I met up for a chat with Mike last night and we pushed some counters around for a learning infantry scenario from the Assault Sicily 43 game (by Sound of Drums).

There is something very compelling about the game, which covers tactical WWII combat and the campaign is beautifully done, but it also has some detractions for me and these days I am preferring to stick with a single series of games per era, so my tactical WWII game of choice remains with the Old School Tactical series from Flying Pig.

Firstly multi coloured dice are used for combat with both sides rolling and the defender trying to defeat the attack my matching dice symbols (critical hits, hits and supressions). Situations will modify the dice. For example if your section is in rocky terrain, you get a basic yellow dice for the defending section, plus a yellow and green dice for the terrain. The attackers dice combination will depend upon the firing range, so you are checking dice colour combinations throughout.

It just feels over convoluted compared to the more tradition type of game that rolls 2D6 with its bell curve effect, involving (say) a stone building getting a +2 for defence etc, the latter is just more intuitive and easier for me to handle, especially if playing solo and especially late at night when tired.

Also, there is a system of hits (attacker) and lives (defender). This makes sense when fighting against infantry, as accumulated hits can reflect individuals in a section becoming casualties and the section gradually losing cohesion, but in vehicular combat, the system means that you don’t often get a straight knock-out, which to me, seems like losing an essential element of a tactical warfare game. A Sherman (say) has four lives (shown as hearts), a good shot might knock out 3 of those lives, so it is now on its last life …. What exactly does that represent. I would much rather see a miss, a hit with track damage or a hit with a knock-out etc.

I do like that position and manoeuvre are given an importance, which comes in part from good map design and so you are continually thinking about how to unhinge the enemy defence, rather than just going for a head on engagement or shoot out and hoping for the best.

How does this fit in with our future sessions? I’m not sure really, we would probably limit ourselves to the smaller scenarios, but then would we play enough for things to become a bit more second nature? Regardless, it was nice to get some dice rolling.

Well it was certainly pushing it, but last night I hit the painting goal for July with three battalions of Prussians done. The last bit of flocking went on just before midnight! In fact I did a little more than the July plan had proposed. 

This leaves me all set to do the ‘Near to Gilly’ scenario that I recently discussed.

Also rather than going with the bare minimum two bases per battalion, I have managed three bases, which is where I want all of the napoleonic battalions to be once enough bases have been painted.

So, painted and based in July, we have;

Two battalions of Prussian Musketeers (white webbing)

One battalion of Prussian Fusiliers (black webbing)

One company (1 base) of Prussian Jäger

One Prussian gun battery (2 models)

Two mounted Prussian Commanders

I also managed to get a few items done for the French which are shown (blurred!) at the front in the photo;

One French Gun battery (2 models)

Two mounted Colonel’s

I got a little fed up doing these by week three, but a push towards the end of two painting sessions a day saw me get over the line and now seeing them as a group, I am quite pleased with the work that went into them.

They now form the start of a Prussian ‘Pocket Army’, but I will quickly expand it with a couple of battalions of Landwehr, a regiment of Lancers and a company or two of extra jägers. That should at least give me a force that can cover all of the scenarios in the Neil Thomas book - One Hour Wargames, though I will also have to do some French cavalry for that to happen.

Anyway, there we are, I hope to get them to the table soon.

The latest Wargames Illustrated magazine (issue 452 for August 2025) hits UK stores today (Sainsbury's now carry it) and it carries a free Epic Sprue for their new Epic release ... Revolution (AWI).

In fact, according to the WI latest video, there are a variety of four different sprues on offer, the one I picked up (there was no choice, all the mags carried the same sprue) is a frame for 'British Army 2'. This is the one that carries the Hessians and Allies.

The artwork on the front of the mag is taken from the box cover of the Revolution battle box.

There is a 4 page article that gives details of what are on the selection of four frames and this is really useful as it is something that Warlord Games don't generally give enough coverage to in their game boxes.

The 'Never Mind The ......' rules series by Andy Callan gets a Never Mind the Bushido article and for Italian Wars 1494 - 1559 fans there is a look at the new Warlord Games Pike and Shotte supplement 'Death and The Landsknecht'.

Plus all the usual pretty pictures including a close look at Bill Gaskin's Seven Years War game at Partizan 2025.

I have just noticed the advert on the back which is for the new Wars of the Roses supplement for Swordpoint rules by Gripping Beast - nice!

I recently picked up a wargame magazine that carried an Operation Sealion boardgame covering the planned Nazi invasion of Britain in 1940.

The game is called Fight on the Beaches and was described in a post here on 24th July. It is a hex and counter game. Anyway, I fancy playing the game and perhaps writing it up on a day by day basis in a sort of ongoing narrative style for the blog.

I thought a bit of background reading would help and came across this title. It is a novel rather than an academic study ..... but it turns out the narrative is based on the wargame run organised by the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst with six senior officers per side umpiring various aspects of the game - how good is that!

I seem to recall the late Paddy Griffiths being involved in this or something like it, so a story based on a wargame sounds right up my street and at just a couple of quid on the Kindle, it is a snip.

Most books on the subject focus on the logistics and planning of the operation that never happened, but this book goes beyond that and explores the landing and subsequent campaign, taking an hour by hour account as a 'what if' campaign for the conquest of South East England and London, with the wargame directed by people who actually have the military knowledge and experience to keep the action within the limits of what was possible / likely.

As something quite different, I have high hopes for this.

As per previous post, Fight on the Beaches arrived yesterday. Note I have edited the front cover to remove a swastika symbol so that the post can be viewed without breaching the legislation of any part of the world.

The game was printed in 1985 by 3W as an insert to the Wargamer issue 40 magazine and it essentially covers Operation Sealion, the German Invasion of Great Britain in WWII.

It looks to be very playable with just four pages of rules, though they use quite dense text and no illustrations, so if done today, I would imagine that they would be an eight page set.

Receiving a 40 year old game through the post is a reminder of times gone by. The cover price was $10 and today it cost me £10. Other games out at the time and either discussed or advertised in the magazine are Boots and Saddles by GDW, Advanced East Wind Rain rules, A Holy Roman Empire replay, Killer Angels and South Mountain by West End Games.

This arrived as an unpunched game in good condition, but the staples are rusty and there is a mild ‘old mildewy magazine’ type smell that I know will annoy me, so I have kept the map which will be under plexi, cut and clipped the counters (small font so may be harder to read for some) and then the magazine cover, rules and historical support notes have been removed, scanned and printed onto new paper (thank you ink printer that uses big tanks!). Everything but map and counters have been discarded, I will just rely on the scanned and printed documents.

There are random victory objectives. The Germans select a chit from a pool of 5 chits. The number on the chit will determine what the scenario victory conditions are. These range from a 4 turn game, to a 22 turn game and objectives vary from occupation of rural centres to isolation of them by cutting rail lines.

I am hoping that this is a fairly easy way into this ‘what if’ campaign. The subject fascinates me and I can see it making for some good play in its own right or using it as a campaign driver to get some figure games up onto the table. It might make the blog as a turn by turn replay ….. or it could just end up in the bin! I have high hopes, but know nothing of the system, so time will tell.

The map (not a particularly pretty thing) is showing south east England, with the lower half of London presented on the top section of the map. The Germans do their land and then the British are allowed to move their units from their pre game set-up positions to reflect the German poor intel regarding accurate British troop deployment. Hopefully this will be an early one to the table.

Also in the order came another magazine, this one printed in 1994 and oddly that has rusted staples, but no smell. It has a glossier, higher quality paper that we are used to seeing in later magazines and that could be the reason.

I came across some talking about using the nauknauk AI app to animate their figures. I put this together in under 5 minutes. I doubt I will do much with this type of material, but I can see it having some presentation uses.

I just uploaded a photo of some Warlord Games Epic ACW and then instructed the AI to make the soldiers march forwards.

The below video is just 5 seconds long.

LINK

https://youtu.be/uSZUNSeReMI?si=aMW-w8zbFQgWTXuf

oh no! Another one :-)

Link

https://youtube.com/shorts/fI4h2EK9ooQ?si=BmYbJABK5i2Oc4Oy

If any of this interests you, have a look at Nik’s Blog and be amazed!

Link

https://youtu.be/CqfDKs385Is?si=PC-VUFcxh14QC03v

A couple of weeks ago I posted about an old set of Ancients rules that I (re)bought from Irregular Miniatures that basically held the entire system on half a dozen A6 sized cards that each dealt with one section from the sequence of play i.e. one card covering all the Movement Phase rules.

I was quite taken by them and ordered the Napoleonic and Renaissance sets on the back of that and they arrived today.

I like that they share a familiarity with each other, but that they are different enough to reflect period specifics.

The Napoleonic set talks about ‘moving a couple of corps to victory in 2 - 3 hours’, so they play at a higher organisation level than usually suits me. The brigade is the unit of manoeuvre, but its separate battalions are still represented on the table, it’s just that it fights as a brigade. Each brigade has a number of men in it (say 3500) and a Cohesion points Number (say 4).

As a unit fights, the chart gives combat results as a specific number of casualties (say 200) and this figure is used to reduce the brigades overall strength. Additionally any tests are run against the brigade’s Cohesion number (which will worsen with increasing casualties). If Cohesion drops to zero, the unit will become disordered and have various penalties, including retreating from the table on further failed tests.

There are elements here that remind me of some of my own rules - having individual units fighting as a ‘brigade’ reminds me of my Wars of the Roses rules in which the ‘wing’, ‘forward’, ‘rearward’ ‘mainward’ etc would absorb the casualties in one place from all the various individual component contingents of  bow, bill and skirmishers receiving losses.

Cohesion works much like my Horse & Musket rules that allow for units to deteriorate as casualties are absorbed, to the point that they start to fall back and eventually excuse themselves from the field - so obviously there are things here that I like and that interest me here.

The Pike & Shotte rules work differently as individual units accrue Fatigue Points to represent casualties and the friction of action and during play, tests are taken against a unit’s fatigue. As fatigue gets worse, units will increasingly tend to leave the field (rout), again this is similar to my Horse & Musket rules, so there are some common design sentiments there.

I was interested to see that the rules also cover late medieval, so an outing with the Wars of the Roses troops with these rules seems a likely prospect.

I had to wait a bit for these, because the Napoleonic set were being re-printed. They have been reproduced exactly as per 1989 set (the year I first bought them), with typewriter font etc, but without the box, a self seal bag serving the same function.

Anyway, two more blasts of nostalgia that I shall have some fun delving into and will put some examples of play up here when that happens.

I have been collecting the Anschluss resin vehicles for a while, with three German StuG IIIg's already painted when I did the Starter German Pocket Army.

While we have the summer weather, it is the time to get prepping done that needs a rattle can and then these can be put to one side and brush painted at anytime - so here we have the German collection so far.

I tend to game right down at the lower tactical level, so don't need a lot of vehicles, just 2 or 3 Panthers, that sort of thing.

There is a bit of a mix here including the Hetzer and a couple of armoured cars.

The parts (turret and body) are attached to coffee stirers using those gell type dots that stay rubbery and tacky. They give a good hold, but are not too difficult to remove.

They were sprayed with Revell Ochre Brown, which is a pretty good base for the colours that will follow.

Next the Soviet's can go on sticks and given a coating of Revell Nato Olive, which I have not used before, so let's hope ...... no surprises! 

All of this will set me well on the way to expanding the WWII Pocket Armies later in the year.

Plan ‘A’ is / was that by the end of the month, I will have a painted Prussian Regiment (like a brigade in most other nationalities orders-of-battle) and that it looks like this image ….. with 3 bases per battalion.

Two battalions of musketeers and one of Füsiliers.

In the early stages of building up a ‘Pocket Army’, I generally allow the armies to have just 2 bases per unit, just to get enough formations on the table to have an early game and then the extra base can be added as the painting production allows.

Coming off the painting corks today are the first 2 bases worth (4 musketeer  strips) ..... so the above goals are looking a little doubtful and as we are about to enter a heatwave that makes painting harder as the acrylic dries on the brush - it may well end up that by the end of the month that I only have 6 bases done, rather than the 9 that I would prefer to have. Either way, there should be some kind of game, a low level action, but a game never-the-less.

The bad back thing is taking further hold, so there is no gaming going on at the moment and painting has been cut to to 20 - 30 minutes per session, so even though from memory, the Epic Prussians seemed easier to paint last time I did them, they feel like they are taking longer with more sessions per painting group now needed.

I have based up some cannon for both sides, but whether these will see any paint in time for a game is uncertain.