A couple of posts ago, I described an AI attempt at creating a Napoleonic wargame scenario.

It looked interesting enough to have ago, so today I did a run through. Would it work? Would it be balanced, I had my doubts, but there was enough there to intrigue.

The instruction to the AI was to create a Napoleonic French attack against an Austrian held farmhouse. It called the generated scenario ‘The Kaiser’s Kitchen Garden - 1809. It gave me general instructions, an order of battle and what it called a map, but which looked like a photo reconstruction of a gaming table.

I have put observations and replay notes up on the Battlefields & Warriors Blog. Link

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/04/playing-ai-game-napoleonic.html

A second playing of the Blue & Gray Deluxe scenario and getting a different outcome.

Casualties were significantly higher than in the first game for the Union, losing 81 strength points compared to the Confederates losing just 30. Also, the Confederates fully held all four hexes of Sharpsburg at the end of play, worth an extra 15 points, so when all is added up, we come out with a Confederate Decisive Victory.

Some highlights;

From the outset, the Union took heavy casualties. In the photo, the Union have pushed over the Middle Bridge rather successfully, but a counter-attack cut into their ranks and the Union (strength 7) unit in the photo is about to be removed from play from getting a ‘Defender Retreat’ order and not being able to comply due to being cut off.

The Sunken Lane fell to the Union, but Dunker’s Chapel didn’t.

The Union got over Burnside Bridge and broke through the Confederate line, for a short time threatening the Ferry Crossing over Antietam Creek, which could have seen the whole Confederate army trapped and captured… but the Union just didn’t have enough strength on hand and despite getting close, their attack fizzled out.

Finally, in the last turn (like in the last game), the Union threatened to take one of the four hexes of Sharpsburg. There was essentially a 50/50 chance of the Union winning the attack, but they were repulsed by the town’s defenders and then defeated in detail by A.P. Hill’s Division counter-attacking from outside the town.

Again, we are in the region of a 25-minute set-up and a 2-hour play time, giving a fun and engaging game. The scenario is looking a little uphill for the Union, but there is a compulsion to keep on trying :-)

The Blue & Gray boardgame mentioned a few days ago has started to see some table time.

First up is the Antietam scenario and I though it played rather well, making for an engaging game.

I have put an AAR up on the Battlefields & Warriors Blog, link below, which has a closer look at turn 1 and then just gives an overview of the rest of the game.

As a starting experience, it certainly makes me keen to a) replay Antietam with some of the optional rules and b) to get the other scenarios to the table.

Just good old fun.

LINK

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/03/antietam.html

I asked Google's 'Gemini' software to create a scenario for Napoleonic French forces attacking Austrian forces located in a farmhouse. I also asked for a tabletop map to support the scenario ....... and this is what it gave me.

Amazing on first inspection, but it raised the question in my mind as to how much of that image was created / mashed-up by the software and how much of it was an actual lift from someone's table.

Anyway, I have written a piece about it over on the Battlefields & Warriors Blog if this sort of thing interests you.

LINK

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/03/thinking-aloud-ai.html

I popped into my Waterstones bookshop (UK) today for a quick mooch, not expecting to find anything new, but there on the Osprey Publishing stand, somewhat out of place, was a book in paperback published by Helion.

The Wars of the Roses by David Grummitt (£30) is going to eventually become a three-volume series that covers the whole of the period and really it is the last volume covering Bosworth that will interest me most ...... but I do like a series!

This book has been on my radar since 7th Son did a review of it on his YouTube channel, but I thought I would wait and pick it up at a wargame show as a way of channeling funds into the show, but seeing it in front of me and hoping to encourage Waterstones to stock more Helion titles, I bought it.

This book (The Triumph of York) covers 1455 through to 1461, which will take us up to the Battle of Towton.

The author has gone into meticulous detail of the available sources, testing the credibility of each and that gives a fresh look at the battles, Towton being the one that particularly interests me here because the nature of the battle does much for wargamers to understand how armies of the period fought in relation to separating archers out from the melee troops and the command structures used.

I feel that if you are writing wargame rules for the period, being able to emulate Towton is an important aspect of getting the right feel, at one end of the spectrum (large battle).

I generally approach revisionist text with some caution, but here I feel that the combined level of detail, scrutiny of sources and battle/campaign narrative make this a worthwhile addition to my shelves and I look forward to a) delving into this b) expanding my Wars of the Roses armies in the summer and getting more games with them to the table. Hopefully the book will be inspirational in that regard.

For the 16th year, the painting challenge has run its course, again over the three months of winter. The idea being that you sign up and commit to painting a certain number of points worth of figures and that by having a target, you are encouraged to paint and add to your collection over the winter.

Almost 90 people signed up. You paint whatever you choose, post it on the Challenge blog and then others will comment and you will pick up your points.

I signed up for 400 points, which due to a lapse mid way through, became a bit if a stretch, but in the end I got there and here are the rewards of that effort.

3 x Austrian Infantry Battalions (from 9th, 35th and 38th Infantry Regiments), 1 x Austrian Artillery Battery, 1 x Austrian Commander (Prince Liechtenstein), 2 x Austrian Colonels and to get me my final 10 points, I also painted up a couple of 28mm Soviet soldiers, just to see whether this is something that I want to do in the future for the Rapid Fire Rules (oops, just noticed that they did not make it into the photo - there is however a close up on the 'Painting Desk' page - yellow button on the left).

Seeing them all together makes me really pleased that I did this. My Napoleonic French forces had been steaming ahead and the Austrians needed to do a bit of catching up - and now they mostly have.

Thank you to Dallas, Curt and the rest of the team behind the Analogue Hobby Painting Challenge for hosting the Challenge and so kindly giving up their time and to all those fellow hobbyists who commented on the Challenge blog, supporting the various entries. 

The latest World War II magazine from Decision Games has arrived on UK shores (Second Chance Games) and for me, this is a very special issue.

The subject covers the German attempt at relieving the Stalingrad Pocket, which of itself is a really interesting action, but more importantly (to me), it uses the series rules from Decision Games’ Battles in the East system.

To date, there are four volumes in BitE, each has two battles, all are in print and initially this was meant to stop at that. The artwork on the side of each box is a ¼ slice of a well known photograph of a Soviet soldier in action, so that when the four boxes are stored end up on a shelf, the box edges of the four volumes mate to present the full photograph.

However, the series has proven quite popular and so the designer is working on a fifth volume and now we have Decision Games adding this new single title in the form of Winterstorm.

The number of units looks to be lower than the scenarios from the boxed games, so I am hopeful that here at least is a scenario that can fit in with our face-to-face sessions. In every other regard, other than the map being paper (rather than mounted) it perfectly matches the series games.

Being a magazine, we are also graced with a rather nice article on the operation itself.

I suspect, as with some other issues of the magazine, that this will fly off the shelf and quickly reach collector status, so if this is on your radar, pounce now! 

EDIT - wow, that was fast, just checked in with Second Chance Games and they are sold out already!

This game hit UK shores (Second Chance Games) some time ago and while I fancied a low complexity series of ACW games, I felt that this was perhaps a bit too simple and that the lack of command and control would allow units to be continually doing fancy footwork and moving outside of their Corps area of operations to get those perfect attack odds etc.

Anyway, the game itself is beautifully presented (the clue being in the Deluxe Edition). It is a collection of eight battles that the hobby was first introduced to in 1975 in the form of two quad games, Blue & Gray vol I (Antietam, Cemetery Hill, Chickamauga, Shiloh), to be later followed by Blue & Gray vol II (The Battle of the Wilderness, Chattanooga, Fredericksburg, Hooker & Lee - which covers Chancellorsville).

I have done a bit of an ‘initial look’ post over on the Battlefields & Warriors Blog, so if you fancy that, here is the LINK.

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/03/blue-gray-deluxe-boardgame.html

1944 - Battle of the Bulge from Worthington Publishing went onto the table last night for a face-to-face game.

It is a very playable system and last night's game moved along swimmingly.

At the start of play, rather than simply playing the campaign game (10 turns), the German player can choose one of four objective cards, each dealing with 'a plan' with different objectives.

As the German player I went with 'von Rundstedt Case Martin' plan, which was a bit less ambitious than the actual 'Watch on the Rhine' plan and so you are under tighter time scales (6 turns) to get those objectives captured.

Anyway, I got to around halfway to my objective goals, primarily failing to also take Bastogne, Verviers and Marche.

I did have a chance on turn 2 of a major breakout and exiting the board with a supplied unit for a 'sudden death' win, but my die rolling deserted me and the small window of chance was quickly closed down ..... forever!

The game uses special dice, with infantry and armour symbols, plus blanks and you are looking at rolling the symbols to score hits, resulting in step losses to the enemy.

Some units, particularly the armour have 4 steps (represented by two counters) and they can be hard to shift.

Anyway, the system has not failed yet to give a good clean competative game and last night was no exception.

I have opened a new yellow tab (halfway down the left of the screen) that will start to highlight some map sections / artwork from boardgame maps.

Over time it will build to 20 images (my maximum allowance per page) and then slowly start to rotate out as new things come into the collection.

As with all images on this site, clicking on one should give you a slide presentation of all images on that page.

On the cover of last month's Wargames Illustrated magazine, Warlord Games had donated a plastic frame of their new WWII Soviet infantry.  It is a well-designed sprue with many options including snipers and men holding a panzerfaust.

To make the sums work for the Analogue Hobby Painting Challenge, I need to find an extra painting 10 points from somewhere, so - two 28mm infantrymen would do the trick quite nicely, so here we are.

The figures do not come with their own integrated puddle base, so I used a Kallistra plastic base, to get a strong connection between the soldier's boots and the base using a plastic weld glue.

The base is 40mm x 30mm, deliberately chosen to see what it would look like and whether it would work for something like the Rapid Fire Reloaded rules on my table and to see what the figures would look like when set amongst terrain that I already own.

Anyway, they are quite easy to put together. I used Vallejo Khaki for the uniform, which needs two coats for full coverage.

Whether or not this becomes a future project is uncertain at this stage, but it has the advantage that two small forces can be built up relatively quickly. 

As I start to jack up the Schoengrabern scenario from the boardgame 'Napoleon's Wheel' by the Operational Support Group, which has a range of 1805 battle scenarios, including Austerlitz ..... I was reminded that I also have the excellent figures scenario book by Michael Hopper, covering the same subject.

I say reminded - I pulled a game box from the shelf and heard a thud as 'something' got knocked and fell down the back of the shelves. It was then a hands and knees job to drag everything off the bottom shelf to reveal all .... and it was worth it, because I had forgotten about this scenario booklet.

Schoengrabern is a French Vs Russian scenario. I don't have Russian figures, but I do have Austrians in growing numbers and don't mind doing a bit of proxying. So in the first instance, I will be doing Schoengrabern in both boardgame and figures battles and then move on to some of the other pairings, I quite fancy Elchingen and in fact think that I have two boardgames on this subject and the scenario in the figures booklet looks quite do-able.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel on the painting for the Analogue challenge. I have been putting 2½ hours a day into it and have the aggravated shoulder to prove it!

The challenge ends on the 21st, but we have a holiday between now and then, so the race is on to get my last Austrian infantry unit done and for it to cross the 400 point line that I set myself at the start of the challenge.

Last night I put the wash down. This morning I highlighted the figures back up and I have just brushed on a matt varnish. If I can get them off the painting corks tonight and glued down onto bases, then tomorrow I can lay the basing paste.

By the time everything is done and photographed to submit to the Challenge, I reckon I will have just come within a day failing to hit the deadline - so the extra hours painting have paid off.

Once I get back from the hols, those time-consuming jobs of proofing my boardgame, playing the Henry Hyde campaign right through in compressed time and painting for the Analogue Hobby Challenge, will all be behind me and I can just return to a bit of self-indulgent play!