On the high street shelves in the UK. Issue 462 (June) of Wargames Illustrated magazine has appeared.

It comes with a free Gladiator sprue, manufactured by Wargames Atlantic on behalf of Dead Again Games, who have a Kickstarter for their Blood on the Sands Gadiator game.

Another freebie with the maage is a nicely done 30 page Quick Start Guide called Training Grounds. Apparently, you can download a printable arena for the fiures to fight on, using hexes.

In the mag there is an aricle on painting the figures. There are three other articles supportig skirmish games, a scenario for Assassins and Templar (Ruckus Game) and a campaign game for hired guns in the johnson County War (wild west type figures and setting) and  an 'En Garde!' Three Musketeers type action called 'Spilling Blood for the Queen and Coin for the Cardinal'.

Throw in a show report (Salute 53) and with my lack of interest in skirmish level gaming, it doesn't leave an awful lot for me to get out of the mag.

There is a nice 2 page 'In Memoriam' on George Gush by his friend Andrew Finch.

Finally, Sword Beach by Milton Hundred Wargames Club won 'Best in Show' and there is an article on how that game was built up and put together. I am about to read Fisher's book on the subject, so I enjoyed the article. 

Apparently next month, there is another free frame for Warlord Games' Konflict '47 .... Zombie! I have my fingers cross that the subject does not dominate the mag! As a life long buyer of all three wargame mags, I am becomming a bit disenchanted with two of them.

An oldie but goodie went onto the table last night for our face-to-face game. Victory in the Pacific is an old Avalon Hill game that covers the WWII Japanese / Allied actions in the Pacific from start to done.

It is a straightforward but longish game, so we decided from the outset that we would play the game over two sessions and the art of doing that is picking the right moment to stop, so that a decent second half can still be had.

In our game, the Japanese put everything into the attack at Pearl Harbour, at the cost of exploiting some other areas of the map and on balance that worked very well, with significant harm done to the Allied battleships at Pearl.

The Japanese launched an early attack into Indonesia and though they were very badly mauled by the Allied forces there, the tenacious fighting by both sides had also seriously diminished the Allied fleet and as the Japanese limped away, those losses were worrisome for the Allies.

A little later at the Marshall Islands, the Japanese had sent a very modest force to the Marshall Islands, supported by one small carrier and the support of ground-based aircraft. They were shocked to find themselves facing the overwhelming might of U.S. forces in the area and a very one-sided battle looked to be on cards...... however! In a stupendous victory, the Japanese air forces, together with submarine assistance, were able to sink three Allied carriers!

It allowed the Japanese to retain control of the Marshall Islands and this seemed like a good point to halt the game and record positions for a second playing.

The Allies had the better Victory Point score, through still having wider control of the Pacific, but they had lost much of their carrier capacity and so it seemed that this was the point of the game at which the test would be how well the Japanese could manage expansion and to what degree the Allies could limit that.

We felt that despite not having the best position on the Victory Point track, overall, the advantage looked to be with the Japanese and so it was a good place to park the game for a future return. 

I have owned this more than once! First seen in 1985, it was the flagship module to what was then the new Advanced Squad Leader system.

It includes the full German order of battle and also the Soviet order of battle and so together with the rulebook, this became the gateway module to the world of ASL.

It has been important since that time to keep the module in print as most of what followed would need German opposition to play.  This is the latest  (third edition) copy and as well as the original 10 scenarios, it includes a further 14 scenarios that have previously been published in out-of-print journals etc. and they have been re-balanced and all known errata included.

The weighty package (5 kg) includes the 24 scenarios, ten ASL maps (1-5, 8 and 20-23) and fourteen countersheets.

Of immediate importance to me are the admin markers, which I can use while waiting for the starter kits to come back into print (soon) and the box includes board 1. This will allow the playing of the 'classic' 1st scenario from the basic Squad Leader that introduced me to a lifetime interest in tactical WWII boardgames, so there is a bit of a nostalgia blast here.

I have already downloaded the 'Guards Counter-attack' scenario from the MMP site, which has been updated to be ASL compatible.

If I jump the hurdle from starter kits into full ASL, then I will at least have secured a copy of the most important module in the series, but aside from that, there is a simple nostalgic connection to just owning it.

I have been spending several days trying to get to grips with a new boardgame (not previously mentioned here or at the Battlefields & Warriors Blog) - but to no avail!

Things did not bode well from the outset as it uses cards and I deeply dislike cards in wargames - so fool on me for buying it in the first place. But outside of that, the game engine is certainly not standard and that combines with the dynamism of card play to get between me and the actual subject.

Sometimes immediate disposal by any means can be a helpful thing to both mind and shelf space!

Though the game box is a handy size for keeping my 28mm hedges in for the figure games :-)

I have a part penned article on how we view things like games and books somehow deserving to hold a recoverable value, while other forms of entertainment such as weekend breaks, coffees, attending sport matches or cinema etc are just as expensive, but we never think that we are 'owed' a right to claw back any of that money spent. I'm not sure the article is or will be sufficiently cogent to actually post it - perhaps a bit more tweaking!

Disclaimer ..... in the image, the bin does not look like my bin :-)

On the flip side, Advanced Squad Leader Starter Kit, which is also complicated, but in a more ordered way, continues to get my favoured attention. So two sides of the same coin - interesting!

This is Advanced Squad Leader (starter kit) scenario s41 - called Sink's Encouragement (8th June 1944) - designed by Ken Dunn.

This town sits between Carentan and St. Mere Eglise and elements of 1st Battalion of 506th Para (American) are ordered to attack. Their commander, understanding that his men were tired after 2 days of continuous action, arranged for artillery support.

In full ASL, I recall that the artillery rules have some complexity to them .... benefitting from a flowchart to assist!

While off board artillery has not been covered in the starter kit series, it is given some utility in this scenario by a simple hit / scatter die roll and where the fire lands, that and all adjacent hexes are attacked on the 12 Fire Power column. There are 3 such fires at the start of the game, targeting German positions.

The artillery was pretty effective - especially as the squad with the MMG broke, this team had been covering the central building and had good fields of fire.

Even so, there were enough Germans scattered amongst the remaining buildings to cause the paratroopers to advance cautiously, mainly via the orchard. The paratrooper collective fire cut up the defence leaving importantly placed German squads broken.

However - they had taken too much time to get to this point and the victory conditions of capturing all of the town's buildings within 2 hexes of P6 started to slip from reach ..... and so the paratroopers, confident that much of the towns defenders were in a broken state, advanced on this part of the town.

Of course, it all unravelled ... well it would wouldn't it!

The paratroopers' attempts to use smoke grenades all failed - then the MMG team recovered and finally in a close combat amongst the buildings a German defender saw off an attacker despite being out-numbered 2:1.

A situation of several broken German squads that made the edge of town look like a door waiting to be kicked open, instead came to life and the paratroopers ended up with broken squads everywhere with no hope of securing the building.

Play time - just under the two hours mark.

Complexity  - I still had to double check some 'Final Fire' stuff, ELR, smoke placement and what does a squad do when their leader breaks, but outside of that, everything was quite straight forward and these rules are bedding in now ...... well, for infantry anyway :-)

This is Anzio from White Dog Games and it concerns itself with allied landings on the Italian coastline in January '44.

The game just has 4 pages of rules, with the advantage of brevity and the disadvantage of brevity!

Anzio was a hard slog through the mud and the same (quite rightly) can be said of the game, for the middle part of the play, our game looked like something of a stand-off.

Then the break came and the Germans took Cisterna and pushed beyond it and soon after Aprilia fell.

The level of victory is not so easy to work out in a face to face game as it seems to be set up for the Allied Vs Bot game that you can run, however we gauged it to be a minor German win.

Though overall we ran into stalemate positions quite early, it then becomes the push and shove over a handful of hexes and trying to get positional advantage that occupies the attention, so it keeps both sides busy and even on this small map there are nuances at play that keep the players engaged.

So it is a funny game, it doesn't feel exciting enough to race back to, but it is solid enough to give a very entertaining game. It feels like neither side is winning ...... but that is exactly what Anzio was all about!

A few weeks ago, I opened a discussion about getting some 10mm Napoleonics and doing a test run on speed painting, to get that balance between visual and speed by painting figures that are already glued to their bases.

I have now completed samples for infantry, artillery, cavalry and a command base and put a post up on the Battlefields & Warrior Blog.

Link

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/05/10mm-napoleonic-french-bases.html

One of the items that I picked up from the Partizan show was a set of figure rules stocked by the Society of Ancients and at just £15, including cards, I thought that they would provide at least an interesting read.

While looking for reviews, I noticed that there is an entry on BoardGameGeek that covers the creation of a scenario and subsequent game. It is quite detailed, but I think for those interested in the rules, it gives more useful information in one place than anything I might do.

Here is a link to that free download.

LINK

https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/288720/blood-red-roses-palm-sunday-battle-1461-from-sling

A fab day today at Partizan wargame show.

I have put a show report up on the Battlefields & Warrior Blog, just a mix of pictures and comment.

Link

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-partizan-may-2026-wargame-show.html

For tonight's face to face game, we had a go at Operation Winterstorm from the recent issue 107 World at War mag (DG), which they call Stalingrad Relief and is part of the Battles in the East series from Decision Games.

I have had the boxed volumes 1 - 4 for a while and they remain unpunched, so tonights game, was a way to ease me in to the system. It is desribed as being an evolution of Army Group South, Panzergruppe Guderian and Cobra ..... which bodes well.

Initially we found it a little more awkward than we expected with its variable supply rules, but this is quite a low counter density battle and so for the first few turns, there were only ever really 2 - 3 points of contact, so we were able to get much more familiar with the game mechanics before the bigger clash started. Having played, I need Post play, I need to re-read the rules before touching anything else, just so that everything falls into place.

I played the Germans and by the start of turn 6, it was clear that my drive to relieve Stalingrad was blunted and that as the Soviet line thickened, counter-attacks would start to push me back.

Mike thought it more of a draw as he didn't feel strong enough to go on a full-pelt counter-offensive. I am left wondering whether I pushed 6th Pz Division hard enough, but I was a little cautious of getting cut off. I will try this again solo over the next week or so and perhaps break one of the box sets open.

The designer notes say that if the Germans have not created a gateway with the Stalingrad garrison by turns 5 - 6, then they will likely lose and by turn 6, this did feel evident. I will loook for some AAR's and see how other players have got on. 

A downside is that this doesn't fit out session timewise. It does look like it will be easy to record a game partway through and play the second part at a later date. The art of course is to know when to stop, so that the second part of the game remains viable as a session ..... and that point is not always the halfway mark in turns played.

It still feels a bit more convoluted than I would want or had expected, but being a series game, the re-playability will likely address that.

The vehicle rules are starting to stick. Yesterday I ran an exercise of Panzer IV's being ambushed by SU 85's while pushing through a gap in the woods and a few interesting things happened, as they always do.

A reader contacted me yesterday (Hi Mike) to say that they were enjoying the snippets here about the approach to re-learning ASLSK, so I thought it time to do give yesterdays dabble a bit more prominance.

Anyway, if anyone is on am ASLSK path, I have put up a post on the Battlefields & Warriors Blog, covering my most recent tank situation.

LINK

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/05/advanced-squad-leader-practice.html

I have played the scenario a fourth time, but made an adjustment to the rules. For the French, their turn 1 movement restrictions are now also imposed on turn 2. For the Austrians, on their first two turns, they have their attack (only) strength doubled. This is not as drastic as it sounds as the Austrians have few attack opportunities on the first few turns and it just helps ensure that DR happens more than AR.

Both tweaks are already present in the scenario, so it is not introducing something too new, rather it is just expanding the designer's thoughts of 50 years ago.

Together, the tweaks serve to ensure that during the morning, the French are encouraged to develop their defences on ‘their’ side of the Fontenone Stream, giving the Austrians a timely jump-off point to assault Marengo, while still ensuring that there is plenty of fight and contest going on before Marengo falls.

My game did give me that, but the French hung on and took heavy casualties. In this system, once one side ‘thins’ the other side has more opportunity to overwhelm, break through or turn flanks and start to cut the enemy retreat and this is what happened here.

In the end the French were desperate for their reinforcements just to hold the line, rather than going on the counter-attack and re-taking Marengo. So we end with a very clear Austrian victory.

The scenario was more fun to play than the previous ones of a ‘contained’ Austrian force, but it would need to be played a few more times to make sure that there is also the chance of a French victory. The tweaks may have given us the right opening and a good contest for Marengo, but if they fail to show the French counter-attack in all of its glory, then we still have a problem.

For the next play, I may remove Austrian double strength attacks for turns 1 & 2 and just stick with the French movement restrictions for turns 1 & 2 and see how that goes. Regardless, four enjoyable games of Marengo in just a couple of weeks without the rulebook being used is its own minor victory. 

The playing of small incidents continues and I am noticing my speed picking up.

Here we see the 'Allied Minors' set up at one end of a town ready to meet attacking infantry supported by a self-propelled gun.

The SPG is useful against buildings, attacking as area fire on the '12' column of the Infantry Fire Table... however, a combination of poor shooting and good defender morale meant that the SPG did not deliver the goods this time!

Note the defender's anti-tank rifle is ready to have a crack at the SPG if it enters the town.

The stack at the bottom of the screen contains a medium machine gun, which jammed as it fired at approaching enemy!