TACTICA 2016: Some Impressions of THE best wargames show on the continent

Last friday saw the missus and me heading out for Hamburg. After some seven hours and several hundred kilometres through the whole of Germany, we finally arrived in that blessed city.

We had a short stroll through the inner city but soon got hungry and cold and therefore visited one of the (at least it seemed that way) few affordable restaurants... well, restaurant is a bit much of a stretch for that miserable little burger takeaway. After a quick, not overly tasty and uneventfull diner it was back to the hotel for some much needed R&R.

After a restfull night it was on to the venue site. After a quick stroll through the different rooms the missus handed me over to the Tactica staff (she termed it 'the IKEA childs paradise for elder men') and left to explore the city on her own. Too bad for her I'd say! Why run around in cold and rainy Hamburg when one can have fun, games and of course countless possibilities to get rid of your hard earned cash? Well temperated and indoors I might add.

So what follows are some impressions from this years Tactica. Sadly I forgot my camera at home so I only had my cellphone at hand. Also I forgot to take notes on who did all those fantastic presentations. So should I accidentially have credited the wrong club or people, or even worse no one at all, feel free to leave an appropriate comment. I'll try to make amendments asap.

15mm Impetus - Battle for Frankfurt - Frankfurter Spielbetrieb

28mm Wolsung - Warehouse Games

15mm Battle for Helm's Deep - ???

15mm Battlegroup - Hell's Highway - ???

28mm Pb12 - Ridge Brake - ???

The Torso - Dice Knights Berlin

X-Wing - Battle for Yavin - ???

Heroquest 3D - ???

Shadows of Brimstone - ???

X-Wing Armada - ???

Steinhagel - "Vertraut mir Legat, der Weg ist frei" - Martin Feller

DBA - Battle for Trebia - Frank Bauer?

The port of Carthage

Chain of Command - Ypenburg 1940 - ???

Black Powder - Battle for Hanau 1813 - Berliner Napi Runde

Bolt Action - Battle for Aachen - ???

Lion & Eagle - Battle for Disuq 1801 - THS

Asterix

Freebooters Fate

Grand Tactical Rules - Königgrätz 1866 - Frankfurter Partisanen

Donny Brook - Lesnaya 1708 (Pt 2) - ???

??? - White Death - League of Augsburg

Zen-Saga - Nagashima - Frank Bauer ?

LotoW - Lucky Luke gegen den Kaiser von Amerika - ???

Stronghold Terrain

Dave Thomas - Perry Miniatures

Van Dyck Models - 12mm WW1

Van Dyck Models - 12mm EIR

And now to my personal highlight of this years Tactica. Mate and fellow Blogger Sören of BlackPowderGames.blogspot.se fame released his new miniature line Eagles of Empire at Tactica. The range focuses on the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and some of you might know, I've painted a few pre-production models for him.
We met at Tactica and I lent him a helping hand at the booth... well, I more or less occupied his chair and chatted with all the passers by, while trying to sell a few of his lovely miniatures. It was a great experience and the miniatures were well recieved by the audience it seems.

Be it as it may, while Sören was underway on an errant of his own, suddenly there were the Perry twins at the booth chatting to me and Jasper about Sörens new miniatures and how nice these were. You might imagine Sören's face when I told him later.

Sören's friend Jasper, who's doing quite some interesting stuff with Lego, also gave me this little fellow (sWhy am I suddenly thinking about doing Bolt Action in Lego scale?!)

And of course I also enjoyed a game at that day. Like in 2014  I visited fellow blogger Jan Groß aka Lt. Hazel and his friends at their table. They were running a Late Ancients game using their adaption of the highly recommended 'Triumph & Tragedy' rules again.
It was a four party game where each party had their own objective. There were the Franks who had to capture some civilians to interrogate them for they wanted to know where's the plunder. Than there were the Goths who had to kill those same civilians, the Huns (me) who had to take them (the civilians) for slaves and finally the Romans who had to prevent all that.

After some intense fighting the Romans managed to save all the civilians and therefore won the game. It really was a great experience to play on such a nice table with lovingly painted miniatures and a well thought out scenario it was too. Of course my fellow gamers too were excellent companions, who really indulged in the spirit of the game.

For the first time I was displaying some of my miniatures in public this year. I took with me my "French-Indochina War in Greyscale" minatures and was a little shocked to see my figures placed next to some stuff of reaaaallll brush artists. At least I got the biggest nameplate ;-)

Of course I also brought 'some' loot with me. And also of course I got a bit carried away and spent quite a lot more than I had planned, but who cares? Fortunately Tactica is always once per year.

Early on sunday morning we left Hamburg. On our way home we stopped at the Deutsches Panzermuseum Munster/ German Tank Museum Munster. More about that in a later post.

For more and probably better  summaries(most of it in German) on this years Tactica I recommend you to check the following websites and blogs:

Magabotato -Tactica
Der Kleine Krieger -Tactica
Stoessi's Heroes - Tactica
Geschichte als Hobby - Tactica
Figuren und Geschichten - Tactica