Bought yesterday at Salute:

• Two Cyclops Battle Tanks and a Spider Tank, in a three for the price of two offer from Urban Mammoth - £35
• Deinonychus, Gallimimus and Young Tyrannosaurus from Copplestone Castings - £15
• Pack of ten 28mm SF figures from Trent Miniatures - £8
• Land Rover from S&S Models for use with my UNIT troops - £8
• Four Kryomek Drones - £7.98
• Stegosaurus, two Triffids, six (should have been five but there was an extra one in the box) Ichthyosaurus and two Platecarpus from HLBS Co - £28

Plus the freebies: St George and the Dragon and a Revenge of the Sith Clone Trooper.

So that’s £101.98 on miniatures, plus £8 entry and £2.90 train fare.

Running total is now £506.65

So Salute comes to the end of its six years at Olympia. From one floor in 2000 to four floors this year. I think this year was one of the good ones - lots of happy looking people, lots of interesting games and a good buzz in the air.

Top games in my opinion were the 1/1200 Battle of Trafalgar and the 28mm Pirates of the Caribbean. Hmm, a naval theme there. There were very few “traditional” periods being gamed - not a lot of ECW, ACW or Napoleonics. In fact I’d say that ancients and the 20th Century were there in force the periods in between were slightly under under-represented.

Dinosaurs (oh you didn’t think I wouldn’t mention them at all?) appeared in several tables, but the promised Bog-A-Ten 2.0 was absent (though another club was running original Bog-A-Ten). The Gloranthan HotT game featured some cool dinos as part of one army. One interesting new mini I saw was a very nice 28mm scale Mammoth labelled as “Coming Soon” from Baker Company.

My photos all came out crap. But there’s a gallery of photos over at Rotten Lead.

… and ready for deployment in 45 seconds no less! Was that just a little bit of politics? Oh yes.

Last week I said:

Doctor Who grows up and enters its second childhood all at once.

Which is probably a fairly good reaction to the current state of British politics.

So this week we learnt how to hack into the Royal Navy from a flat on a South London council estate and launch a missile to blow up Number 10 (but it’s okay ‘cos only nasty aliens who want to nuke the planet and sell bits of it as scrap get killed) – This is proper Doctor Who: totally barking mad in a very British way. Love it.

And the stuff about vinegar and Hannibal was a nice reminder that way back in the mists of time DW had been envisioned as an educational programme.

The plot had holes you could drive a starship through but I just don’t care. And next week we get a Dalek.

9/10