Carronade 2013

I attended Carronade yesterday, so this is just a mixture of my thoughts on the event, stuff I bought and stuff I didn't manage to buy...

Laser-cut scenery seems to be the in-thing at the moment. The smell of burnt mdf hit you as soon as you walked into the first hall and throughout the show there was more laser-cut scenery than you could shake a laser-cut stick at. Unfortunately I currently have no need for laser-cut scenery, so it all got little more than a cursory glance. I don't remember seeing much in the way of traditional resin scenery at any stand, so perhaps this is the laser-cut shape of things to come.

My list of things to buy was fairly short: new bottle of Vallejo black, as many of the Vallejo washes as I could find, and a Games Workshop Stormtalon (if it was at a reasonable show discount). Out of that list I got the Vallejo black and that was it. There was only one stand selling Vallejo paint this year, as opposed to the usual three or four, and they didn't have any washes. I found a couple of Stormtalons but, at barely 10% off the retail price, they stayed on their stands.

I was considering buying some Games Workshop chaos boxed sets, but there was very little GW stuff this year - I only remember seeing a few boxes on a couple of stands, and I don't think any of them were troop boxes. There was quite a bit of secondhand GW stuff, but very little new. I don't know if this is the result of various GW sales rules changes, but they were very noticeably a minority presence this year.

Warlord Games' boxed sets, on the other hand, were everywhere. Unfortunately, much like the mdf scenery, I wasn't looking for anything from them.

Vehicle-wise, I picked up a Maisto 28 mm (or close enough) Humvee for £3.00, an Ainsty Sloth fuel crawler and their S.W.A.T van (which I'm hoping to paint up as the Mystery Machine for Hasslefree's Post Apoc Scooby Gang).

I bought some Four A Miniatures Spaceship crew figures and a couple of their demons (Mortimer and Mortimer's girl). I also picked up the astronauts from Crooked Dice. I didn't notice at the time, but only one has a full visor, so I'll need to get a couple of their head sprues to get full helmets for the others. Hopefully they'll be at Wappinshaw in a few weeks, but if not, I'll get them online.

The final figures (which were actually the first I bought) were a few items from a range I hadn't heard of - Das Schwarze Auge (apparently "The Dark Eye" in German). It's billed as 15 mm, but the stuff I bought - a swarm of bats, the demon Heshthot and some snakes - all look fine against 28 mm figures.

I bought a walker from Critical Mass Games. These are 15 mm, but it looks like it'll sit alongside my 28 mm Pig Iron figures without any great problems. I also picked up a Reaper Warlord CAV, which will hopefully also work in 28 mm. I bought a couple of sheets of MaskFX, which bills itself as a camouflage masking sheet set. The results looked good on the display models, so fingers crossed... The final items from Critical Mass were a couple of pieces of 1:300 SF scenery, to add to my growing collection of unpainted 1:300 SF scenery :-(

Paint-wise I got Vallejo black, a lightish brown (cork brown) and a couple of bottles of Citadel paint. One was Athonian camoshade, as I liked the chaos figure painted using a couple of washes in this month's White Dwarf and thought I'd give it a try. The other was Nuln Oil, their Badab Black wash replacement. I still have two or three pots of Badab Black, so there's no great rush, but it won't do any harm to see how the new one handles.

I did a quick circuit around the flea-market (bought nothing), and called it quits just after midday.

Overall it was a good show - busy and plenty of traders (at least one of whom always seems happy that I'm handing them Bank of England notes, rather than ones from the various Scottish banks). However, compared to the show in years past, I wasn't wandering round thinking "I'd like to buy that but don't have enough cash left", and instead it was "more MDF scenery - why hasn't anyone brought paints".

Next up is Wappinshaw, which has traditionally been the weakest of the big three shows in Central Scotland. It's in a new venue this year, so perhaps that will help.

If there are any traders reading this who'll be there - if you have any Vallejo washes, please bring them along - there's someone who wants to buy them!