Just a quick one today: Following the recent resurrection of my Seven Years War mojo, I was visited by the Ghost of Demo-Games Past, who sent me this photo he’d scanned from a 1998 copy of Wargames Illustrated. The photo is of our 1998 demo-game of the Battle of Lobositz 1756, which was the first battle between the Prussian and Austrian armies during the Seven Years War.
This photo was taken by Duncan MacFarlane at the Partizan show in Newark. We also took the game to Warfare in Reading, where we won a runner-up prize for the best demo and also to John Tuckey’s excellent little show at Marston Magna, where we won the Best Demo Game prize, with the maximum number of points (the only time that had ever happened).
Gareth Beamish and I built the terrain, which was definitely one of our best, though making those vineyard walls from cat-litter and PVA glue was something that I vowed never to repeat… Which of course I did only three years later, when building Fuentes de Oñoro for the 2001 AB Figures Wargames Weekend…
Doug Wetherall provided the Austrian army (painted by Gareth Beamish) and I provided the Prussians (as seen in recent posts). The rules were our 18th Century-modified version of ‘Shako’, which I’m currently editing and will post here soon.
What a blast from the past! I remember that game but had forgotten the cat litter walling escapade.
Still looks great. We did some good looking demo games back in the day.
Yes we certainly did! 🙂
Sadly the only photo that exists of the Kolin game is a very small shot (including Martin, Doug & Elaine) in Wargames Illustrated from the Marston Magna show and there’s also a very small photo of our Bautzen game somewhere in the depths of WI. There aren’t any photos at all of our EPIC Samurai game with the two opposing castles. There are however, photos of our 4th Kawanakajima game (with the first of the two castles) somewhere in back-issues of WI.
Something else that exists somewhere in the WI crypts is our 1:1 Macedonian ‘Taxis’. I also did a few AB Figures photo-shoots at Duncan’s, but that doesn’t really count! 🙂
I’d love to know what happened to those Japanese castles. I sold the entire game terrain, including the castles (but not the troops) to a bunch of Irish lunatics from Dublin at the end of Colours (1999, I think?)!
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