Hotlead 2023

So another Hotlead is done and gone. The convention goes from Friday night to Sunday in Stratford, Ontario, Canada but as usual I just went for the Saturday. This year I played the in the ADLG tournament, which was great fun but I will try to do a separate post on that. As a punter I can say it seemed as well organized as usual and everything looked very smooth/professional. I’m sure there were some gremlins for the ‘red shirted’ organizers but from my viewpoint it all went well.

I believe the convcention was busy and heard the hotel had sold out of rooms. There did not seem to be many (if any) empty gaming tables which was good. There also seemed a good number of vendors selling figs, books and other things. The bring and buy was back this year as well. Last year they did not run one as we were just coming out of COVID. I was restrained and did not go mad in that or purchases in general. I still picked up some decent deals – mostly 15mm figures. The bring and buy is the big source of the money raised for charity so I hope it did well.

I did a lot of socializing and walking around looking at the various games when not at the tournament. It is always good to catch up with various people I do not see that often. There was a great variety of games being put on. Note, every game in the event other than the tournaments are participation games, where the shows attendees play the games. Pre sign up is allowed to some level but there are always places available on the day. As well as the ADLG tournament there was also a bolt action and DBA tournaments running on Saturday. I did not get chance to check out the Bolt Action one but the DBA one looked well attended. There is an area for RPG’s etc but I did not make it to that area.

There were a lot of really cool looking games run on Saturday. Some of the stand out tables which caught my eye were:

• Nimitz the new game from Sam Mustafa being run,
• Various areoplane games – at least one Check Your 6 game (run by Keith a great GM) which looked very nice, as well as several others using different rules, include one with telescopic poles for the planes. real 3D altitude and everything.
• Chariot racing in the coliseum,
• Small boat action in a big scale using Warlords Cruel seas.
• Multiple big robot games – both Battle-tech and Gamma Wolves games were on offer,
• A big English civil war game using Pike and Shotte rules in 28mm looked really cool,
• A great looking 2mm Too The Strongest game – with some real guides and stages examples for how to make your own 2mm bases (at some point I may even try that we will see),
• Multiple WW2 and even a WW1 games using Bolt Action, Flames of War and other rules sets,
• Sharpe Practice on a nice looking table,
• A great looking Zulu wars game using Ospreys “The men who would be kings” rules. I believe in that the Zulu’s had a surprise victory over the British,
• There were Spaceship games as well – they always look interesting but never really draw me to them,
• A big ancients battle that had a huge hill with loads of troops fighting on the steep slopes. I berlieve that was using DBM rules.
• A ‘Saturday morning Cartoon heroes’ game with such characters as He-man, Thundarr the Barbarian and Skeletor fighting it out over a big table of terrain,
• A 12 or so player multi-player chaotic game in the pulp era with loads of figures.

There were many others, so I am sorry if I missed them as they all looked so cool. I did not have chance to get a good look at all of them in enough detail. I have to thank the organizers of the event. Also, all the GM hosting games (and running the tournaments), as well as the attendees for again making Hotlead a great event for me and the others who attended. It was, as it always has been, a great day of gaming and chatting with like minded people.

So, I’ll finish this post off with a collection of pictures I took of various tables on Saturday. I did not catch all the tables but here at least is a sample. Note, if you click on the picture you should see it a full size.

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