Conference of Wargamers 2012 - Friday evening

Here I am back having survived another fantastic COW weekend.  Arriving safely after a journey mostly carried out in torrential rain I was pleased to be accommodated in a room at the front of the house overlooking the drive.

On Friday evening my opening comments were followed by Ian Drury's plenary game.  Set in Vietnam, nearly 40(!) players defended a platoon position against repeated VC attacks.  The four squads each set up on separate tables, with the Platoon HQ on a fifth. A part of the umpire team, my role was to oversee one of the squad sectors, moving Ian's 20mm toys around, shouting at players and allocating hits.  As this was a very intense game I had no time to take any photos!
Then it was on to run several games of Rollbahn Ost. 

The booking-in poster for prospective Army Group commanders

I ran the game five times, with Martin doing the sixth and final run through which ended at about 11.30pm.  Once again I had no opportunity to take photos - for a look at the game setup see my post on Triples. 
The informal bring and buy arrangement again proved popular with at least eight attendees bringing items to clear out.  My own purchases consisted of some old 17th Century 25mm toys (see below) from Jim Wallman and a few Greek 25s from Mike Elliott.  Bob Cordery gave me a few books on the Spanish Civil War and Graham Evans presented me with a box of Military Modelling magazines from the 1970s.