Joy of Six 2026

 Made it to Joy of Six this year, and for once it doesn't clash with COW. WD Display Team (North) put on 633 Squadron, and as I've missed every other run of it this year, I was glad to be able to help out. The venue is close to where I live, so a short 25 minute walk into town. 

The welcome team at the entrance. I encountered a couple of slightly lost people who were obviously wargamers wandering the streets of Sheffield on the way and directed them to the venue. The Sheffield Hallam campus is quite  big and confusing.

Getting one of the halls ready. This show is very different to eg Partisan as it is mainly games with just a few traders.

Very quick Battle of Lens. Huge bases with lots and lots of figures on each, the Baccus demo/participation game. 

Operation Daquet, 1991. The French participation in Gulf War One in 1991. That feels a very, very long time ago now and rather exciting at the time.

I spent an awful lot of time peering at the NATO toys trying to work out what they were before I actually read the game blurb which explained they were French!

Battle of Santiago de Cuba. The Spanish were run by the umpires while the players took the US fleet.

This one was very clever 'Urban Warfare through the Ages' with three boards set up adjacent each covering city combat in different eras.

This lovely Norman era table was set up near the WD stand. I cant remember which battle it was, but the terrain just looked amazing although it was a simple furry cloth over some hills with various bits of scatter terrain.

Sheffield and Rotherham Wargamers put on this rather grand sci fi game.

A beautiful city and some Mechs. I think this stuff is mostly Brigade Models?

The troops line up for battle.

This was also near our table, Gaines Mill (ACW) participation.

The troops deployed, the Union are heavily outnumbered and defending so the players (generally) took the Confederates.

South London Warlords put on this fabulous Marne 1914 game.

The French artillery deployed to confound the Boche.

Froeschwiller/Worth. Another lovely table, custom made this time. It reminded me of Bruce Weigles setups for '1870' (he came to Triples some years ago and put on some games there).

Unlike "1870", the troops are on quite  big bases. These are just skirmish formations, everything else is out of sight for now.

Richard Crawley/Cold war Commanders Calais 1940 game. I just love the custom French style place signs. The scenario is from the Tac:WW2 Blitzkrieg scenario book, I helped playtest a couple of them with Richard.

The toys all laid out on OB sheets. Elements are platoons and manouvre units companies and battalions, rather like Command Decision. iirc 3rd RTR vs 1st Panzer Division outside Calais.

If you look carefully you can see flames and smoke coming out of the German engineers flamethrowers. Figures and vehicles a mix of Heroics and Scotia.

The Ilkley Irregulars put on Borodino using Bloody Big Battles. One of the Tuesday Irregulars (Tim C) played this. Like the the real thing, a rather bloody slog!

Greek City State warfare.

The Battles with MDF team put on a huge demonstration of their 6mm MDF figures, which look very grand en masse.

More of a close up. They do look a bit wooden (sorry!) close up, but to my mind I actually prefer the look of these to the very artificial looking Epic strips which are shoulder-shoulder.

It was only fairly late in the day that I discovered another entire room full of games and stands.

Baccus, as main sponsors of the show, had a huge stand, as well as running the raffle and doing basing demonstrations.

Rapier Miniatures were in attendance and it gave me a chance to have a really good look at their stuff close up. Lovely figures, excellent value for money but very much epic scale '6mm', similar in size and proportions to Baccus. They still have printed catalogues though, which get a big thumbs up from me.

The WD stand for 633 Squadron.

All set up and ready to go. This is the highly portable version of the game using a 1/300th Mosquito. John managed to bring all this down in his rucksack. I added my RAF Officers side cap for period colour.

We managed to run the game 24 times during the day, it was busy in the morning and late afternoon with a bit of a lull around lunchtime.

The bombers reach their target. 23 of 24 missions were successful (the failed one needed anything but a '1' for his last plane and duly rolled disastrously). One very skilful/lucky pilot managed to reach the target with all nine aircraft! That had never happened before. 

I managed to not spend any money on toys during the day at all, although there are some manufacturers whose websites I will be visiting. I need some more 6mm aircraft and I feel a distinct lack of armoured trains... Despite that I came away with a 2mm Mosque (thank you Richard C), a pack of paint pens (thank you John A) and half a dozen dice (thank you South London Warlords and congratulations on the VC).

That was a geat show, nice to be back again. As I said earlier it has a very different vibe to Partisan, Fiasco etc and well worth a trip if you fancy something a bit different for a change.