Nottingham Young Gamers

Chum James invited me to come along and help at one of his "Nottingham Young Gamers" events on Sunday and I was only to happy to oblige.
I was supposed to help at the inaugural one last year, but something or other prevented me.
These events are essentially the follow on to James' very successful school wargaming club (which featured in one of the wargame magazines (WSS?) last year). James set up and ran the club at his primary school and had a whole bunch of children of both genders playing with toy soldiers. When he changed jobs recently the club was left a bit up in the air, so rather than see it die James has decided to keep it going by staging occasional afternoons at a social club near the school where, for a small fee, the children can come along and play games and paint some figures. On this occasion the models were generously supplied by the top chaps at Warlord Games.
I agreed to run a small game of Bolt Action (which meant frantic re-reading of the rules on Sunday morning). James and Scrivs provided all the models and scenery, all I had to do was point the kids in the right direction and tell them how many dice to roll.

My simple scenario saw a building in the middle of the board, in which fleeing Germans had inadvertently left behind the blueprints to Hitler's toilet. As the plucky Tommies closed in on the plans for the Fuhrer's khazi, beastly Bosch were headed back to reclaim them for the Fatherland. Whoever ended up with troops closest to the building at the end of the game would be the winner.

And so we played through two games over the course of a couple of very pleasant hours. The children were unfailingly polite (even to my terrible jokes) and seemed to enjoy it - though I couldn't persuade any of them to declare "For you Tommy the war is over" before rolling dice.
Bolt Action worked very nicely and the models from Scrivs and Martin all looked very good.

I took a few pictures.

 Beastly huns hug the wall

Both sides close in on the house

 Tommies caught in the low sun

 Teacher James gives his half-time lecture

 Plucky Brits storm forward

 The Germans get to the perimeter

More Germans get to the house

James is intending to run another one later in the year, so hopefully I'll get to do it all over again.