Hamburg Tactica 2017 / Saturday

"It's a pity you couldn't come to the Tactica this year.", I said to Krüger.

"Yes. How was it?"

"Well. We arrived at 11 on Saturday morning and directly went to a table set up by the guys from THS to see if we could join them for a game at some point. One of them asked: 'Do you have anything to do now?', so we stayed. It was a large game using the ruleset Black Powder. They had beautiful miniatures and terrain, like last year. British forces were landing on the coast of Egypt at Abukir and the French were defending. We had a game master on each side. After a while they got into a rule fight. This reminded me of my early years of wargaming, but these guys must already be gaming in a club for more than 30 years, so I was surprised this happened. Maybe they were nervous because they had a game coming up at 2 o'clock with the Perry twins and Aly Morrison as guests. In any case, this was lots of fun. I mean, they were very friendly with us. Although … one of them kept teasing me that I should role the dice with more verge. I said: 'Man. These are dice. It doesn't matter with how much verge you roll them. You just need to get a random result.'"

Krüger asked: "What other games did you play?"

"There is this club from southern Germany that does excellent participation games each year …"

"Kurpfalz Feldherren?"

"Yes. They were there with a large table, depicting an area of desert in Sudan. I played the British. I had to lead a camel caravan from one small side of the table to a camp on the opposite side, while the other three players, including Jörg, brought in large groups of nomads on camels and horses and on foot from the long sides. After an hour my caravan was stopped coming out of a narrow valley. I didn't even manage to capture an imam hiding in a small village on my right side. The terrain was quite impressive. The two game masters had used cork to depict rocks and the sides of cliffs. I really liked that."

"Great idea."

"All in all I was a bit tired on Saturday. The week before, Marjorie had worked a lot, leaving at 8 a.m. and returning at 3 the next morning. On Monday I had spent four hours on the train, bringing Lina and Hendrik to school, to aikido, to flamenco and picking them up again. And then there was the school strike …"

"So what else was there to see at the Tactica?"

"They had a very interesting theme room with games for children and old miniatures and books. You could play several boardgames with plastic soldiers and there was a table with armies made of paper. They were taken from one of the books by the artist Peter Dennis who was also there showing how he worked. I would like to play more strategy games with Hendrik, so all of this was very inspiring. Those paper soldiers look fantastic, but cutting them out with a little scissor and glueing them together must take a lot of time, especially in my case, being such a slow person."

"We should play 40K with Hendrik."

"Yes. And he could join the Waltrop campaign, play some units of Greeks… He likes slingers."

"Slingers? Why?"

"I have no idea. There was also a library of gaming books. I flipped through some books and one of the members of the club THS recommended 'Scenarios for Wargames' by Charles Grant. It looked very interesting."

"Do you plan to buy the book?"

"I saw it for 363£ on Amazon yesterday."

"Wow."