General Reeve: SELWG 12 Report

Tuesday 16 October 2012

SELWG 12 Report

It’s the only wargame show that I have been able to go to this year and I always look forward to going to SELWG again at the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre.

As with last year the sun was shining and this time I went by car and arrived just after 11am. I did not have much on my shopping list as HaT have just shipped out their next order for which there is plenty for me to buy. So it was more or less a time to see what is happening in our hobby.

The entry fee was once again £6 to get in and as soon as you get in, you can hear all of the activity going on in the hall, a slightly bigger crowd than last years. As usual I like to walk around all the trader’s stalls and look to see what is on offer.

The first thing that hit me after just the first few stands that they had a lot of them laser cut wooden buildings. Although these look very nice in detail, the price was quite high but as always I hope that once they become popular the price will drop.

My first stop was at the Magnetic Displays stand and loved a pack of walls and a gate to go with it. These will go with my derelict farm set. Next stop was at the Hatfield stand. I love having a good rummage in their second hand packs of plastic figures but none that I needed. But to my surprise, I did find a complete box of Revell Napoleonic British Infantry. I do need loads of these now as I have run out of the old Airfix figures as they are all now painted up. These are now hard to find as the Revell set are not in production any more.

The bring and buy stand was packed and as busy as always, but I could not see anything that I wanted here, so down to the main hall. Big surprise here is that the main hall usually has all the trade stands going around the outside with the wargaming all in the middle. But this year there were more trade stands in the middle which meant that there were fewer gaming tables this year.

I wanted to make up some casualty markers so I needed some bases to do these on. My first thought was to make the markers in a square, but came along to the Warbases stand and brought one pack of 40mm and one pack of 50mm round bases. The 40mm will do for the infantry and the 50mm for dead horses etc. After going around all of the trade stands, I had noticed that the 28mm plastic figures are in abundance this year. Not many 20mm plastic sets could be found. Will 20mm scale hobby people be out numbered soon by the 28mm?

So with the wargame tables around the main hall the displays are getting more and more life-like. You can tell the ones that have spent a lot of time on their terrain features and I have taken a couple of pictures of them.