Reluctant Conscripts At Derby Worlds Event Most Flames of War players in the UK and some in Europe will be familiar with the Reluctant Conscripts through their long running series of competition events and with the running in recent years of the UK FoW GT and the UK Team Yankee GT. Based in and around Nottingham the Reluctant Conscripts have for several years worked alongside Battlefront to promote the game in the UK and had the pleasure of playing at the Battlefront HQ. Probably not so many of you will know about the smaller section of the Reluctant Conscripts who put on participation games of Great War and Team Yankee at wargames shows up and down the UK.

Over the last 3 years Richard Robinson and Pete Harris have attended a variety of UK wargames conventions such as Partizan, Barrage, Hammerhead, The Other Partizan and Derby Worlds. This year Richard and Pete put on TY at Hammerhead, Great War at The Other Partizan and have just got back from doing another TY participation game at the Derby Worlds event. Strangely this year’s Derby Worlds event was held in Hanger 42 at Bruntingthorpe airfield in Leicestershire…36 miles from Derby.

The Derby Worlds Tabletop Wargaming Convention (http://www.derbyworlds.com) is a mixture of large team based competition games, a massive array of trade stands, 19 Demonstration games and 15 Participation games supported by painting demonstrations and society stands. The event was very heavily attended and although the hall was a bit smaller than that used in previous years everything was squeezed in somehow.

Richard and Pete manned the Team Yankee stand and ran participation games for the event guests. Actually they spent more time talking to visitors about TY and in particular the new USA book “Stripes” which Battlefront had given them a pre-release copy to show to people. People were very excited by the new book and were already planning future list containing many of the new figures; the combination of the AV-8 Harrier and the UJ-1 Huey Transport Helicopter was seen as a particular good combination with a fast moving USA force.

The participation games were 50 point games on a 4ft by 4ft area in order to keep the game length to a practical 30 to 45 minutes. Down each side of the playing area was a strip with the individual unit cards and summary rules sheet. The USA side used the Bannon’s Boys starter boxed set with the addition of two VADS and the Soviet side used the Potecknov’s Bears starter set with the addition of two Shilkas and two additional T72’s. As in many TY games the action was very bloody and whilst at previous shows the results have been fairly even between USA and Soviet at Derby Worlds this year every game was a Soviet victory; next year with the release of Stripes the Soviet’s may not be so lucky.