Colours 2019, Newbury

There is a first time for everything… and in this case, it was my first visit to a proper wargame show: Colours 2019, in Newbury. For those, who are not familiar with it, Colours is an annual game show, organized by the Newbury & Reading Wargames Society at the Newbury Racecourse.

To be perfectly honest, I was hesitant to go: it was a very busy period, I was working my way through a massive backlog of miniature painting, and it took more than an hour to get there by train, but a veteran gamer friend convinced me to take the trip. I didn’t really know what to expect, as the closest thing I recently participated in, was Fighting Fantasy Fest 3, which was focusing on one single line of games.

It was funny to see that as the train was getting closer to Newbury, more and more people started to show up with rulebooks and catalogues, who were talking about unit types and composition, strategies and wargamer stuff.

I can honestly tell, that I wasn’t prepared to what I saw there: 2 floors with over 70 traders, publishers and manufacturers, plus a third floor with more than 20 participation and demo games! Most probably, there was no historical era or scale that wasn’t presented. There were games, figure sets, neatly painted armies and loads of accessories everywhere.

The dioramas deserve a separate gallery, they were built and painted with amazing skills:

A couple of products worth highlighting:

The most exciting part of the show was on the third floor, featuring participation and demo games. Building and painting minis and scenery pieces is fun, but you want to use them… I mean, you want to play with them. I’ve never seen so many, fully equipped gaming tables in one place. Most of them were impressive because of their level of detail, their size or the creativity of the designers.

Of course, there is no way to visit a wargame show without buying bits and pieces. There were plenty of exciting products and great show offers, so it was a real challenge to resist buying new games. Thinking about my huge painting backlog helped a lot, I was focusing hard on avoiding expanding it further. Still, I ended up with a few new purchases:

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Learnings from visiting Colours 2019:

A 6 mm army is not a bad idea at all. Previously, I simply ignored this scale as the size of these figures and their level of detail (or the lack of it) wasn’t really appealing. What I saw at the show convinced me of the opposite, as I have seen several examples of reasonably detailed and well-painted figures in this scale. With 6mm figures or tanks, you can have very large scale battles even in relatively small gaming tables, without all the logistic difficulties of the bigger models. It’s also surprisingly budget-friendly: you can get a tank for £1 or 100 pieces of infantry for about £10.

Demo and participation games: this time I was overwhelmed by the products, but next year, I will have to block out some time to play a few games.

I must put together a shopping list, otherwise it’s just too easy to succumb to impulse buying.

I need to make sure I have cash with me, since not everyone accepts cards. This is a bit of an annoyance, because I love history as a hobby, but not when it comes to finances. 😊

Was it worth visiting? Yes, absolutely. Will I visit next year too? Yes, I certainly will.

For the members of Newbury & Reading Wargames Society and the marshalls of the event in case they read my post: Thanks for organizing the show, I really enjoyed it. Keep up the good work and see you next year!