From The Garage To The Guild

The wargames group I'm part of here in Wollongong is known, informally, as the Gong Garage Gamers. Why? Because we're in The Gong (Wollongong), we game (obviously), and our earliest meetings were often in people's garages. We quickly switched to using the basement office at my last house, which had space for a couple of decent-sized games to be played. However in the last nine months we have been using the office in our current house, which has less space.

It was time for a new venue and, to suit some people, maybe a new night.

So we're trying the experiment of attaching ourselves to the Guild Gaming Society at the University of Wollongong. Some of our members already game with them from time to time anyway, so it was a fairly logical move. You don't actually have to be a student at the uni to be a member, and they have plenty of space. We also felt it was a chance to attract fresh blood to our group, whilst having some gaming contact with other people as well.

This evening was our first session at the new venue; it's odd for me wargaming on a Thursday after years of doing so on Friday night (my traditional night in the UK even before I came here), but it was fun.

Of course we played HOTT. Two games, each 48AP with two players a side, using 25/28mm figures.

In the first game Dark Elves faced an alliance of High Elves and Centaurs (as ever, click on a picture to make it bigger):

The Dark Elves were victorious, after an early collapse by the Centaur command saw the alliance on the back-foot for most of the game. The High Elves couldn't create any openings. The star element of the game was the Dark Elf magician who ensorcelled two Heroes and destroyed a couple of normal elements with some solid dice-rolling.

Let down by the Centaurs, the High Elves switched to some new allies for the next game ... Zulus:

They proved a much better ally, pushing their foes right back across the table. In the meantime the High Elves got their act together after their woeful performance in the previous game and quickly dealt with the Dark Elves facing them, breaking the command. After that it was just a mopping up exercise.

Two great games with lovely figures from a mix of manufacturers. I realise that I haven't played HOTT for a month or two, but it all came flooding back.

We will continue to try out this new venue and new night and see how it fares. Based on tonight I think it's a good move, even if I now have to travel to my gaming; the one advantage of hosting the game sessions was not having to go out.

Stop Press: In unrelated news, here is a newly-released image from the front-line showing the latest in Nazi technology:

Let's hope they don't manage to make a bigger one ...