Gaming Club Network

Triples show 19th & 20th May 2012, a brief review of the weekend.

Well, another Triples show has come and gone, held at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield this is the third year that Triples has been held in this venue. For those that do not know Triples is a long running show hosted by the Sheffield Wargames Society over a weekend, it used to he held at the University of Sheffield but moved to a more suitable venue three years ago.  I first attended Triples as a dealer way back in 1994 when I was in the trade.  The EIS is airy light and easy to get round, with good parking and easy access to the M1 and road/rail/tram links.

The main reason the show is held over a weekends is because of the tournaments, there were at least three running, for ancients, in various scales, and its hard to do that with a one day show.   Plenty of traders attend this show and if I am not mistaken this is the quite possibly next largest UK show after Salute. 

Plenty of traders usually means a hammering for the wallet, however being as I had thinned out my painted 40K models earlier in the week, either never used or no longer wanted, I stuck several lots in the 'bring and buy'.  I sold everything I took except for one fully painted Chimera tank, and then proceeded to blow all of my loot, so I came home happy as selling the 40K models allowed me to buy a lot more 15mm Flames of War scenery, buy some of the new M36 tank destroyers and a 155mm heavy artillery box set (out of the bring and buy at a really good price), to fill out my US army which is part built and ready to be painted, along with some more KR Multicase boxes for storage at home and a few blisters of Gerry Anderson themed 28mm figures from Crooked Dice.

I was attending the show with Dave Wise, COGS Chairman, and the new GCN secretary.  We were there over the weekend running a participation game that we have devised and written.  This is a small scale rule set initially called 'Blood Feud' set in the Victorian era and features various factions of mutants, monsters, manics, circus freaks, vampires and fairy tale characters in teams dueling it out in an arena for supremacy.  Its a bit like fight club for lunatics, its fast paced and great fun to play.

We had four 2 foot by 2 foot arena boards sets up and we were kept pretty busy all weekend, we had another of our club mates Terry help us out again and he did a stirling job, running several games each day for us, at several points over the weekend we had all four boards in action at the same time, which kept us on out toes.

Although I kept nipping off at various points over the weekend and donning my GCN hat to go talk shop, as well as to keep going shopping of course, a good result though, I can very happily report that we have one old GCN club coming back into the fold and I spoke to a couple more clubs who are considering joining the network, so all in all not a bad weekends work.

The icing on the cake though came right at the end of the weekend, two GCN clubs took the honours for best participation games at the show.

My own club COGS was presented with 1st place with our Blood Feud game, which came as a complete surprise, although as mentioned the game was very popular with attendee's, and to complete the double with 2nd place a new club to the GCN who only joined the network in April, Heathens and Peasants from Doncaster running a 28mm wild west game.  So well done to them and a really good result for GCN clubs.

All in all a really good weekend, and a show to look at coming to in 2013 if you have never been before.