"Salute "coup d'etat" ?" Topic

Is it a fantasy / Sci fi show nowadays? The feel over the last decade has seen a drastic change . I think there has been
a gradual embrace of the 'New Wave " in this diverse hobby , this is down to many factors. Historical the traditional core
has lost it's way . Many gamers have lost their verve . Take the display games at Salute. Mediocrity is the normal with a handful of very good games but the abundance of lackluster lazy efforts should be resigned to a club nights not the World's foremost show. Many young fantasy gamers , brought up on a diet of groundbreaking computer graphics see more inspiration at a wet weekend in Clacton.
Maybe the organisers should set a high standard for their paying public . Enforce exceptable quality control and provide some income towards the logistical costs for such sterling efforts . Name and shame ban the dross as it is a paying show as it should be a benchmark showcase of our hobby.
Why no quality control , is it just a free ticket . Less is more and Warlords have to take more responsibility.
Warlords have over many years morphed from a largely historical club to a dominant 'New age " approach. The leadership indirectly embraces Fantasy/Sci fi and their respective influence has gradually infected the show .Good or bad take your pick . Last year's unbelievable show stopper the
SYW Gaskin game blew the majority away . The general opinion this was arguably the best spectacle over the last few years but wasn't reconised as best of show . Lost the plot?
Many award winning painters do not enter the painting competition as they feel the judges tastes have changed and an outstanding Space character is usually more appreciated than a historical unit .
If MDF buildings, Plastic figures, 3ft war/boardgames is not your ticket then your stuck to buy something. Of course this is an exaggeration but so many traditional suppliers are not attending that in some your choice is more limiting.
Surely it would be rewarding ethically for the organisers to provide some free spaces for ground breaking artisan small producers to show their product. This would be an enrichment of the hobby for all.
We all know that everything changes . It's not only Salute fault that the historical side is gradually being marginalised. Money , time , age are all factors. The continue bland games doesn't help . Also historical gamers have to take a responsibility . Many have become entrenched in blandness . In quality terms this Race to the bottom as showcased by the majority of the historical side is reactionary and artistically retrograde. The magazines hand in glove approach with a few manufacturers is a chain on the hobby.
May l also thank Warlords for all their hard effort .
For many of us the show is a great place to catch up with friends and Salute is a great platform. We all enjoy ourselves but unfortunately there are no great expectations anymore . The Old Guard have passed away but the lunatics have taken over the asylum .Hopefully the great Peter Gilder isn't turning in his grave .

An excellent review , the move to the ever larger traders taking ever larger spaces selling the same plastic figures etc as many other retailers is worrying .
I see many of the ''smaller'' one man and his dog sellers at the show , but many just don't bother any more , this indeed seems to be trend .
From looking at facebook blogs from the show yesterday , I see literally no mention of any ''smaller'' traders and what they had new for the show , yet 3 or 4 seem to grab all the attention .

I was amazed at the vast gulf created between the two trade areas by the central wodge of games (it wasn't as apparent on the floor plan). First thing, it looked as if there were two separate trade areas bridged only by the thin line of stands at the far walls.

Perhaps Salute now does better reflect the hobby in general.The majority of games looked like what you would see any Games club night. It must take a lot of effort to put on a spectacular display, I would assume most clubs don't have players who want to commit the time for this sort of project which might be shown in the growth of the small table skirmish games?
This year was the first time I thought do you need so many traders selling Perry plastics all for the same price?

I would prefer it to be historical only. Then without the fantasy stuff it could be a smaller event, with no need for the vast Excel and its drawbacks (relying on the dreaded DLR etc)

1) It's a public secret that Salute is expensive to attend as a trader, which favours the big professional outfits and tends to push out the smaller manufacturers.

2) It used to be that there was the "three people in a shed" manufacturers and GW as the sole company that could claim to be the actual real deal. In recent years Warlord, Battlefront, etc have taken up the slack. It's pretty much a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't. We all welcome a thriving wargaming community, but demand it remains a quaint mom and pop operation, any whiff of professionalism is almost automatically perceived as a "dumbing down" of the hobby. There is room for nostalgia and the days that armies were made up of the same three basic figures of dubious sculpting quality, rules were all badly misaligned partially unreadable mimeographed copies and tables were simply a piece of brown curtain fabric with poorly flocked trees and some leftover flooring tiles used as step hills. And you know the nice thing ? You can still get old-school figures, you can still play those worn old rules, there is no "gaming sonderkommando" that is about to drag you screaming and kicking out of the cave and force you to play with intricately detailed modern miniatures, streamlined rules on glossy paper over sumptuously built terrain. Actually I'm a sucker for minifigs armies, block painted with a gloss overcoat, but it doesn't mean I must restrict myself to liking certain things and automatically hate everything else.

3) The idea that we were all doing historicals "back then" is preposterous, Tony Bath was running his Hyboria campaign, and people like Scruby were among the first to produce fantasy styled miniatures, the big difference was that we didn't have an abundance of material to start with. Besides historicals most background was either from ancient mythology or from the first generation of Fantasy literature like Burroughs, Tolkien and Howard. The fantasy explosion happened in the seventies with many new authors and the introduction of Chainmail and D&D. And it's those people who grew up on fantasy that are now in charge of successful gaming/media companies. Growing up on fantasy isn't a death sentence either, how many GW alumni ended up producing historicals ? Many historical miniature manufacturers today used to work for Games Workshop if only as a blackshirt at the local store for a few years and it instilled in them a love of miniatures and gaming and the fact that many aim for historical miniatures rather than fantasy says a lot about their permanent appeal more than moaning about how fantasy ruins everything.

4) I've seen plenty of tables featuring stunningly painted figures each and every one of them painted to the highest degree of skill displayed over a meticulously crafted terrain and yet it was "just another battle" Most historical battles, especially those when formations were still important can end up looking "boring" despite all the energy and amazing talent that has gone into it. WWII games and such can look much more dynamic because it feels less static is often played with terrain features rather than the mostly flat, featureless battlefields of yore. The problem with many large battle tables is that from three feet away you can't see the beautifully detailed shields, the subtle expression on each individual face, detail disappears into the mass with only the odd Elephant, command stand or camp vignette sticking out. We must make an important distinction between the games we actually and demo games, they are two very different things, we don't care if two Successor armies lined up against each other on a featureless table looks "boring" because it's not boring as our armies duke it out against each other. A demo game needs that little extra to make it interesting, Raphia is boring, the siege of Tyre is not because it adds terrain features and the possiblity of adding dynamic-looking elements. And this is where fantasy games offer more leeway in coming up with ideas and "thinking outside the box".

5) Not everyone can and wants to invest in massive wall-to-wall armies, it's a hobby, not a competition, nobody is going to tell me how I should play my games, if you have a penchant for 256-figure strong Napoleonic battalions in 28mm and only want to play Austerlitz and Ulm at that scale, be my guest. There is no such thing as the one true scale, no "golden number" of mandatory figures on each and every table. Some of us have the luxury of having that gorgeous table bigger than some people's aparments and can afford to play a single battle over the course of three years and kudos to those who can afford such luxury, but many of us are tied to regular or semi-regular club meetings where games of a few hours are the only option. And I'm not even talking about the logistics of carrying you armies up several flights of stairs, the multiple runs because you can't take everything with you in one go, or the supreme horror of having to make an emergency brake and hear the dreadful sound of years of painting trying to become a horrible mess. Sometimes I'm glad I can play something else, be it historical, fantasy or otherwise. Diversity is the spice of life in my opinion.

6) I don't think there is a single week where you hear someone's opinion that the hobby is dying and that has been a fixture since the seventies of not earlier. Every decade we heard someone claimed we lived in the golden age of wargaming and things only got better. I'm spoilt for choice in areas that were niche only a few years ago. It took about 10 years for 28mm WWII from being fringe ranges to being among the most popular today, lavishly supported by plastics, resin, MDF and a variety of highly detailed figures including many of the rarer armies and nations. It took 20mm much longer to get there. I don't know if we truly live in the golden age, but the future looks bright enough.

7) Ultimately I think that Salute is a bad indicator of the hobby, it's a splendid show, but it has become a thing of its own, we should look to the regular mid-size shows and what segment they offer, I think many smaller outfits are still doing extremely well on the regular show circuit and that still makes up 80% of their revenue.

8) The "problem" of seeing the same product all over the place is that scales have changed with the introduction of plastics. Metal and resin are extremely cheap to produce in certain numbers, plastics are very expensive to start with but your production run can be tens of thousands for next to no money. Distribution channels have greatly improved and most importantly we're no longer talking about three chaps in a shed, one sculpting, one casting and the third one selling, but we now have people in the hobby who know about real production, sales etc from having worked in real companies and setting up real companies of their own rather than the artisan-work of the previous generation.

Well put Patrick, I agree with everything you say. I chatted with a lot of the traders on Saturday, they all agreed that people only go for the shopping. A bit like London as a whole now, it bears no relation to the rest of the country but the shops are nice.

Maybe the lack of smaller traders is due to the fact that they can't afford the "trade stand" price. I heard of a "large" trader who stopped going to salute because of that years ago!

I was quite surprised when I found out how much a trader pitch costs. I wonder what excel charges.

"Death of the hobby" reminds me of a similar theme in computers. I used to be a mainframe computer programmer, working on large IBM mainframes. Industry magazines from back in the seventies (when I started out) always talked about when programmers would be outmoded (wishful thinking by managers). Next came the fear about how mainframes would fade away, overrun by PCs and the like. The first only came to pass because the term programmer faded and such people are now called coders or software engineers. Same job, pretty much. The second looks like it happened, because PCs and other smart devices are ubiquitous. What has really happened is that smart devices have moved into places previously free of automation. The actual number of mainframes has increased over the years, even if the percent of such devices has dropped.

I wonder how much of the moaning about the graying of the hobby is driven by that look in the mirror in the morning?

If it works fine for those who sell, put up the display, organize it, then " it ain't broke" and should carry on, for the tastes of those who enjoy it.
And there is space enough for all tastes.
Wargaming has not been regulated or taken over by states , so still a free hobby.

Some of the comments above have encapsulated why I personally don't like Salute that much as a show, and why I prefer the smaller regional events. I'm not really that interested in seeing large stands from large traders since I can probably see them, albeit maybe on a reduced scale, at somewhere like Colours or Warfare. But to be honest I'm not that much of a "mainstream" wargamer so they don't tend to interest me anyway. What I do enjoy about the smaller shows is exactly what has been noted as being missing from Salute – the smaller traders. And from a purely personal point of view, I really don't like the venue (a more soulless, impersonal place I can't imagine and that atmosphere tends to permeate many of the otherwise excellent photo reviews of the show in recent days), plus its a pig to get to. But thats just me, I can also see why others love it just the way it is and I see a value i it that way as well, since it does act as a focus for the larger trade side of wargaming in particular and does a good job of pulling in punters from across Europe and often elsewhere as well.

The most boring looking games with minimal effort regards the display/scenery are normally the historicals, and they tend to be club players having a game, and often ignoring 'punters', and certainly not making it a demo game – these kind of games should be banned – a load of figures all ranked up, on a mat / green cloth, with hardly anything happening – talk about a waste of show space.

Not forgetting the effort and time it takes to put on a display game I think we're slightly spoilt – or blase – I thought the Fort Mosquito game was best in show and there were several other very nice games there. But to be honest it would have to be a very very nice ACW or Napoleonic game to get me excited (and I like those periods) these days.

An awful lot of tables there were small 'advertorial' type games where someone was trying to sell their rules / figures. Well good luck to them (and some were beautifully presented) but small games seems to be the way the hobby is going at the moment and Salute reflects that. Give it a few years and hopefully it will swing back in the other direction.

I came away thinking there was too much sci-fi / fantasy / historic mash-up (steampunk Wild West, Wild West zombies etc) for my taste. But thats just me. I thought quite a few of the small makers were there – they were just hard to find scattered around the edge of the room.

'The most boring looking games with minimal effort regards the display/scenery are normally the historicals, and they tend to be club players having a game, and often ignoring 'punters', and certainly not making it a demo game – these kind of games should be banned – a load of figures all ranked up, on a mat / green cloth, with hardly anything happening – talk about a waste of show space.'

Not that you are generalising at all….

Even at shows which aren't Salute, you gets loads of traders all selling the same stuff as each other in boxes and blisters.

It is quite entertaining to run from one to another in search of the best deals.

Just the nature of the hobby these days (as that is also what is largely in our local wargames shop).

I do question whether the people who complain about the quality of show games have ever put one on. Having put on several over the last 20 years or so, many very large in terms of table size, I can say that it is time consuming and expensive. Transporting a large game frequently requires hiring a van, not cheap. The cost of materials and figures can easily run into hundreds of pounds and there comes a time when you have to say enough. You also need several people who are very familiar with all aspects of the game to help out -- not easy. From a show organiser's point of view getting games at all can be a nightmare, let alone dictating what the games are about. As for banning a particular genre, or insisting on only one genre, well that is a sure fire way to end up with either no games or no punters. Salute is in a class of its own in the UK, it has always been an important trade event and has always attracted large games, but there will always be shifts in the hobby as different genres, periods and scale come and go. At the moment small size games are popular, so that is what shows get. I can't comment on this year's Salute, I couldn't afford to go, but there has always been a good mix between historical and sci-fi/fantasy in the past, so if this year was different it reflects the interest of people who are prepared and able to put the effort into putting on games.

I don't think "coup d'ιtat" means what the OP thinks it means…

It is very refreshing to have a thread complaining about a British show instead of an HMGS one.

Saturday was the first Salute I've attended since 2005, the expense of getting there from the US is a big factor. My take is that the Historical side of the show has waned, as it has here in the States. My son was with me this year, and as a millennial, he identified more with the Sci-Fi, Cosplay, Fantasy side of things. We discussed it on the long ride from ExCel to Wembley, the "real" reason for the trip and he felt that the boxed and ready to play games were a lot more appealing to his generation than spending months painting up a few hundred lead figures of any scale for a game at a later date.
Going to a big show such as Salute or Historicon is like visiting a big museum, you go to see the things that interest you, not the entire collection. If Star Troopers and Space Marines aren't your thing, ignore them and race to the traders that you were there to buy from in the first place.

Speaking as a 'one man in a shed' trader, I am no longer doing any wargames shows. This was initially due to health reasons, but apart from the social side of meeting people, I am not missing them.

My revenues are up and my costs have gone down without shows. Plus I am no longer holding a lot of metal as show stock but cast most things to
order…

I am considering returning to a couple of shows, but that would just be with display cases to show the figures to new people.

Mike

The things people describe here certainly are not unique to wargaming, I've seen exactly the same thing happen with RPG's, video-games, comic books, collectables, genre literature, etc.

Several major factors collide and cause disruptions :

1) The expansion of the genre : think how D&D 3rd edition attracted a whole lot of new people to RPG's. At the same time you get dilution as new subgenres appear that draw people away from a particular group, Magic meant that more people got into the hobby, but they didn't necessarly want to play RPGs.

2) Tribalism : How many people do you know who say dislike Star Trek and love Star Wars or vise-versa ? I know people around the same age as many historical gamers and yet they will only play 40K, Warmachine or Star Wars Attack Wing because they think historical gaming is stupid, and I know more than a few historical gamers who wouldn't touch a GW mini with a ten-foot pole. I remember at a convention that some Magic players demanded that the RPG area was cleared to make room for their game, and the local shop once organized a Battletech day and the people who played the Mechwarrior card game would rather jump under a bus than have a try at the tabletop game …

3) Fear of change/diversity : "Back in my day everything was better !" There was a time where you purchased rules from one company, bought models from another and everything had to be done from scratch, you had to acquire books on the subject you had to do your own research, dig up paint schemes and spend years in search of those elusive miniatures or models nobody makes to complete your army. Today you can buy an army in a box, complete with rules, scenery and everything you need to play a game and if you're lucky the models come already painted. There is a fine line between purity and masochism. It's one thing not to tie yourself to a single source for all your gaming needs and another to crave exclusivity so you can look down on everyone else.

Like I said it's not just wargaming, I can give hundreds if not thousands of examples of people who think Martin is the devil because his work is popular and kids today don't even know who Tolkien is. I know comic book collectors who started in the nineties and worship at the altar of Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld and think that every character should be an even darker iteration of the Dark Knight Batman, they live in a world of extreme masculine wish fulfillment, while at the same time you have nostalgics of the golden age "where things were a lot simpler" they worship Alex Ross and slap you around with hardback editions of Kingdome Come but get almost infinitely upset that works like Sunstone or Rat Queens make top ten comic book sales.

And I myself have a list a mile long full of shoulds and ought-tos. One particular peeve of mine is that Funko started making awesome retro action figures in the style of the Kenner Star Wars toys but you can hardly find them because every square inch of available shelf space must be sacrificed in favour of those horrible blank-eyed Pop Toys !

I thought it was a really good show- very well organised, busy, friendly atmosphere. The venue is cavernous but it needs to be to accommodate the event. I didn't get to see all the games but some were very impressive. The traders I saw seemed to be having fun (or maybe it was just the bundles of notes I was handing them). Met hundreds of chums from the hobby. Roll on 2018!

I love tradition; the annual "Salute is going to the dogs" tradition. I must have heard it for the first time in, ooh, 1979…

Patrick, there is no need for you to come on this forum and be reasonable+ intelligent. Please stop, or it will catch on. Let's get back to "they are all wrong".

@ LittleArmies – no, just an observation over the years. Yes some Historical games look amazing, most often the best tables going, but there is no need for the club games where people cannot join in and are just bland scenery. IMO anyway.

My revenues are up and my costs have gone down without shows. Plus I am no longer holding a lot of metal as show stock but cast most things to
order…

Has the internet made shows obsolete for traders?

Patrick, you stole the words from my brain and put them on the page. Foxweasel, I love London, but you hit the nail on the head: it's a different beast from the rest of the country (though with outstanding shopping ). It was my first Salute, and I thought it was very professional looking and inviting, with something for everyone.

I've been going to Salute for something like 20 years off and on. I remember at one of the earliest visits – when it was still at Ally Pally – walking into a room and seeing two chaps sitting with their backs to a large beige sheet with a few micro tanks dotted about – a Western Desert game IIRC. They were both peering over their shoulders using a kind of pericope apparatus and didn't observe us walking in. After squinting through their vision aids for a few seconds the following exchange occurred:

"Elevation 20!"
"Roger!"
"Load AP"
"AP Loaded"
"Fire!"
"Shot away!"

At this point the "Gunner" of the pair threw a foam ball over his shoulder to land on the table. They then put down their periscopes, rolled a few dice on their clipboards, stood up and examined where the ball had landed and removed a tank, before taking their seats again.

Now THAT is a demonstration game.

G.

I don't think that shows are obsolete in the days of the internet. They are a way of advertising and showing people what you make who may not have come across you and interacting with your customers.

However, from a sales point of view I foudn that my overall turnover was going up but the takings from shows were static (for 8 years!) and the costs associated with shows went up as did my prices.

I was still making a profit from attending shows but it was a lot of work to do so and when I had M.E. would knock me out for a week after the show as well.

Salute has moved to the "big box", professionally packaged presentation companies and I felt that as a smaller trader it simply isn't worth the money to attend. It is extremely difficult to sell 15mm at shows anyway, as people always come up and ask for 10 packs of HE10 when I only used to take 6 of everything I could to a show…

Mike

I'll confess- I have never been to Salute but have always meant to. I have really enjoyed the blog photo reports, the reviews and videos of the show and it has always made me want to go sometime. This years show seems to have had equal coverage to others on the internet but looking at the games nothing much inspired me to pay a lot of money to visit next years Salute. A few games stood out- Fort Mosquito,Prague and a few of the bigger sci-fi efforts but not the horrendous giant 40K table.

I have put games on at shows and I appreciate the efforts but some of the games on show seemed no more than standard club night fare to me.

One caveat I will add to salute as a trader, it is not a show for browsers. You need everything in pick up and pay packaging, so many smaller ones who have a stand of display and service the stock from behind find it very hard (we did) because people cannot just stand and look, they get jostled and bumped and it is not a great experience.

bruntonboy wrote:

"…some of the games on show seemed no more than standard club night fare to me."

I'm very happy to see wargames that represent what's really happening in clubs and people's homes, especially if I can stop and actually take part in them for a while.

Wargaming IMHO isn't a 'spectator sport' – it's something to enjoy by playing games (and whatever degree of research, preparation and painting one finds pleasurable).

" I am very happy to see Wargames that represent what's really happening in clubs and peoples home "
Arthur 1815

Then you must be overwhelmed with delight on what is on offer at Salute .
I am sorry this is the worlds premier event and a show , not a club night or
someone's house . Many have payed a small fortune to attend , many from abroad , hotel and flight costs .

So you think Salute games should all be high quality dioramas, over which expertly/professionally painted troops manoeuvre to create a visual spectacle that bears no relation to the real-life wargaming that most attendees already/will actually experience?

Your opinion, fair enough. But what would be the point of such a show

I have no objection to a small number of such displays, but much prefer to have the opportunity to take part in some games, and see others that present something I can realistically hope to recreate myself. Wargaming, IMHO, is not mainly about modelling and painting, but about playing.

You wrote:
"Many have payed (sic)a small fortune to attend, many from abroad, hotel and flight costs."

They clearly have much more money to spend on their hobby than I do! Why do that just to gawp at dioramas when one could look at plenty of wargame 'eye candy' on the internet and in glossy rulebooks?

I have a mixed view on this issue. OTOH I like seeing good games done well but showing what Mr Average can achieve and sometimes having museum class spectacular game tables in itself can be off putting. But I was referring to Salute's status as the showpiece show of Britain not to some ordinary run-of-the-mill show. Previous photo walk throughs have simply not shown as many "ordinary" games as I have sen this time. Seeing as I have often heard (and refereed to above) that Salute isn't the place to do your shopping- pre-ordered is essential, small companies don't attend, too busy AND the number of relevant games to my interest (ie historical) is going down on top of the standards not being so high of those that are there. I would have to ask what is that is good about it and would attract me from the other end of the country? Being big isn't anything by itself.

There does need to be a balance between the achievable by most people AND the spectacular to hopefully inspire. It just seemed to myself that the reports I have read and seen that the balence is tilted somewhat.

The reality is the younger gamers (and the small group of female gamers that are slowly increasing every year) are into fantasy/grimdark scifi, and the historical gamers are just getting greyer every year.

Depends what you define as "younger gamers".

Forty years ago I was a "younger gamer" but I'd left school by then!

I think the situation hasn't changed as much as we think, we are just on another part of the time cycle and its made more noticeable by the availability of SciFi and Fantasy.

For example, Games Workshop has been around for a really long time but it didn't come to what people would know today until 1991. By that time I'd been an historical gamer for twenty years!

I think actual young people (say up to 20) are going a different route that's all. They may stick with SciFi and Fantasy, they may move into historical they may just stop altogether!

The "greying" of historicals has as much to do with the fact the 30's and upwards have already gone through that process – some still do both genres but its probably true for the same chronological reasons he older the sample the less SciFi and Fantasy you find.

Plenty of gamers in the 20 – 30 bracket were interested in our historical game at Salute and they certainly would have been exposed to the SciFi and Fantasy wave in the last ten years.

Its not a clear cut case of kids = SciFi and old gits = Historical.

Depends on your perspective doesn't it?
This year it sounds that if you're an historical gamer maybe not so good,on the other hand if you're a fantasy gamer maybe it was 7th heaven

I didn't make it to Salute this year but in 2016 I timed a trip to the UK from NZ in order to coincide with it and hopefully will make it in 2018

There are a dearth of shows in NZ so I was wowed last year by a number of games but maybe as an historical gamer I wouldn't have been this year

I also want the moon, I'd like all my favourite traders – big and small to be there, last year they weren't and for those that were if I hadn't ordered before to collect often stock had run out or wasn't carried…

Whatever happens, if I make it in 2018 I know I'll be wowed and I'll be like a kid in a sweet shop trying to spend my money on what is available but then I'm not as spoiled for choice as most of you…

Best bit will still be catching up with my internet mates again for a beer after the show

Its pretty darn good however you look at it with more positives than negatives, maybe some of you just have it a bit too good :-)

For what it's worth I just sat down with the show guide.

There were 98 tables (excluding traders) this year, out of those 49 were historical, 49 were not.

A couple of those were marginal calls on my part, from what was written down but if you call it as a 50-50 split you would not be a million miles away.

Not having seen all the games and I wouldn't have been counting if I had, I am genuinely surprised!

@Trajanus; you cant let facts like that get in the way of a good whine ;)

Er well, yes.

I have to confess I was surprised that it was as high as 50/50 but it's a bit hard to argue that historical games are being "marginalised" when they still have 50% of the action!

"Surprised as high as 50/50 but it's hard to argue that historical games are being marginalised. "

Since it use to be 80/20 ,10/15 years ago l would say they have a fair point.

Then you take into consideration so many games are of a poor quality especially the historical , if it wasn't for
meeting good friends there would be little point in going .
My Spanish friends ( historical ) have decided to miss it next year as the cost doesn't justify the show .experience .

10 or 15 years ago we were all a lot younger – I know I was.

80/20? Possibly.

Time passes and things change. Go back another 5 or 10 and there might have been 95/5.

10 or 15 years ago I used to play Napoleonics. Wouldn't cross the street for a game today. Lots of great figures, many sets of uninspiring rules. Now I play other periods.

In a lot of them the innovation has been in skirmish level games so people have brought them to Salute. You could trawl through the show guide and find quite a number of those and most of them I fancy would come into the "poor quality/uninspiring" but whose fault is that?

People who play what they play and like them, one assumes. Same goes for SciFi and Fantasy I would imagine.

What's going to be the Warlords criteria – enjoy what you play and you are out?

32 playing peices and its a Chess tournament! Better check the numbers in my Chain of Command set up.

I'm not surprised your friends from Spain will give it a miss next year. If I'm not persuaded to put on a game I expect I will too. My amigos who actually managed to get round the floor while I was nailed to our game tell me it was poor, so flying here for the privilege is clearly ridiculous.

Mind you the three Spaniards, several Frenchman, one or more of whom could have been Belgian (made that mistake two years ago) a Canadian and three Americans (got those the right way) and at least two Germans liked it, so who knows?

That said. looking at games good or bad has probably passed the point of worth for me and wandering round trade stands certainly has. However, the number of non historical games makes that no worse.

If I thought banning them overnight would make any difference I might think twice but I don't. Salute needs a wide audience to continue so they are not going anywhere and if they went do you think quality historical games would replace them?

For the last several years after the paying public has left and the weary take down process gets under way a 7 tonne truck turns up for the stand of a trader, who they are I'm not sure as I've been packing up the large historical games I've been involved with.

Lots of people load lots of stuff into this truck. I'm pretty sure its not historical miniatures going in. Someone wants their goods, I doubt its you and it sure as hell isn't me.

If this is a "coup" you are a bit late reporting it!

^^ 50/50 is far too much SciFi for the historical people ;)

(I used to be a pure historical gamer, then came kids and 40K, and I now find the "split" btwn them an odd thing, given all wargames are essentially doing the same thing – simulating conflict situations using rule based systems and pushing models around)

PS by "younger gamers" I mean "gamers who are less old" ;)

On the subject of mediocre display games; are the critics aware of the sheer amount of effort required to put on such a game? Which has to be done by volunteers, usually not many volunteers? Do they get paid for their efforts? Does anyone reimburse them the costs?

It is not easy to be put on even a mediocre display, and to complain about it, rather than applaud the effort (however badly executed) seems a bit unfair given that its done by people who give up their time to try.

If you think standards are slipping, why not have a go and show everyone how it should be done? All you need is a pile of ready cash, good modelling skills, and a few weeks off work (or many months fitting it around work!) etc.

Easy, if youve the time, money and inclination.

Each year myself, and a few friends are asked to put on a game of something at Gauntlet (our clubs small annual show). come to think of it, I think the first year we asked if we could, and every year since they just assumed we would and booked the table anyway!

Most of the time we just go with what we've got- using figures and scenery we already have available as much as possible, just pooling our collections and occasionaly putting together extra bits where required by the scenario we intend to play. The result is a game that differs little from our normal club night game except its on a table four times the size. Thats usually as much as we can commit to- we are all 30-40 somethings more or less, mostly married with children. This rather cuts into the available time and funds to put on something a bit more special.

Occasionaly, we'll try to be a little bit different, and start something more or less from scratch. This requires us to build all or most of the scenery, and probably paint all the figures for both sides (except in some cases the unit or two already painted that inspired this descent into madness!) And when I say US, I realy mean just ME- as the only one without sprogs to drain my time and money and will to live (obviously work and other committments do for their free time too) it invariably falls to me do most of the leg work. The months before the day are then given over entirely to painting or building something- its two months to Gauntlet17 and every spare moment is currently dedicated to painting Zulus (Fassands of 'em!) and I'll have to find time in the next two months to build the entire battlefield too. Some of the guys are able to get the day off to come and help on the day, but only one has been able to commit to the task and pledged 100 zulus; In the time it took him to paint 24 I painted 300.
NB- I'm not complaining btw, I enjoy these projects, and would have done this anyway eventually; I just wasnt expecting to have to do it in three months flat!

The end result will (hopefully) be a touch better than something we'd do on a club night, and be marginally more impressive. It won't live up the standards required by the OP, not by a long shot. You could not call it a professional job without your pants catching fire and your nose getting longer. Its simply the best we can do with the time and resources readily available.

And so, given that I know what it takes to achieve even our mediocre efforts I'm not about to knock anyone who at least gives it a shot, and if you insist on only accepting the best you're going to put off a lot of people who might otherwise want to have tried to put on a game, and now wont bother. And this can have an offputting effect on the public too- "Well obviously I cant achieve that standard, therefore I won't try, even in the privacy of my own home".
Some people are insipired by excellence, some are humbled by it and think themselves unworthy, but who are we to try and put them off with elitism?

Well said!

If the expectation of visitors is "I paid money, I want to be entertained with super-high-quality games", then a few years from now, we will have only games run by rules publishers. You will also see these same games over and over again at every single show.

However, if the expectation is "I will have the opportunity to meet and chat with a lot of other wargamers, and ask them questions about how they did design this particular game they're proudly showing", then we will still have the (sometimes quirky) mix of club games as you see today.

The value of having a mix of club games is showing the the hobby as it is, what people think is good, what people play, what people do, what people are proud of.
You can commmercialize this if you want, but you will get a much more bland mix of games. Sure, they will all look outstanding, but it will be boring.

Question to the OP: What was the last time you presented a game at a con?

Well said, Mike Target and Phil Dutre!

I have presented with Paul Darnall a few years back . One year trying to get it right . Cost was not expensive as nearly everything was scratch built.
I am sorry but poor games are retograde at a show .
If you were going to an art gallery you would want to see a Turner , not a paint by numbers effort because you were personally inhibited ,someone had put more effort , spent more time , wanted to raise the standards of the hobby or was more talanted.
Many of us want to be enthralled, Gilder , Gaskin , Ray ,Dave Marshall, Paul Darnall are inspirational .