Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Winter Quarters ... 2015 in review ...

2015 was a massive year for me in which a number of key projects came to fruition, in which I lost another close friend and in which I ended the year moving house (almost) ...

The bare bones as far as the Shows North blog is concerned ... 22 posts tracking a year in which we attended 12 wargame shows, 6 tournaments (although 2 of these in 2015 were FoG-R, so didn't appear here), 4 Ancient/Medieval heritage events and a couple of related features ...

(each picture is a link to the show report so click the pics to find out more)

The Shows ...













At the shows for which I did the games and presentations I did the Battle of Yarmuk four times, Bouvines and Northampton three times each, David and Goliath twice ... and we did my recent Society game Greyhounds in the Slips once (Salute) and a Tony Bath's Hyboria retake at Warfare.

*****

The sad event in the middle of the year was the passing of my great friend and collaborator Andy Gittins ... founder of the Slough Barbarians, Society President and designer of the seminal Society game Gladiolus amongst many other award winning participation games and Conference projects.

Here are some of us old guys at Andy's funeral ...


And here are some of us 30 years or so earlier in a pub in Dorset ...


Such a loss - we gave the original shows copy of David and Goliath some commemorative outings.


On the tournament side, I mainly played DBA or FoG-R ... with random scenarios at Triples/Northern Cup, Sub Romans at Mercia, Spartacus' Slaves at Tarrington, and their Roman enemies at the DBA Open ...

Mercian DBA Open


The Society of Ancients BattleDay


The English DBA Open


The Tarrington Scramble


Through our links with The Northampton Battlefields Society we promoted heritage protection and historic battlefields at Towton, Naseby's spectacular 370th anniversar event, at Northampton and at Bosworth ...






In addition to helping organise the 370th at Naseby, it is a year in which we have secured genuine moves towards a permanent exhibition at Northampton and start-up Lottery Funding for the Naseby Project.

Nevertheless it was a year of losses as well as triumphs ...


RIP Andy Gittins

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