Author Archives: talesfromtheperiphery

Peterborough Crown Tourney

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The Peterborough Crown Tourney is a listbuilder “Classic” BattleTech tournament using the BattleMech manual rules, at the George Alcock Centre in Stanground, Peterborough on Saturday, May 2nd 2026. The event is being jointly run by this podcast and Peterborough Wargames Club. Provisionally, you will play three games over the course of the day, and your force will be 8000BV, any faction, Civil War era. The rules pack will be based on the excellent one for Southern Assault 2025, and will contain certain restrictions on choice. It will be up before (hopefully well before) the end of March.

The deadline for list submissions (and entries) will be Tuesday April 28th, to allow the organisers time to check and approve lists.

The event is in the TFTP diary here, and the direct link to sign up is here. Admission is £15. (Sadly, our venue put their prices up, so we have had to follow suit. There is, however, free tea and coffee, a staffed and well-stocked bar with soft drinks and beer (low-alcohol as well) and very reasonably priced breakfast and lunch.)

For those considering staying over the night before, the nearest decent hotels are the Premier Inn Hampton, which is currently about £63 for a single for the Friday night, or the Premier Inn City Centre (about £65). The latter is on the number 5 bus route to the George Alcock.

About the Crown Tourney series

Hopefully, the Peterborough Crown Tourney will be the first of a series around the country – we’re trying to fine tune a set of listbuilder rules for BT for those who prefer that style of tournament. If you or your club are willing to put on a similar event, we’ll be more than happy to help, advise and/or listen to your input – just drop FleetfootMike a DM on the UK Discord.

Welcome to 2026…

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It’s been a while, for which I apologise. I got hit with the cold from … hrm.. what’s a good BattleTech metaphor? The jungles of Old Kentucky? Either way, I picked up a cold from the trip down to one of my contracts’ Christmas bash just before Christmas, which settled in with a vengeance till late January. I managed to record a podcast between Christmas and the New Year, in a brief lull between sneezing my head off and keeping myself awake all night coughing up my lungs.

Not a fun start to the year, and, being a contractor, I don’t get paid for being sick, so the time since has been spent catching up on paid work so I can afford the Corporation Tax bill 😀

Still – I’m back. The podcast is still in the editing stage, but I’m actually about caught up with the stuff that pays the bills, so expect that this week. As a warmup for that, I’ve just updated the events calendar. If there’s any entries for that or the directory that I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll make sure it’s up and you get a mention in the upcoming episode.

Happy New Year, belatedly!

Mike

P.S. expect dates for Periphery Assault 2026 and another tournament from Tales from the Periphery real soon now!

Periphery Assault 2025 Aftermath

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Whew. All finished.

Winners:

  • Overall Winner: Richard Cook (Snord’s Irregulars)
  • Most Violent (most kill/crippled points): Bartosz Debski (Clan Jade Falcon)
  • Best Tactician (most objective points): Bob Sawyers (Wolf’s Dragoons)
  • Wooden Spoon: Gary Condra (Threshold Strikers – Mercs)
  • Best Painted: Colin Golder (Free Raselhague Republic)

Richard (as overall winner) was ineligible for the Most Violent and Best Tactician awards, otherwise he’d have won Most Violent by a country mile as well.

The results spreadsheet is here if anyone is curious (he says, somewhat nervously hoping he triple-checked the logic and formulae properly – please don’t hurt me if I goofed!)

Huge thanks to Dan, Josh, Bob and Richard for help with setup and teardown, my wife Anne and Sam for cookies, gingerbread ‘Mechs and chocolate muffins, Lesley at the venue for keeping us all fed and watered, and to Ed and the folks at Buy The Same Token for making sure each player had one of their very sweet rear arc templates.

Please note that the BTST links are affiliate links, so if you wish to support the podcast’s recurring monthly costs (subscription to Riverside.FM among other things), don’t hesitate to use them.

See you next year!

(And look out for a catchup episode with Bob just as soon as he gets back from Parts North.)

Periphery Assault Player Pack

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You can now download this here.

Event details are here, and the direct link to sign up is here

For those considering staying over the night before, the nearest decent hotels are the Premier Inn Hampton, which is currently about £43 for a single for the Friday night, or the Premier Inn City Centre (about £51). The latter is on the number 5 bus route to the George Alcock.

We got merch!

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If you ran into Mike at Salute, you may have noticed him sporting a very fetching black Tales From The Periphery T-shirt in the best of sizes (Wargamer XL) featuring our Old Grey Whistle Test-inspired logo.

These are now available for purchase from the site shop – secure payments are handled by WooCommerce Payments and Stripe. Manufacturing and fulfilment is via StreetShirts, and should be pretty quick (same or next day dispatch) as long as Mike is around to transfer your order across for production. Sizes available are S to 3XL. Sorry, UK customers only (for now).

Note: If you want a shirt delivered to the English Nationals this coming weekend, please order by 1pm Weds 22nd May (i.e. tomorrow lunchtime) and Mike will bring it along (floods, etc, permitting).