Historical Wargames

These soldiers will take the village and look fabulous doing it!

I will keep the text for this post to a minimum, as it is a bit picture heavy. Our family is involved with historical wargaming, which, for those who may not know, is similar to playing Dungeons and Dragons (where you have terrain, miniatures to move across the board, and roll dice to determine if your strategies to win certain goals in the game will succeed or not), except there is more actual terrain than D&D tended to have (back in its hayday). The wargames are not limited to historical events and times. In fact, there were some games that were more sci-fi oriented, including games that take place in space with spaceships, and other games that were a sort of robot-gladiator combination (if you can imagine such a thing!).

We attended a wargaming convention this weekend called Huzzah in South Portland, Maine. Our kids were pretty excited to see all of the neat terrain and miniatures (as were we adults!). There was table after table after table of wargaming going on, along with quite a few vendors and people milling around having a great time catching up with old friends and new. 

These sets and games certainly captured our imaginations!

There were lots of ships of all shapes, sizes, purposes and time periods.

There were *MANY* village, town and small city-scapes.

Wouldn't you love to climb aboard one of these?! Check out the temple dragon in the background (on the hill just behind the middle red sail)

Here you can see some guys moving their troops around the board, based on dice rolls and strategy.

This airport, complete with hangars, fueling stations, towers, bunkers and of course planes made us deeply consider adding a few planes to our collection.

A Budha statue stands at the base of the stairs leading up to the temple house.  Rocky crags and high walls protect the small fortress from attack by sea.

As you can see by the boy in the beige shirt behind our son, all age groups were represented

 at the convention.

Our youngest eyes (with her hands, of course) some of the figurines for sale on the vendor tables.

A battle on the dunes is being set up.

The village looks eerily quiet before the invasion.

A simple village will make for a nice backdrop to the oncoming battle.

By Fire and the Sword. This door attendant will ensure you have the proper credentials to enter!

Who says it is difficult to stimulate a child's imagination??  When we returned home, both children picked up their toy swords and had their own battles in the back yard. Mission: successful.