Salute 2013 Swag

With Salute 2013 now behind me and the aches and pains reminding me that I'm getting older, I thought I'd do a quick overview of my experience at the show and the loot I brought back from it.

With no engineering works on the DLR this year, Lenin and I got to the show at a reasonable time and joined the advance ticket queue.  As we waited the queue got longer and longer and started looping back on itself - so it was clear there were plenty of people there.  We have the obligatory walk past of the Star Wars cosplayers and people pressing leaflets into our hands but we didn't start to move into the show until 10am (although still in advance of the pay on the day folks).

Once in I went around and picked up all the things from my list which I thought there might be a danger of the traders running out of and then we took a more leisurely walk around the show.  It felt pretty busy and there seemed to be quite a bit of interest at most of the trader's stands.  There were quite a few things which, whilst I wasn't sure I'd be buying, I wanted to have a look at.  First up was the new Whitechapel to Baker Street range from 4Ground:

Whilst the larger buildings are, as I expected, quite a bit more expensive than their normal ranges, the buildings do look rather nice and I may well be "investing" in some of these later in the year.  I did, of course, pick up a couple more 15mm buildings to add to my collection and one for my new Muskets & Tomahawks project.

I moseyed on over to the Great Escape Games' stand to take a look at their new Wild West rules release, Dead Man's Hand.  Which was interesting enough for me to pick up a copy (expect a first look post on that shortly) - I also picked up on of their new MDF building range which they are having 4Ground produce to accompany the game.  They had some full assembled ones near their demo game and they looked rather nice but I wanted to see how they'd scale with my existing buildings.

At lunchtime I joined up with a whole bevy of bloggers at the Rejects' meet up and got to put faces to names for some of the wargaming bloggerati. Here's a photo of some of the crew (courtesy of Big Lee - who always has a superlative range of photos for the shows as well as a really interesting blog) see if you can spot me lurking towards the back:

Image by Lee Hadley at BigLee's Miniature Adventures

As usual I managed to catch up with a whole legion of old friends and have a decent natter.

So what did I buy in the end - well here a look: