SWS Christmas Games Day 2025

 It is fairly traditional at Xmas for Sheffield Wargames Society to have a games day in the break. Now that we play remote games on club night and f2f games at Tapton, we don't get down to the club very much so it is nice to pitch up and see the old gang at least once a year.

Many of the regulars like to set up big games which take much of the day to play.

Like this huge 28mm ACW game. 

Reb cavalry galloping along.

Or this big 15mm Napoleonic game.

Austrians vs French and some liquid refreshment to aid the brain cells!

There were also some smaller things in play, like the new edition of Kingmaker (much faster to play evidently) - Jerry was involved in the development and play testing.

And this naval game on a rather nice mat.

And an intriguing Ancients set played with top down counters on a square grid.

Great Plains, so Carthaginians and Romans.

Funnily enough I'd brought Zama, so more Punic Wars. I'll do that as a separate report, as you don't often get to play with six elephants.

We also had a few run throughs of the show version of 633 Squadron on Johns portable boards. This is the 1/300th scale Mosquito.

A bit less cumbersome than my mountains! Here is the Nazi base at the end of the fjiord complete with power station and waterfall as featured in the film.

Tim was first up.

Lovely aircraft cards, which sadly get shot down progressively. The Squadron Leaders plane goes at the front.

For my run I used the base of 1/600th scale Mosquitos in line astern, which I think look pretty good. In the book the planes flew up the fjiord at 20 second intervals to allow a safe interval for the bombs (fused at 12 seconds).

We also played a boardgame and by 6pm that was quite enough for me and time for home. Great to see everyone and nice to be back at the physical club again.