It was only a few days ago that I was playing the Duffy’s Mill battle in my Graysville Campaign, that I noticed I didn’t really have as many ACW type buildings as thought.

So with the campaign having the potential to throw up a fight for Graysville itself at some future point, I put in a small order to Pendraken Miniatures for the rather lovely 10mm Buildings from the Battlescale range that they stock.

I like to use 1 scale lower than the figures for buildings and at 10mm, these make for a good backdrop to the Warlord's Epic range.

The annoying thing is that I have owned a fair amount of Battlescale 10mm before, but got rid of it in the 'great clearout' a couple of years ago!

Anyway they arrived today, just three items. Claperboard House No 2, a Watermill and a Tiled Timber Cottage. Together with what I have, the representation of a small town will be quite do-able now. 

The Battlescale stuff is good quality resin, without air bubble pock-marks and has nice raised detail, making them easier to paint. So I think I can get these across the painting table in plenty of time for ‘that’ battle …… should it arise!

Wargame Rules for Armoured Warfare at Company and Battalion Level 1925 to 1950, Bill Farquhar, a pseudonym used by John Salt.

These have just dropped through the post, via the print on demand service ‘Lulu’. I have only had an opportunity to briefly browse them, but my nostalgia button is already in overdrive!

In the 70’s Wargames Research Group (WRG) were the rules staple of most wargamers, reinforced by their use as ‘standard’ on the convention circuit.

Amongst the wide range of periods covered my WWII rules of choice were the 1925 - 1950 Armour & Infantry set. These covered platoon to battalion level action and between these and my 6mm figure collection (pocket money affordable!), I played the hell out of them and several of the pages still are imprinted in my mind’s eye.

In 1979, WRG brought out their ‘Moderns’ set, covering 1950 - 1985 for the company to battalion level game, with an armour focus. The cover looked exactly like the cover shown here, but in a pale blue instead.

Today, John D Salt has brought us a set of rules that sit between the above two sets, that is, the ‘Moderns’ version, but for the earlier period of 1925 - 1950. Essentially the text has been taken from the Moderns set, with things like helicopter and ATWG rules removed and all the 1950 - 1985 aspect has been replaced with WWII troop and vehicle types.

There is much here that is familiar to me and from that commemorative style cover to browsing the content, I have already found a simple pleasure in just owning it.

It needs to be understood that this is an old school style rule set. There are some things that these days can be a little slicker, like observation rules, but that is not the point, these rules are meant to be fully sympathetic to WRG era of the 70’s and in that regard, they absolutely are. It is a job well done.

One of the first things I do when looking at a new WWII system is to see how the author has handled the German Tiger I tank compared to the Panther tank. It always makes for a fascinating study, as the former went into production in 1942 and the latter half of 1943. The Tiger I was a heavy tank, formidable at the time, with a fearsome reputation, but just a year and a half later, the Panther tank, a medium MBT, had made a generational leap in design and their comparison is says much about the nuance of gun / armour rules.

Plenty of systems have them as close equals, some even give the Tiger an absolute advantage, surely something that could only be attributed to elite crews, but this is what we have here;

[The first thing I look at is the Armour Classes page, which is set out just like my 1975 set, only more comprehensive in terms of vehicle types listed].

The Tiger I armour  is classed as V front and IV sides and for armour it is grouped in the same class as the A22 Infantry Tank, Mk IV Churchill, KV-1, m41, and the up-armoured T-34. The guide tells us that Class V armour covers 90mm - 120mm and Class IV is 65mm - 85mm.

The Panther armour is classed as VI front and III side and for armour it is grouped together with StugPz IV, Jagdpanther, M4A3E2 Jumbo, SU-100, SU-85M and Centurion. The guide tells us that Class VI covers 125mm to 160mm and Class III is 45mm - 60mm.

The notes indicate that protection is a combination of armour plate thickness and slope, the quality of the steel and fasteners used, plus good design presenting no vulnerable spots of shot traps. Clearly that superbly sloped Panther front armour is at play here. I love this sort of stuff!

I won’t know until I have read all of the rules whether size /profile has also been used to shape the final placings … as the little Hetzer looks good in the stats!

For Firepower, the Panther’s 75/70 gun and the Tiger’s 88/56 are close performers …. i.e. you never want to be on the wrong end of either of them, but when it comes down to actual stats with standard ammunition, the Panther’s gun has the edge over the 88/56 at range (for penetration, it rightly is the case that the 88 has better HE performance), but it is by a present, but small margin, that will really only influence the margins of some of our engagements.

As an example of the performance of these sort of guns, the Panther’s 75/70 is automatically penetrating all armour classes of IV and below. At Class V a die roll of ‘6’ is needed at 2750 metres, with -1 to that die roll for every 250 metres below that. So at 2000 metres the die roll would need to be ‘3’ or higher. This formula is used for each higher armour class thereafter, with Class VI starting at 1250 metres and Class VII (Tiger II, Elefant and Super Pershing) at 250 metres.

For game scale the player uses 1mm = 1 metre or 1mm = 2 metres depending upon size of figures used. I will be using 10mm / 12mm figures on a domestic table, so will likely go with the latter.

There are (of course) To Hit charts and on the longer ranges, the Tiger gets the slight advantage.

There is Target Acquisition and this is obviously done in the old school way (as the rules are a lift from the 70’s text) and on first sight the number of modifiers to this is a reminder of some of the heavy lifting that rules of that generation were built around. However fellow blogger John H. Has play tested the rules and in his review, he felt the modifiers quite quickly became familiar.

I have found looking into these rules a real pleasure. The task was to re-create a rule set that would nicely compliment what WRG were doing between 1973 and 1979 and to ‘imagine’ the set that WRG would have brought out, had they taken that next step in their WWII tactical rule development. In that, these are a perfect fit. It is like stepping back in time. I am that teenager again!

It is a comprehensive set and of particular note, it is fully self contained. All the troop types and vehicles you will want are here, so no ‘Codex’ style supplements - you just buy the rules.

In the links below, fellow blogger John H has a combined review with an AAR that gives a deeper overview than this post. That post also contains links to other replays, so you might want to check that out for some wider opinion.

The Lulu page is here to purchase the rules;

https://www.lulu.com/shop/bill-farquhar/wargames-rules-for-armoured-warfare-at-company-and-battalion-level-1925-to-1950/paperback/product-wdkk97.html?q=bill+farquhar&page=1&pageSize=4

A limitation of Lulu is that it doesn’t print single sheets of card, so they can’t bundle play aids when printing and sending the book. My understanding is that The Wargames Website (UK wargame forum) has proposed to host the PDF, but I couldn’t find it. There is an e-mail address in the rulebook, which I used and John Salt kindly e-mailed me the PDF. Of course, they are on the same deep yellow background as the 70’s original, just adding another level of WRG authenticity.

Fellow Blogger John H’s AAR and review is - Here

https://hereticalgaming.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-farquhar-version-review-of-missing.html

The Graysville Campaign folder (menu on left) has been updated with the morning actions of Friday 19th August.

The Union divisional commander Shields is currently giving more responsive command as he is in a forward position, While all messages to Ewell have needed to travel further and messengers have been restricted to the bridges whilst traversing Mott's Run.

Ewell has moved his headquarters to Laurel Hill and the action is getting closer to the bridges, so that should help him.

This morning's fighting gave a pure cavalry on cavalry fight, with a sabre clash, which surprisingly my rules have not really been exposed to and from a narrative point of view, they performed fine.

This will probably be the last action of the campaign for a couple of weeks as I have a vacation coming up. I home to get another Krosnogrod battle in before then.

We played our first face-to-face game of Rebel Fury last night (Chickamauga) and both enjoyed the playing experience very much. I have not followed the Q&A over at BoardGamegeek and found that the rule book answered everything that I wanted to know - so errat free rules, who would have thought!

I particularly liked that the rules follow the sequence of play, so for starting out as a newbie, it is very easy to follow what needs to be done next, just by working through the rules along with the sequence of play.

We really liked the ‘approach to battle’ aspect of the game. This is primarily a game of manoeuvre, with a need for one to manoeuvre better than the other.

It seems that the player that has achieved a few key positions is best to then pass to try and close down the enemy manoeuvre opportunity - as long as you have moved to do some key things you wanted to do, then that is fine. It also seems an important tactic to advance into contact in some places quite early, so locking down enemy units.

The combat is of course brutal ……. often for the attacker :-) but we started to find ways and places of trying to get as many advantages as possible before attacking and especially to avoid attacking in those places that looked risky to the attacker.

I didn’t see water crossing costs in time as an issue, they are important terrain features and in the time frame / scale that we are playing, this is a full division trying to do something in half a day. I also thought the brutal combat was realistic (harsh but realistic) as again representing half a day of action, my limited knowledge of the period is that formations would basically attack until they burned out and that very often could be measured in around 3 - 4 hours or so of sustained fighting - so frustrating but realistic.

Overall, our experience will have us coming back to the system, hopefully repeatedly. We need to get better at what we did, for example we both used artillery at the same rate, until it ran out and we need to think about that a bit more and we probably made more attacks than we should have without maximising our positions first. We should also have given a bit more thought to developing manoeuvre and attacks against the enemy flanks, rather than trying to break the centre.

Definitely a ‘thinking’ game that fully involves the two players throughout. I think there is an art to knowing when to pass for best effect on the enemy and also to know when a unit is likely to be already disadvantaged in combat and perhaps save your artillery rather than waste ammo on that that particular situation.

For the record, the CSA could have won on casualty points - 12 points to zero, but in any case they won on the strategic objective by pressurising the Union line to fall back so that a lower lateral route (costing few hexes to traverse) from entry hex to city could be gained. 

Arriving at the door today is the third volume in Decision Games’ East Front Battles series. I have had this in pre-order for a couple of months and it seems to have been out in the states for a while, so it is nice to see it hit UK shores.

The obvious draw to me is that this is a series game, but the bonus is that it comes with V19 rules, which are of course backwards compatible to also work with the first two games.

I am becoming a bit weary of newly released boardgames seemingly to quickly need to be on version 1.1, 1.5, 2 or whatever i.e. a bit more than simply a few errata points. It raises the question of development and it seems pointless to get a beautifully presented rulebook if you end up downloading a replacement file for printing out that just kills the enjoyment of getting the nicely presented rulebook on nice paper.

It is almost like being an early adopter, just means that you are part of the extended play test group. Anyway, rant aside, the game looks lovely. The boards are mounted with the surface having a sort of linen texture. Anyone who has volumes I or II will know exatly what to expect.

The system plugs into the nostalgia spot a bit with it being a relative of the old SPI Panzergroup Guderian, Cobra and Army Group South systems.

The two battles (always two battles per box) cover Drive to the Sea (West Prussia, January 1945) and Battle for Pomerania (Pomerania February 1945).

I have high expectations of the system and have promised myself to get this system to the table this year and play it enough to become familiar and proficient, so that it can make repeat returns to the table. Volume IV has just gone onto pre-order.

Last nights face to face game came from the ever giving Red Blitz module from the Old School Tactical series. I have been playing loads of this lately, thanks to my Krosnogrod campaign - so it was good to play a game with the rulebook staying in the box :-)

Essentially this is all about the control of three multi hex buildings set amongst some quite busy terrain. The Germans initially hold the buildings and the Soviets must attempt to take control of them. The winner will be side with full control of two out of three buildings.

The Germans need to hunker down and hold on. The Soviets will as a matter of course try to ensure that the Germans from each building are isolated from supporting either of the two other buildings and they get a couple of SU 76 assault guns and a flamethrowing T-34 to help ensure that any crossing by the Germans between buildings is a perilous venture.

In our game, both sides managed to solidly control one building each and it was the fight for the third that then saw all of the desperate action. The Soviets had the freedom of movement to throw reinforcing troops at the building, but the defenders were tenacious and on two occasions flipped German single units in melee with good ordered Soviet shock troops rolled 11 in combat and nothing is going to survive that and so the fight intensified as the clock ticked down.

Unfortunately, we ran out of playing time to complete the scenario, but we sort of fast forwarded a couple of key moves and combats. We both concluded that on balance, it would be a game that if played to conclusion, would go down close to the wire, but that it would be the Soviets that would get the win.

We pick up the action for the Krosnogord Campaign at the River Wislok. The Krosnogord page (tab on the left) has been updated.

Here, the Russians move against formidable defences behind the river, they need that bridge. The campaign is roughly at the midway point.

On the painting sticks, the needed confederate unit for the Graysville Campaign has been painted and based and just awaits flocking, which hopefully will get done today.

To keep the painting momentum going, I have have put a unit of confederate mounted cavalry on the painting sticks. I am not overly enthusiastic about doing them, but the painting discipline needs to see some movement - even if slowly!

At last, the toys get to the table ..... as described over on the Graysville Campaign tab (left).

With an action underway, I went through all of the paperwork and with a sigh, I noted that I am one painted unit short for the confederate order of battle. 

So the painting sticks are out and in a slight panic, some goodly hours are being directed their way!

My campaign admin system has largely stood up to the rigours of turn one, but a couple of things have needed tweaking, but overall, things look good.