Dear Diary - a rolling 4 months of comment
A return to fast play rules
A few posts ago, I mentioned a need to find some fast play rules to reduce my time standing at the table and so help with constant back ache.
(Right - the front cover to my home brew WWII tactical rules)
This got me thinking to yesteryear. I recall that decades ago, Irregular Miniatures produced some small boxed sets of fast play rules for several periods for their 2mm and 6mm armies. In the box would be say six or seven different coloured cards (like mini index cards).
They were colour coded, because each colour corresponded to a different part of the Sequence of Play and you cycled through the cards as you advanced through that sequence. So for example, the yellow card might be the movement phase. On the front face would be the movement charts and modifiers that you needed, working a bit like a quick reference sheet. On the rear would be the notes and rules needed to interpret the charts or convey design intent.
It was all rather clever and the boxes had something of the cute factor. Even the box lid doubled as an artillery blast zone (If memory is not playing tricks!).
I had both the Napoleonic and Ancients sets. Anyway, I have just checked the Irregular Miniatures website and they still do them, together with two other sets, one for Franco Prussian to WWI and one for Renaissance to Marlburian, each one for under a fiver, plus the base postage.
As an idea, it seems a great format for the gamer who likes to make up their own rules (me), with the limitation in size, keeping the player true to making concise rules and avoiding rule bloat.
I thought I would give it a go and make an effort to do a ruleset for each of the main periods that I game in, taking the current home brew rules that I have and paring them right back to fit the small card format. Hopefully that sort of streamlining will see games play through at a faster pace.
Will it work? I don’t know, but as a mark of respect and gratitude to Irregular Miniatures for the inspiration of taking me down this path and to just indulge in a bit of nostalgia, I have put in an order for their Ancients box set. In a few days time, I shall no doubt be in my twenties again immersed in just some simple good old fashioned wargaming pleasure …… minus the 6mm armies …… for now! :-)
Margaret of Anjou
Re the post on 26th May (below), Margaret of Anjou has now been painted and based, giving me a Queen Margaret for my Wars of the Roses ImagiNations games (Piggy Longton).
In some respects, I was a little disappointed that I had to give her a dark, blackish dress, rather than something more imperial looking like Royal Purple, but to keep in accordance with the artwork in Graham Turner’s book, I followed his guidance, even giving the page a white and blue tunic with a green felt hat.
I did texture the base all over with a view to heavy flocking and tufting to match my other WotR bases - then I realised that in the artwork, Margaret is on a road, so a road was painted. Then I though a road should have rut marks from wagons, so they were put in.
Finally the tufting was quite heavy and encroached onto the road, making it a bit more ‘path like’, which I think I prefer anyway, so the final look is not quite as envisaged, but appealing to my eye.
The model is metal, so as well as being initially primed with rattle can primer, it has upon completion, been gloss varnished and then matt varnished.
Anyway, the Lancastrians now have a queen to lead them into battle. I suspect she will be visiting Piggy Longton in the not too distant future. Lord Darcy will be pleased ..... and worried, as he will be responsible for her safety!
In the meantime, here she is, being escorted by Lord Stanley’s men, who have Lancastrian sympathies ........ at the moment!
Face-to-Face Friday Game
With so much Napoleonic Operational Studies Group Napoleonics going on at the moment, it was just easier to put Souffel 1815 back onto the table. Familiarity with both rules and situation helped the game move along at a good pace.
The situation, as previously mentioned, is that the French have been retreating before the Austrians and they must make a stand at the Souffel river. It is only crossable by bridge, of which there are several. So the French defenders are a little stretched and the Austrians have the tough task of assaulting over bridges.
There is enough going on to keep both players constantly engaged. In the game, the Austrians made several successful assaults, gaining the far banks of the river, only to be thrown back by counterattack.
Here there was danger for the Austrians as a retreat over a river bridge causes the retreating unit to test for elimination ... and we saw that happen!
The system brings plenty of local nuance, such as out of command units not being able to advance after combat, counter-battery fire negating enemy bombardment and combined arms attacks. Each of those things made their presence felt, to the relief or delicious frustration of one side or the other throughout play.
One aspect that I really like is that the game gives great narrative, some of the moments feel like they are falling from the pages of the book and I don't think it matters whether you are winning or losing, just the immersion brings its own pleasure.
The game ended as a French victory, but having played this particular scenario three times, I have seen it go in different ways, so it is nicely balanced - a successful session.
Back ache changes things!
An ongoing bad back (years) is now increasingly persistent and at a higher level of discomfort and It now seems pretty obvious to me that some changes to my gaming are needed as a consequence.
The dining table that I sit at for 1 map boardgames and smaller is fine.
The table that I stand at in another part of the house for two mapper boardgames and all figure games is not!
Basically, standing, quite quickly brings on back pain and leg pain / discomfort. Reaching out into the centre of a table exacerbates that.
Yesterday I put out a two mapper boardgame covering the full 3 day Waterloo battle to have a dummy run in readiness for June’s anniversary game, but even breaking play down into half turn sessions with long breaks between, was not enough to keep discomfort under control and eventually I was forced to stop play … BooHoo!
As a counter to this, changes to my hobby approach can pretty much be divided into two camps.
Firstly - Stop playing two map games and move the boardgame collection to single map and smaller games, which can all be played seated.
Secondly - Figures gaming need two tweaks; Cut the depth of the table from 4 foot (48”) down to 3½ foot (lose 6”) to reduce the impact of reaching to the middle of the table and Play shorter / small games with faster rules to spend less time standing.
Combined, these should all reduce the skeletal stress of standing, leaning forwards and stretching - no doubt all of that will be to the good.
The changes for boardgames shouldn’t be too much of a compromise, there are plenty of good one map games and some of the two map games carry one map scenarios anyway.
The one problematic area may be the overly large boards that come with my favoured WWII tactical series - Old School Tactical (OST).
A couple of weeks ago, I set up one of the OST boards to run a four battle campaign, with each battle using the full area of the game board. It was something that I was really looking forward to, but that was also packed away after only an hour of play, due to said discomforts. So while the question of what to do about that is uppermost in my mind - I am not too keen on moving to another tactical board game system.
The figures solution will almost certainly improve things and my preference towards ‘Pocket Armies’ will simply become reinforced anyway. I also quite like the smaller teaser / large skirmish type figure game, leaving the boardgames to deal with the big battles, so that’s mostly okay.
There is a third tweak that I know will help because it removes all measuring and precise moving from the tabletop, greatly reducing leaning forwards ..... going to a hexed table.
I used to do this all the time, but these days I am a little resistant to it and in no rush to catch that bus. Recent experiments show it not to be as aesthetic as the open table and that matters to me, as the figures need to be doing something different from the boardgames.
I think I would need to work quite hard to make a proper aestheic job of it, including bespoke water and road stretches that match the hex grain and hills that also fit, but still look like hills.
A further problem is that if I reduce the depth of the table and grow the hex size to over 5", then the hex field will only be 7 hexes deep. Not a game killer, but it certainly brings some disadvatages with it and the loss of an entire hex row is not ideal.
Perhaps before deciding, there is more to think about on this.
I used to use 4" hexes, but there is a conflict between having terrain and figures in the hex at the same time, there just isn't enough space and also it is harder to show different formations such as line or column etc. The 5" hex takes much of that pressure away.
Anyway, this is not intended as a self indulgent post, rather, it surely must be the case that other gamers are in a similar position and might be interested in this sort of thing.
If changes stay fairly simple, then I will just leave it at that, but if more drastic adjustments come into play, then I will give the subject its own page in the menu on the left as I think there is interest out there for what is essentially an invisible issue in our hobby - disibility (in its many guises) and wargaming.
Monty v Rommel
The latest scenario booklet in the Rapid Fire Reloaded series arrived in the post this morning. I delayed my purchase of this because the desert is not really my thing …. But the completist collector in me caved in!
I read a Rapid Fire article by one of the authors in this months Miniature Wargame magazine and on the horizon they see Russian Front 1941, Ardennes and D-Day, so I have much to look forward to.
The A5 format books are just lovely. Full colour, well illustrated and just a joy to own. The Rapid Fire rules are in their 31st year, which is wonderful ….. though many of us will remember year one and just wonder how that time has passed so quickly!
One of the nice thing about these booklets is that they recognise the utility of the 6x4 table (the Crete book stepped outside of that slightly) and so these are very ‘home player’ friendly. Also the authors favour the 20mm - 1/72 scale and so anyone gaming with a smaller scale (me) can take advantage of an even smaller table.
The ‘Reloaded’ rules are the latest version of the rule system and they take a more streamlined approach to play. Their 'Reloaded' ruleset is very cheap and sits in just 16 pages of rules and that includes a comprehensive scenario, with orders of battle spread over several pages.
As with other scenario books, there are four fully fleshed out scenarios here, these being;
Himeimat - Delaying Rommel Aug 1942
Alma Halfa - The Turning Point Aug 1942
Lightfoot - Desert D-Day Oct 1942
Bir el Abd, Ariete’s Last Stand Nov 1942
There is a good selection of vehicles being used and so gamers may end up proxying some vehicles …. or it might be worth just selecting a single scenario and collecting an order-of-battle to exactly match.
When I said desert was not my thing ……. Who knows! :-)
Margaret of Anjou
I bought this lovely model of Margaret of Anjou a couple of years ago from Athena Miniatures. To install with my Wars of the Roses collection.
I mounted it to a base and undercoated white soon after buying, but it has languished since in the ‘to do’ pile. Anyway, the mood is right for getting this into the painting queue as I fancy painting a bit of 28mm for a change,
So a little research on suitable dress colours brought me to a site that had discovered a close resemblance of the model to a scene painted by Graham Turner, who does a lot of work for the Osprey Publishing.
Anyway, by good fortune, I have a copy of that lovely book ‘The Wars of the Roses, the Medieval Art of Graham Turner’, by Osprey Publishing and it is just a wonderful thing to own, it is full of his artwork, together with a goodly amount of history and period setting.
So, here they are together, the model and some painting inspiration - there is no excuse now! Her majesty awaits.
If you click on the image you will get a closer view of the model.
Reinforcements in the post.
My latest purchase from Anschluss came in the post today. I tend to buy from them in small groups like this and it is amazing how quickly the vehicle pool can build.
The two important buys were to get the three Soviet trucks, so that I can motorise one platoon (or a company in a higher level game) and the two SU 152’s, simply because I like them! (Though I like them - they don’t seem to last very long in my games, as every German gun tube available seems to have them in their gaze).
While ordering, I added one Hetzer to complement the one I already have and two Marder II’s, which are universally useful and particularly nice models here.
They are all in 3D resin, so very light and nicely detailed. You can click on the image to get a better idea of that.
The trucks will get done first to increase the functionality of my just completed Soviet Pocket Army.
I do have other, previously bought Soviet vehicles that are also in the painting queue, which include 9 x T-34 (mix of 76mm and 85mm versions), JSII’s and SU 76’s - the latter by Victrix Games. At the level that I game that should be enough ….. until I push to early war!
I have put a One Pound coin in the box as an indicator of scale (12mm or 1/144).
There is so much goodness, how does it all get painted in this life-time :-)
Soviet WWII 12mm Pocket Army
My second WWII Pocket Army is now complete and it pretty much mirrors the German force in content.
9 x Rifle Sections (3 platoons or one company)
1 x 82mm mortar platoon
2 x 45mm A/T guns deployed
2 x Maxim machine guns
1 x observer and radio
2 x SU 122 self propelled gun
This is the basis of a mid-war Soviet force and over time I will increase the infantry element to battalion size, so that it fits with both the Rapid Fire rules and ‘O’ Group rules.
The figures are very nicely sculpted 12mm in hard plastic from Victrix, the two vehicles are SU 122’s, which are 3D prints from Anschluss Wargames and the pair of anti-tank guns are metal from pendraken.
One of the advantages of this scale and period are that the forces are relatively easy and quick to paint, so these ‘starter’ sized forces can be expanded alongside painting other things.
As with the German force, I like to have something at the front of the anti-tank gun bases, so that their barrels have something to rest on, protecting them from handling and being dropped! Here I have used a cut down tree frame that Woodland Scenics sell.
The mortar teams have positioned themselves behind a wall, which is cut (outside in the fresh air because of resin dust) from a section of 10mm resin wall, made by the wonderful Battlescale and sold by Pendraken.
Anyway, I now have the beginning of my two Pocket Armies, so time to get some action to the table. I have been researching some actions that involved the SU 122.
There are a few more pictures up on the blog. LINK
Oh Dear, I am not needed to blog anymore!
A.I. wants to help me!
While writing here today, I saw a new egg shaped icon, which I now know to be ‘Kai’ the A.I.
I never click on anything these days that I don’t recognise or understand, but an e-mail popped up in my tray from my web host, telling me all about my new A.I. Buddy!
It says ‘Kai can proofread your text, expand your rough notes into well-written content or change the writing style without changing your ideas’.
Apparently it works best for people with a lot of content (me) because it has more information to draw upon in emulating my style / content / thinking etc.
On the plus side it says ‘Unleash your creativity without overthinking spelling or grammar’ ….. so a posh spell checker then?
Anyway, there we are, no big deal, but certainly a peak behind the curtain into what the not too distant future holds for us and another stepping stone on the way to a shallow relationship with those that read you, beaten only by the joys of monetising your blog!
I would be more impressed if it would paint my figures for me, but it strikes me that writing is a very personal thing, why would you want someone (something!) else to do it for you, when I can spend hours agonising over format, content and spelling?
It reminds me of a cartoon joke that my music shop has put in front of his racks of vinyl albums which reads something like ‘the two things I enjoy most about vinyl are the expense and inconvenience’ :-) very funny.
Here are the rough notes to my next post - ‘scenario building and the price of fish’ ….. good luck with that, my little A.I. buddy.
Question - is it likely that A.I. could (At the moment) write the above passage, with the kind of nuance that is in there and how the hell would it know about the cartoon in my music shop? Answers on a postcard please.
Rapid Fire East Front £5
For the past couple of years, I have been collecting the Rapid Fire Reloaded series, which includes rules and a number of scenario booklets in the A5 format.
The latest A5 booklet is now out, Monty Vs Rommel, which covers four desert actions. This is not a particular area of interest or knowledge for me, but I am something of a completist when it comes to collecting series, so while searching the Rapid Fire website for the booklet, I came across their latest news, which is that the OLD Russian front supplement has been made available again in PDF format.
Now there is a caveat with this. They have lost the original files and in any case the publication was somewhat pre good DeskTop Publishing software, so layout and maps are rather old school rudimentary and the visual quality is a bit mushy (soft) because they have had to rely on scans of old documents …… but they are up front about this and compensate by providing the PDF download at just £5, a bargain for something that I am not likely to come across again.
Anyway I thought it would be useful for Rapid Fire games and even a source for ‘O’ Group games and having just built up two Pocket Army forces for east front 1943, the scenario information might be a guide as to what to build / paint next.
My present forces are mid war and I immediately fell upon two interesting scenarios. One being Ponyri 9th July 1943 (Hill 253.5) and the Minsk highway 23rd June 1944. Both grabbed my attention as being on themes that I have previously gamed.
The Ponyri scenario mentions a 5’ x 8’ table, but the system is based around 1/72 figures, so my own 12mm armies should be able to use a table half that size, easily fitting in a 4’ x 3’ space ….. I think!
Anyway, regardless, for a fiver, it is a nice thing to have, just to sit with and browse through the various scenarios with a certain flavour of yesteryear presentation, which I like for its simplicity.
Painting mojo, I'm coming to find you!
I have always had a resistance to painting, much prefering to spend my time gaming, but of course 'no effort' = no result, so there were are!
To keep a painting discipline, I try to do something every day, whether that be priming, painting, inking or basing etc, while always keeping a batch primed, so that there are no disruptions between getting one lot of figures done and starting the next.
However, the past few weeks have been totally brushless! So yesterday, I had to kick start hard to break that cycle, giving myself two long painting sessions.
It was enough to move my Soviet WWII 12mm from the painting department to the mucky wash tray. Today I will will throw in some khaki highlights on the uniform and then brush apply a matt varnish.
By tomorrow the figures can be glued to their bases and the base edges painted.
That just leaves the adding of basing paste and flocking, with a final light matt varnish spray to lock everything down. The weather in the UK is presently ideal for that.
So within a few days, I should have the first stage of the Soviet WWII Pocket Army done, something that really could have and should have been completed a couple of weeks ago.
If you are in one of those 'inactive' moments, you might benefit from forcing a painting session of 1 hour over the next day or two, just to get that painting momentum moving again .... before the inactivity damages productivity too much - which it always does!
Hopefully the completing of two WWII Pocket Armies will see some near future tactical games at the table, which have been totally absent since I sold off my 1/72 collection this time last year.
Making a hex board
Having missed the Partizan show today due to limited mobility, I set about catching up on a number of wargame tasks. One being to hex out a couple of my old gaming boards to have a little dabble with figures and hexes.
I created a hex template on the computer. Printed it to a large self adhesive label. Fixed to card and then cut it out. I now had my shape and started to draw around it on the board to create a platter of hex cells.
For those that have done such things, you will know that there are three universal truths about doing home made hexed boards.
1 - No matter how careful you are, you will start in one corner all fine and dandy, but by the time you reach the far corner, the hexes are not sitting aligned properly, the angles are slightly out and some fudging has to be done.
2 - Your swear box will gain a few more coins.
3 - No matter how good your back is, by the end of the process …. It will be buggered!
Anyway, it is done, will it work? …. I don’t care! I have set it aside for a couple of days :-)
I used two boards, each 2’ x 4’ MDF, giving an area of 4x4. I adjusted the hex template to around 5¼”. This allows for 4½ hexes wide and 10 deep per board. With the boards placed together, that gives a total field of 9 hexes wide by 10 deep, with the grain moving left / right across the 9 wide bit. I.e. the hex vertices are pointing forwards into the depth of the board (10).
That gives a total of 90 cells, which is not a lot compared to the standard 13x9 grid that comes with GMT’s Command & Colours boards. However, this time around, I am less fixated on the number of cells as I am of their size and functionality.
The biggest problem with using figures on hexes is that the hexes are typically not big enough to include decent pieces of terrain and certainly less able to cope with both terrain and figures together - unlike a boardgame, which has the counters just sitting on a 2D map.
Going with the bigger hex helps address that. Also, in truth, if playing on an open table, units are generally having a frontage of around 5” or less and have movement allowances of around 4 - 6 inches and weapon ranged of 6 - 12”, then the 5” cell broadly accommodates that and in our minds eye, we could say that on a typical 4’ x 4’ table, our wargame generally has around 90 such locations, its just that they are not gridded off to be obvious, but they are there.
This has gone a bit full circle for me, as some 25 years ago, I was using the 5” hex with soft plastic ACW 1/72 figures, to good effect, I always thought and in fact it was my home brew rules for those game that gave the first version of my Two Flags - One Nation rules.
For now, I am just going to run a few test games on the bare boards with their hex outline and if it feels like it has a future, I will either prettify the boards or source a game mat that has 5¼” hexes already marked out.
A lot of my epic stuff is on 60mm bases, so two bases side by side will nicely sit in the hex, as would a second line or column formation or artillery battery or a platoon of 10mm / 12mm tanks.
I quite like the idea of completely filling a hex with woods or buildings and then instead of trying to force troops into the same space, leave them off the table and just place a flag marked in the hex to show its occupation. Anyway, more to come …… maybe :-)
EDIT - I have just had a quick look at some of my boardgame maps and things like Quatre Bras, the fighting for the St. Amand Villages and Ligny, look quite do-able at the same scale that the boardgame uses in this 9 x 10 hex gaming space.
The Fight for Brienne 1814
The affair with OSG’s Library of Napoleonic Battles continued last night in a face-to-face game from the ‘La Patrie en Danger’ module, examining the fighting around Brienne - La Rothiere, January 1814.
This is a short game that seems quite finely balanced. The French are on the attack, but there forces seemed to have arrived in the area in a higgledy piggledy fashion and they need a couple of precious turns to move up and sort themselves out, so that they can attack with sufficient strength.
There are reinforcements, but there isn’t enough time in the game to get any use out of them, so Ney must manage for the most part with what he has at hand.
I launched a cavalry charge, which is very interestingly handled in this system, but it is fraught with danger for the cavalry. It makes you really only want to charge with cavalry if there is a pressing need, which I think is probably a good restraint. They can fight normally when adjacent to an enemy, it is just the charge thing that makes one hesitate.
So why charge? Well as part of the sequence of combat, attacks are declared and then there is a sub charge phase. The cavalry move INTO the hex of a unit that will be attacked by other forces. The charge table is consulted and applied. Your hope is that the cavalry stays in the hex while the adjacent attack goes in. If the attack causes the defender to retreat, then it will retreat into the Zone of Control that the cavalry now exerts - removing the retreating unit form play.
But because I am so lucky! My cavalry were repulsed with 50% losses!
The highlight of the game (for me) was one of those ‘last roll of the die’ moments, when Ney took the Young Guard into Brienne and took the hex that is worth 10 Victory Points (see map above), but as good as that was, the French still lost the game, with the Coalition gaining a Marginal Victory.
All-in-all a good session, with a game played to a conclusion in a single sitting. I am increasingly inclined to get the full Waterloo Campaign to the table for the June anniversary …… but! I am tinkering with the thought of swapping the maps out for those in the cousin game ‘Napoleon’s Last Battles’ to give a tighter focus and more room (bigger hexes) for the counters counters - we shall see if there are any scale implications that impact on the system.
Souffel concludes.
La Souffel played out rather nicely. At the outset, I thought that Rapp’s French would be soundly beaten, but it takes a while for the Austrians to assemble and then attacking over bridges at rivers is not an easy thing, so things ran tighter than expected.
In the end, on the French left, the village of Dingsheim was attacked once, in the final hour of the day (8 PM) and with the Austrian attackers being repulsed. French cavalry had done a good job here in delaying the Austrian advance further forward of the river and then slowly giving ground and falling back across the bridge after causing 2 hours of delay.
In the centre, Mundolsheim village, that sits in the river loop eventually fell to the Austrians, but was then re-captured by the French. In the system, retreating across a river bridge can be risky, but the Austrians were fortunate in their crossing die rolls when retreat back across the Souffel.
On the French right at Soffelweyersheim, the Austrians forced the crossing and took the town late in the day. The French did try one counter-attack, which failed. By this time, the Austrian III Corps were spread across the three objective locations and keeping everyone in command was impossible.
Casualties were remarkably light, the heaviest suffered by the Austrians who lost a ‘5’ strength unit, because it took a retreat result and couldn’t escape. However, it was to be the points gained for occupied objective towns that would decide the game.
At the end of play, the French still retained two victory objectives giving them 10 points, while the Austrians had to content themselves with just 5 points for Soffelweyersheim, so a 'Strategic French' win according to the victory point schedule.
All-in-all, this was an enjoyable scenario, playable in a few hours and on a boardgame subject that I have not seen linked to the 100 days Campaign before.
