by Airfix.

I also continued my tradition of running a game appropriate to the foreign visitors to the show. A couple of years ago I was running a 1912 Balkans War game at Warfare and had no sooner laid the game out when a Greek couple came rushing over, having seen the Greek flags from halfway across the hall. This time, almost the second I put the mounties on the table a Canadian couple wandered over!