Over the past few days, I have been playing out the last moments of the campaign, which has seen the Graysville Campaign 1863 folder in the left margin updated with the final three posts.

The first covers the actions on the Morning of Saturday 20th June 1863, the second covers the manoeuvres during the early afternoon and finally there are some campaign / playing thoughts in a post called the 'The Diaries of the Divisional Commanders'

Thanks to everyone who followed or dipped into the posts. I will leave the folder up for the forseeable future, so that it can be read as a cohesive whole.

I'm not quite sure how these things rise back to the top of the viewing lists, but on visiting  my Battlefields & Warrior Blog this morning, I had noted that an old Piggy Longton post from November 2021 has resurfaced asa post of interest.

It is ages since I have had the Wars of the Roses troops to the table and reading the post and enjoying the article has made me quite keen to get another Piggy Longton' game done soon,

Anyway, for anyone look for a medieval coffee moment and a reminder of what lord Darcy has to put up with, I have copied the link to the post here.

Link

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2021/11/festival-of-osrics-chapel-piggy-longton.html

The latest Wargames illustrated mag hits the UK high street shelves today, bagged with a free Epic 'Celt Warriors 2' sprue. Apparently the sprue is worth £10, so if it is your sort of thing, the price of the mag is off-set.

I have recently been looking at my Hannibal Epic as I research and draw up a scenario for Trebia, one that will need fewer bases than the scenario provided in the Epic Hail Caesar rule set, to get get the scenario closer to a 'pocket army' battle.

I am going to look at incorporating this Celt sprue into that plan and since the sprue comes with a chariot, it might be nice to make up one interesting large base that has the chariot sitting amonst the infantry warband. Anyway, it is a very nice looking thing with good figure detail.

As for the mag, there is a rather nice 7 page article on the Celts and one on Spanish Napoleonic Infantry 1808- 1811. There is also a substantial article on 'Gaming in the world of Irish Myth'.

For me, overall a worthwhile issue, especially with that sprue.

I have started a new day of ACW battles in Graysville Campaign, but a disappointing escalation in my back / leg pain makes it difficult to do much, so this is being left set up and I return to it every few hours to do a turn, which go very quickly with these low unit density battles.

Hopefully sometime over the weekend, I will have done enough to update the  campaign folder here and that will likely be my next post.

Funny how things work out. Yesterday I pulled the Pike & Shotte Epic figure set from the shelves for a browse. That took me to pulling the Warlord Games’ ‘TO KILL A KING’ supplement down and reading through the various actions.

I have always enjoyed this supplement as it covers some of the very small actions as well as the ‘main battles’.

Anyway, I was in a quirky bookshop today and saw this title. At 430 pages before reaching appendix 1 - 11,  the book covers in some rather nice detail the various Civil War actions in the County of Lancashire.

By necessity, scenario introductions to their subject are often short bland affairs and this book puts the meat on those engagement, plus it gives an account of the war from a Lancashire perspective, including the involvement of local families.

The boundaries of Lancashire at the time were enlarged compared to the present day, so we have the additional context of the involvement of Liverpool, Manchester, up to Lonsdale / Furness.

I was hoping that Stephen Bull might have done other similar titles to cover other counties, but it appears not, so I assume him to be a local author to Lancashire, which may be what sits behind his command of the subject.

Anyway, I think this will be a useful companion once my Pike & Shotte games start to reach the table.

Perhaps a surprising choice for the initial vehicles in the Soviet collection.

With attention now turned to getting a Soviet mid war Pocket Army up and running to mirror the German force completed a couple of weeks ago, while the first five bases worth of Soviet infantry are still on painting sticks, these two SU 122’s have pushed their way into the front of the painting queue.

For their vehicle support, the Germans got three StuG III’s and I suppose one might have expected the Soviet starter force to have T-34’s or even SU 76, but I like the character of the more unusual SU 122.

These are 1/144 resin prints from Anschluss wargames, with nice detail and they hold the paint well. The transfers have been taken from my Victrix 1/144 SU 76 kit.

I did do quite a few stages on them to vary that green, but in the final analysis, the eye doesn't really pick that up, so I think in the future I would cut those out and save time.

I did particularly like the Pegasus model (see below) of this vehicle that I had in 1/72, but you could fit four of these little fellows in the same footprint (if that's what you want), so the 1/144 (12mm) is a good fit for my table, though  I am unlikely to want more than two of these models.

I rather miss the 1/72 stuff, but on the flip side, there is something compelling  aboute the 10mm / 12mm models, I just need to get more of them done and get a few games to the table.

Another playing of Assault Sicily by Assault Games and Sound of Drums (working in partnership, one on design and the other on production).

This is not an official scenario, the modular nature of the game makes it very easy just to throw down an off the cuff game. Here I randomly selected a Formation Card (infantry) for either side. As chance would have it, the Germans were veteran and the U.S. were recruits, which fed into the play narrative.

I started each side at opposing board ends, with three buildings in the centre to capture. This was just enough to give a pleasant 50 minutes of game, while I try to get more of this system under my belt. This time I included Command Points, which in effect means that each turn a side will not get to use every unit.

Off-picture (lower left) is a US 81mm mortar. It has open views to the German Infantry unit that moved last turn amongst crops.

The mortar has fired on the German unit. Their view is slightly degraded because line of sight passes through some brush terrain. The end result is that the German unit suffers one hit (the red marker) and also a suppression marker.

The way suppression works here is very good. A unit is only allowed to take one action in a turn and when it does, it is marked with a counter that expresses which action has been taken. This German unit had not taken an action yet, but the suppression marker in effect becomes the unit’s Action Marker - that is, it has gone to ground and is hunkering down, so the German unit cannot act this turn, it is as some designs would describe as ‘spent’ or ‘used’.

Note the green square on the marker. This denotes that if fired upon, it will get an addition dice (green) for its defensive roll, to reflect the unit hugging the ground.

I have decided a couple of times to sell this game and packed it all away neatly ….. and then put it out on the table again! It certainly does have some compelling elements.

Anticipating that the Graysville Campaign might see Shield’s Union division actually reach Graysville itself, I bought a few more 10mm Battlescale buildings, to allow the representation of a slightly larger settlement.

As the campaign moves closer to that possible moment, they have hit the painting table.

These have been primed in Vallejo acrylic poly and then mostly dry brushed as there is plenty of detailed relief on them. they just need a thin wash to dampen down the brightness to match my other stuff and then they are good to go.

The left building is a water mill and comes with a water wheel, which if fixed would not be visible from this angle, so I have dragged it out into open view, just to give an idea of how this is going to look on the table.

In due course, it will get a base that will allow the building to knit in with my narrow river system, so that the water wheel itself looks like it sits either in the water way or next to it, with a diversion channel of water to drive the wheel. There are plenty of scenarios that need these sort of things.

I also have a bottle of Scenic Effects water which I will try to apply to give the sense of water running off the wheel's paddles.

It is still in the balance whether the campaign will generate a battle at the town as already, both forces are weary and there are a distinct lack of fresh troops about. 

This was just one of those lovely discoveries when browsing the shelves of a book shop (Waterstones UK) and a fine example of why book shops are so important and deserve our continued support ….. no money …. no book shop!

The slight downside is that some customers handle the books without due care and my copy has some wear along the bottom edge, which takes some pleasure away from it all,

This is 'Battlefield Panoramas' by Victor Ambrus. Apparently he has been the illustrator for over 300 books on classical and historical subjects.

He is best known to me as the illustrator supporting the Time Team T.V. programme. Time Team was a UK archaeological programme that visited sites of historical value, setting up a three day dig at them, bringing in experts to find out as much as they could about the site.

At the end of the three days, the discoveries needed some ‘imagining’ to bring them to life and that is where Ambrus would come in, with illustrations of say a typical busy Roman street of a group of monks in a religious setting etc.

Here, Ambrus travels through military history, with each subject getting a one page summary of text with a facing illustration on the next page. It is just a nice thing to own, pick up and browse.

My stash of unread books is getting a bit unwieldy, but this 'pick up and put down' magazine style title is a welcomed addition, with every few pages just being able to be read in isolation from the rest of the book.

The blurb on the back of the book explains it rather succinctly, ‘Battlefields Panoramas is a joy to browse through and will win a place on the shelves of all those with an interest in conflict - or simply a love of illustration’.

A small battle on a 4' x 4' table with 28mm napoleonics and home brew rules.

A French infantry brigade is assaulting the village of Bühl with a cavarly brigade in support on the right flank.

As always, even though a small game, this was a lot of fun.

There is a short write up and some extra photos over on the Battlefields & Warriors Blog.

LINK

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com

Over the past couple of days, I have punched the counters and been going through the game parts of the ASSAULT: Gela 1943 game, which is a tactical WWII system that is new to me. 

There are around 46 pages of well illustrated rules, which I read through once cover-to-cover. It is a fairly easy read.

I am pretty familiar with WWII tactical games, but there are some new concepts here, so I am grateful of the starter scenarios. I set the infantry one up first and played it through. The map artwork is lovely and the starter scenario only needs one board, so I the first game was on a very friendly 12” x 15” sized battlefield.

The system uses opposed die rolls and the four coloured dice are each of a different strength, with red being the strongest, followed by yellow, green an blue. The dice use symbols rather than numbers and the idea is that the attacker rolls their dice and then the defender does likewise, with the defender trying to match their symbols to the attacker’s symbols to cancel as many of them as they can.

The symbols that are not matched ‘get through’ and cause the various effects of Critical Hit, Damage and Suppression.

The dice quality is superb and the system clever, but for my money it just seems to be cleverer than it needs to be and with the slightly convoluted way of checking what dice are needed for each situation and then working through the cancellations, I can’t really see it offering either more or better than my current Old School Tactical system does, with which I am heavily invested.

So I packed it up to sell. But …. I still have a fancy for it, so out it came again last night and I did a tank knockabout with just three vehicle aside. Again everything is clever, but still felt a bit too much for me. Out of interest I ran the same scenario again and used my OST charts and stats and things were so much simpler and smoother / faster …. though interestingly, felt a bit tamer than the crunchy system that I had just been spending the last 40 minutes with!

I have packed it up again, but have just put it away for now, rather than make a rash decision on selling. It still captures my imagination and will no doubt come out again for another dabble.

I wonder to what degree this just needs some proper play time so that the dice system becomes a bit more second nature?

Another nice buy from Waterstones (UK bookstore) Sword Beach - The untold story of D-Day’s forgotten victory by Stephen Fisher and published by Penguin.

The book jacket describes Sword as ‘the least documented is the British landing on the easternmost beach’ and here over 400 pages aims to put that right.

The first thing to be noticed on handling the book is the line of black edged pages, visible when the book is closed and these turn out to be the maps - a goodly number and this is one area that can be lacking in many historical books.

The quick glance that I made in the store that made me buy it, showed a nice balance of a little pre-history, followed by the planning and then a detailed description of the naval aspect to seaborne assault. This looks like it will give good insight, particularly on that last stage of naval assault with the run-up to the beach.

From the actual landing onwards there are lots of accounts of individual actions that are gold dust to those who like to design their own wargame scenarios and which also would have the wargamer asking the question of whether their rules would do that.

I have read a couple of sections and it reminded me very much of how Dave Brown’s ‘O” Group rules goes about things.

So, it gets added to the book stack, something that is growing at a rate that given my current reading rates, is difficult to break into!

On the table today is the Assault game from Sound of Drums. On the painting sticks are 12mm Soviet WWII infantry ...... a busy Easter weekend!