Phoenix Lakeland Wargames Exhibition 2017

Last Saturday I went once again to the Phoenix Lakeland Wargames Exhibition at the Rheged Centre at Penrith.  The show is now in it's second year and has grown since last year.  There were more traders this year, a bigger bring and buy and they've acquired a second hall to host the tournaments.  I'll apologize now, I forgot to nip upstairs and take some pictures of the tournaments.

Let's look at the display games first.

 This is some sort of world war two game.

 There was a big Warhammer 30,000 battle going on.

Beyond the Gates of Antares

A huge medieval game.

A big American Civil War game using the Black Powder rules.  This one was run by my old gaming group The Dumfries Wargamers.

Some of the traders

Chris the brainchild of the show.

My loot.  Ezekel and Shiva from the walking (I got me a tiger yeah).  I picked up another Kings of War army in the form of the Trident Realms and I got the new Kings of war summer campaign salamander figure, that I'm going to use in Dungeon saga.

Also my other half picked up her first wargaming figures in the form of a Poison Ivy gang for Batman. See

She also picked up a church from Dave's Wargames (check his stuff out, he does realy nice mdf kits).  Expect a couple of guest blogs.


All in all it was another great show.  I managed to spend all the money I made on the bring and buy too.  Will I go next year?  Of course, work permitting that is.

Phoenix Lakeland Wargames Exhibition

Yesterday was the first annual Phoenix Lakeland Wargames Exhibition at the Rheged Centre in Penrith.  This is Cumbria's first wargames show, and in my opinion it was a great success.  There were many traders at the event including the mighty Warlord games as well as more local ones like my very own plastic dealer Hadrian's Hobbies. There were also several tournaments on during the day, including Magic the Gathering and the Batman Miniatures Game, guess which one I was playing in?

The Batman tournament was great.  A lot of underrated crews were represented, like the Wonderland Gang and Organized Crime.  The guys were all fantastic sports and a joy to play against.  I came sixth out of eight over all, with one loss, one draw and one win, and most importantly had a cracking time.

 Set up begins for game one.

 me

firefly looms over the board from his perch

burn baby burn, criminal inferno

 Everyone getting stuck in

 chainsaw lobotomy

 Mr pink stalks borgon

The Batcave

 T-Rex

 August tries to hit Flash with an axe

 Contra-Auguste gets stuck in as well, while Firefly sneaks around the board.

Stripper Cop moves up

 The Batmobile

 Joker using it as cover

 Catwoman grabs the loot

The battles rage on

 Joker stalks the unwary

 Joker gets tea-bagged by a dinosaur

and some pictures of the rest of the event

 A big 30k game was put on by Hadrian's Hobbies

The absolutely stunning board by Z1 Designs.  It's even more gorgeous when you see it with your own eyes.


I can't wait for next year#s show.

Tanks unboxing

Picked this up on a whim at my local games shop (Hadrian's Hobbies) today.  Tanks is by Galeforce Nine and is effectively a world war 2 version of X-Wing.  And it's bloody cheap too, I picked this up for £18 and it's quite a weighty box.

Let's look inside.

Time to sort this out

You get these greeny/browny sprues that build the panther/jagdpanther

These brown sprues each build a sherman

you get some dice

A stack of cards

just over half of which are upgrades

the rest are critical damage cards

You also get some bigger cards with tank stats on them.  You even get a bunch cards for tanks that aren't in the box, this is to allow you to use your Flames of War tanks.  Also the cards have a plastic coating on them you can mark damage with a dry erase markers.

the rule book isn't very thick, but is made out of a very sturdy paper.  Also it looks like I've been photobombed by a shoggoth.

A small brick of cardboard.

The brick contains a big wood

Let's just pop that out.  That wood is huge by the way.

A smaller wood and a bunch of tokens.

Some more tokens and some buildings.

Lets look at the tanks.

You get a pair of shermans.  You also get enough parts to put both the 75mm and 76mm guns on them.

The panther actually comes with a hull for the jagdpanther that you can swap out.  However I'm a numpty and glued the hull to the tracks.


Now onwards to learn the rules.