A Joyous Day Out

Just back from my first visit to ‘The Joy of Six’ oop north in Sheffield and a fine day out it was too.

Now as any readers of this blog know, we are primarily a 28mm gaming group and it has only been in the last couple of years we have emerged from our comfort zone into smaller scales such as 15mm and 10mm. The even smaller scale of 6mm is more recent and only used for our 1980’s Cold War games so the need to go to an exclusively 6mm show was a fairly low priority but this year the weather was good, I had some extras to pick up from Heroics & Ross and it’s only an hour and a half run from Coventry so a couple of us thought we’d give it a go.

Just to be clear, this isn’t an in depth show review, Big Lee and Alex Southeran were both there so I’m sure they will go into detail on their respective channels. This is more of a first time visitor’s impression, positive and negative.

‘Small and friendly’ is definitely the phrase to apply to this show. Three modest sized rooms in Sheffield Hallam University, a dozen odd traders serving the scale specifically or generically – paints, books etc, and surprisingly twenty something games both participation and demonstration. The numbers through the door didn’t seem high, but this is a niche within a niche hobby so as long as it paid its way I guess everyone was happy.

The games were an eclectic mix, classic takes from Napoleonic, SYW, Franco Prussian, ACW and WWII along with some more eclectic offerings, Some games were well presented and showed off the scale to its best advantage; for me the top three were, Lobositz, Bastogne 1944 and Lens 1643, I’m not going to do a worst three because ‘eye of the beholder’ and all that but in some cases it was like going back to the 1970’s with an awful lot of detritus on the playing surfaces which given the small scale of the figures was far more noticeable than in say 28mm.

Earlier I used the phrase ‘small and friendly’ and that was the general vibe but again it was like going back in time at some of the tables where the experience of standing and being studiously ignored was in play. Now I’m not a pushy kind of guy so maybe that was it but I’ll be interested to see if Big Lee picked up on it given that it is one of his pet peeves. That said, the guys at Total Battle Miniatures were very chatty – I learnt all about polyurethane moulding in 20 minutes 🤣

Trade wise, the major figure/vehicle manufacturers were all there, Baccus (obviously), Heroics & Ross, Scotia Grendel, and Rapier and very friendly – Andy from Heroics and Richard from Scotia were particularly helpful. The award for most friendly trader however has to go to Rob of Rob’s Scenics, what a lovely guy and great terrain; I’ve watched his videos on Facebook and always thought, “ooh, they look nice” but when presented with them for real I’m afraid Gerard and I went a bit mad 😂🤣 Thank you Rob.

And that’s it really, an impression. Not for the general gamer really but if you do play 6mm than why aren’t you there? Off to have a more detailed look at my purchases now 😀