My Salute 2016

So we made it in one piece to Salute yesterday (despite the rather bad roadworks on the way in).

Unlike previous years we jumped straight in with the purchasing – there was a limited edition Guild Ball model for Bull's team that he wanted so we had to make sure they didn't sell out.

I picked up the GB Season 2 rulebook (I don't have a hard copy of the rules so that justified that purchase) and the new Butcher's captain Fillet (because, well it's a Butchers model!). We saw the new Hunters Guild starter set but weren't tempted – though Bull picked up an entire Union team as part of a deal.

Steamforged were showcasing a new game that launches on Kickstarter later this week – Dark Soul. No idea what it is about other than it had a couple of players running around a very small board seemingly being chased by a rather large demon-knight type fella. I guess we'll see on Wednesday what it's all about.

We noticed there was a much broader range of punters at this years show – a lot more women/children/families there. It felt busier than normal and a bit more spacious but I can't say for certain. There were few demo games that caught our attention this year – some nice Frostgrave boards, a rather awesome 'printed perspex over a lightbox' space board.

I was glad to see Element Games there as they are my favourite online retailer right now. Alas their product range on the stand was quite poor, especially compared to Wayland and Troll Trader, so I didn't spend any money with them in the end.

I did have a couple of other purchases that I was looking out for. Despite being deep into developing my Project Hood game, I had a flash of inspiration last week and have developed a new mechanic for a sci-fi game. I thought I could make use of some of the Infinity models and spent some time looking for anything suitable. Randomly I ended up with some sci-fi nuns.

I also discovered that last week that I don't own any D8 or D12 dice, so that had to be rectified as part of this new project too!

Alas I managed to miss the Blogger meet up – we were chatting to Craig from Critical Mass (who I haven't seen since the show last year) for ages and before we knew it time had run away from us. In fact I didn't see any familiar faces wandering around this year which was odd – maybe I wasn't paying attention. I can't believe I missed the return of Fran the Angry Lurker!

Anyway, it felt quite low-key compared to last year (though that might be my own doing) but I still managed to come away with some goodies and enjoyed a few hours in the big smoke!