Salute 2021

Andy and I went to Salute 2021 yesterday at Excel.  This was the much delayed April 2020 show so the theme was 80 years since the Battle of Britain, with a nicely printed cotton bag featuring a Spitfire, the free model was a 1940s schoolboy playing with a model plane, and there were full-scale replicas of a Hurricane and a Spitfire in the exhibition hall.

The COVID controls weren't made clear on the Salute website and so we were among a number of people caught out by them.  Fortunately, we managed to get the NHS app installed on Andy's phone and were then both able to show our vaccine passports.  So a slight delay in getting in but reassuring that all visitors had to show this or a recent negative test, and a good proportion of folks were wearing masks like us.

Understandably there were fewer people than previous years (partly COVID, perhaps partly because Salute 2022 is only five months away) but pretty much the same number of traders.  The noticeable difference was a reduction in the number of demo and participation games with quite a few empty tables.  But despite that, there was plenty to see and we had a good day out.

Highlights included this pirate battle:

A battle in Mexico:

A futuristic battle, seemingly influenced by the video game Horizon Zero Dawn:

This nice-looking WW2 game:

A very impressive Stalingrad game with a lot of height to it and with the River Volga in the foreground:

A couple of parody games about Brexit...

...and Trump's wall on the Mexico border:

We caught up with Eric C of Anderida fame, and Andy met up with his old squadron leader...

...who unusually was playing a WW2 game when we stopped by:

Expenditure was minimal this year.  I bought a set of reversible road/rivers and a small group of figures from new-ish company Tangent Miniatures.  These are called "Cosmic Travellers" but have more than a passing resemblance to the main characters from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.