May 7, 2014

Mr. Kipling makes….

The whole shooting match, ready to defeat the imperialist invader.

A long time ago (both in internet terms, which is measured in months, and in real terms, which is measured in years) there was a very good Colonial wargaming website called Major-General Reddering or some such (after a brief search I found this image of it, it is well worth the perusal). This place was, frankly, just a bunch of fun, and I always thought that at some stage I would pursue some colonial stuff. Now my sons are old enough to be badgered into it, it would seem to be be time to go forward with the project.

A close up of the leader of a band. I must admit I had not realized he had such splendid whiskers.

Also of note on the site was a general statement, and I am paraphrasing here, that this was just a group of people having a little bit of goofy fun with toy soldiers, and no endorsement of colonisation, politics, or any form of racism was intended, or indeed, present.

Colonial wargaming, with it’s echoes of Kipling and 1930s Hollywood movies, warrants this warning more than most periods of gaming, I think, but it might behoove all us internet wargaming types to pop up similar warnings every so often, if only to protect the innocent outsiders who might stumble across our sites, lest they take up an unintended message from our rather strange hobby. So consider yourselves warned, innocent outsiders.

I decided to use The Sword and the Flame, one because it is a fairly general set, and I am familiar with it, and have enjoyed playing it. It also has a nice simple “Old Schooly” feeling to it with individually based figures and so forth which I am finding myself more interested in recently.

My intent is to act as an Umpire/Game Master running whatever form the local opposition to colonialism takes, and my sons will run the imperialist running dogs (I am gettin’ into the spirit here..). This is partially to ensure domestic harmony (they will actually have to co-operate to win) and partially because the non-imperialist player in these games tends to spend a lot of time dying, even when they are successful, and I think it better for me to take that role. If either of them suddenly profess an interest to run a hill tribe or whatever, I am sure we can work it out.

So, in order to put on a game I have been doing some painting. I am fairly sure what form the scenario will take, but I need to do some organistion of existing resources before I can get where I want to be.

Another one of the “Fearless Leader”. Maybe that is the best title. Taken with a different camera for comparison purposes. The fancy flag is a transfer from Little Big Man

However, I did dig out some embarrassingly old Old Glory 25mm Pathans and paint them up in the standard TSatF organisation of 3 groups of 20 chaps, with a tribal chief.

Here we have the tribal chief, complete with fancy flag and immediate followers. What shall we call him? The Mendicant Mullah? I always had a fondness for “The Akund of Swat” but that one is taken. Leave suggestions in the comments.

In my ignorance of what I needed, about 1/3 of them have “modern” rifles, 1/3 flintlock or jezzails or whatever, and 1/3 some form of pointy object. I am sure this is going to leave them very underarmed as opposed to their opposition, but but I fear the first outing for these lads is going to be of the nature of a guy with a red shirt in the original Star Trek, or an Orc in most modern fantasy books; they are going to perish swiftly to show the players how the game works. If the players are interested in more, we can organise the resistance to be tougher in subsequent scenarios.

An overview of one of the sub tribes. A shield transfer can be seen on the chap in the middle

I found the figures quite a lot of fun to paint; they were done with the customary (for me) acrylic with wash and highlight. A good variety of poses, especially as they seem to have varied the heads as well.

I based them with model railroad ballast and bunches of silfor flowers and grass tufts on top; as it was necessary to designate the leader for each band, I put him on a round stand. The colours of the tribesmen are probably a bit bright for “realism” but I was not all that bothered about realism for this project, as it would be fairly grim if realistic, so this particular bunch of native patriots are wandering around in particularly bright clothes.

The Tribal chief (the mullah of wherever, I suppose) I decided to put on a larger round base with a standard bearer, completely for decoration. The Flag (and a number of the shields) were Little Big man Transfers for Perry brothers Islamics. Yep, I know the writing is completely inappropriate for wherever these lads come from (have not figured that out yet) but once more it looks good, and I am not that bothered.

Showing the markings on the “back” (a little bit of a movable feast, there) of the bases showing which of the 3 sub tribal groups the chaps are in.

As you can see in one of the photos, I marked the (rather arbitrary) back of the bases with a marking showing what group the tribesman is in.

May 5, 2014

More Guns of August, and scale creep

Some later war germans, and some spares turned to engineer stands. Who knew they were green?

As we consider how to address the late war WWI stuff in scale we decided to do some experimental pieces. In support of this I put together a couple of later war german mortars in 15mm. Some of the group lean toward 10mm; personally, I have enough problem seeing 15mm lead, right now I feel those other chaps are too small. I have purchased some 10m lead though, so it is possible my opinion may change. In the interim, I ordered a couple of mortars from Blue Moon; while expensive, they came with enough chaps to make up two engineer stands also.

Very nice figures, but large, and the mortar on the left reminds me of Big Bertha

In my ignorance I thought the later war Germans were in grey (it must be from looking at black and white photos); some small amount of research put them in green grey, so that is how I have painted them here. They have certainly come up well; they are really nice figures, good variety in the bags, and a treat to paint.

Fake Engineer stands. If old “Commando” comics are anything to go by, they are all pointing and yelling “Achtung”

But they are HUGE. Their 76mm minenwefer (yes, I know I left the wheels on, I like the wheels) is taller than a french 75mm. In fact their mortars will not fit on the prescribed 1″ x 1″ base, it needed to go on a 1.5″ x 1″. This might well be a problem for scale footprint on the boards, but might not be such an issue as mortar stands are fairly limited in quantity.

However, it is clear to me from these pictures,

Nice little figures all in a row. Blue Moon, Irregular, and Peter Pig from the left

Frontal view of figures; Hmmm.. some of these chaps were fed better than others as children

that the figures are not mixable. In the pictures with the 2 french stands and the german we have Peter Pig (the old sculpts; I am not sure they have re-done their Early war French yet, but I know they have redone their Germans, and the re-done ones are a little bigger) then we have an Irregular miniatures mortar (as discussed here) and finally the Blue Moon German one.

As I said, the Blue Moon figures are great. The mortars are good as well. But they are really not mixable with the Peter Pig ones, they loom over them like Frankenstien’s monster over a torch-lit villager. The Irregular miniatures ones would probably not be noticeably out of place with either of the other manufacturer’s product.

If we were adding these to our existing armies, this would all be an issue. However, these are being looked at for the late war project, so mix ability is not that huge of an issue (see what I did there?).

Decisions, decisions.

April 27, 2014

More Artillery

Les 75s et mortars. Usual low standard of painting, I am afraid

So I continue on the World War I anniversary kick, The WWI Spearhead rules we use give mortars to 1915 armies to a certain extent, so the the first move has been to fill out our current 1914 armies with these tools, making the current figures a little more flexible. Of course, everyone changed cuostume in 1915/16 so clearly we are going to need a different solution for that, but we have not got that far yet; there has been some discussion of looking at 10mm, so much so I acquired some, and will post some results when I get some painted.

The mortar stands. Once more I found assembling the things too fiddly for me.

In any case, to continue. Early war french mortars are not commonly available, but Irregular Miniatures came through once more, providing me with 6 mortars and crew, and 4 75mm guns.
Without thinking about it that much (something my friends will say is fairly common for me) I painted the mortars as infantry; quick reference to some photos gave a rough approximation of artillerists uniform for the 75mm battery. Once more the figures painted nicely, but I did struggle with putting together the guns; as you can see the one on the end looks like it has suffered a severe thump as a result of my lack of model making skills. I am happy enough with the final result, I will admit.

Les Soixante-cinqs. I really messed up the one on the right, it would just not stay stuck

If I had thought of it, some reference to see what uniform the mortar crews wore would have been appropriate, but I am certainly not going to go back and change things at this late stage in the game. So if mortar crews were seconded from the artillery in the fFrench army 100 years ago, I apologise, but they have been issued with “Les Pantalons Rouge”

April 15, 2014

The Irish SAGA continues

Lest it be thought that I do not actually PLAY any games, I thought I should include something of a battle report. Not a terribly good one, I will add, but something to prove I do actually play a game every so often. Apologies for the quality of the photos, apparently focusing was hard that night.

We previously saw my SAGA Irish army (albeit a completely not dark ages one). In the interest of reminding ourselves how to play the game, I trotted it over to a friends house to have a game or two.

Irish hearth guard sneak around a wood

He came up with a Saxon horde; 3 or 4 units with 12 guys in them, a seeming sea of bad guys. I looked at this with some trepidation; I could not see how to defeat them. All the interesting terrain (a wood and some rocky ground) fell in the middle of the board, and only a gentle hill on my left.

Oh gosh, we’re stuffed, they are gonna slaughter us

I concentrated the fire of my guys on his unit behind the woods, even loosening the dogs on him (much too early in the game, they got clobbered) and working my hearth guard and the mounted Curaidh around the right side of the woods. Two other units made an attept to slow the sea of saxons coming over the gentle hill on my left. In this, they failed dismally, and it looked like they would have the floor wiped with them before my erosion of the right flank would show any profit.

Due to spectacularly bad die rolling on my opponents part, though, his attack did not come off, and the fall of the numer of units he had with more than 10 guys in them to a small number stymied his activities on his battle

How the heck that happen, we won

board.

My lot made it around the right hand side, polishing off his leftmost unit and starting to lean in lean in on his others. It came to an Irish win on points.

We had a quick go at another game, ( I wanted to try out the welsh) but rapidly found that they require terrain that does not grant cover to be effective at all, and we had left the woods and rocky ground down, so they were helpless against my opponents scots.

Only thoughts :- I have not played that many SAGA games, but it does seem to me that most of the armies I have played against specialize in producing single attacks with large numbers of dice. The Irish do not. They nibble away at their opposition, and there is a large group of activations on their battle board that lower their opponents dice, rather than raising their own capabilities. This means they shoot away at their opponents with javelins (a real problem for the Saxons, as they want units of over 10 guys, and the small incremental losses will mess them up) and that they are frustrating to fight as when you put together a “big attack” with your hearthgurd, you suddenly find that you do not have any dice. Also the single hearth guard figures that are self activating seem to cause irritation to ones opponents out of proportion to their usefulness. Not sure my reputation can withstand playing an army where the object is to annoy the other player… oh wait…..

March 26, 2014

Scratching the Itch

One of my favorite memories of growing up was sitting with my father and brother on Sundays, after Sunday lunch, watching the seminal BBC TV show about WWI, the Great War. Now I see it was a co-production with ABC so it must have been on that channel we watched it; to my young eyes, that was the channel with all the BBC stuff on it, all of which seems to have a darker, or gloomier appearance than the American or ITV or Australian shows on the other channels.

Early war german Artillery

In any case, it served to spark an interest in WWI that I have preserved ever since. Land, sea and air gaming of WWI I have done; the most problematic has always been the land gaming. Forever a poor relation of WWII gaming, and the nature of the conflict has always seemed to make the standard WWII company/battalion sized game an unworkable solution. You either need to be playing skirmish, or with divisions.

Great War Spearhead has provided us with an interesting solution to the issue, as we see it, and in honour of the 100 year anniversary of the war we have been dusting off some of our old lead. We have a decent collection of 15mm early war stuff, which I volunteered to fill the holes in on; there is still discussion on the scale to be adopted when we proceed to later war, with a vociferous element demanding the newness of 10mm while I grumble that I cannot see 15mm. Never mind.

77mm Battery. and the close up makes me unimpressed with my paint job

Here we have some mortars and a 77mm battery for the Germans, things we both found to be needed for early war. Figures are Irregular Miniatures, honestly because they are the only ones I could find with early war mortars. I have always liked Irregular though, because they have always seemed to me to paint up very well.

German Mortars

Though the mortars can with stands, I am not sure wwi ones had them, and I found the stands very difficult to attach, so I made an executive decision and left them off. I am still pretty happy with how they came out, at least from a distance.

March 18, 2014

Forgetfulness

Attack of the Chinese artillery

One of the difficulties of getting older, in my case at least, is one starts to forget things. Some are important things (wife’s birthday, doctors appointments, medication) and some are not. These figures definitely fall in the “not” group.

The have been part of my toxic lead mountain for years; I think they are Wargames Foundry Taipeng war figures.

I don’t thing the lad holding that gun next to his ear is going to have much hearing left

I do not recall when I got them, save that I think it predates blisters. I do not recall WHY I got them; and I am not sure why I painted them now, except they were rather nice figures. I have no idea what I am going to do with them, either.

It is all, terribly, terribly, sad.

I do like the bloke throwing the cartoon bomb, though…

Paining was done with water based oils, combined with vallejo acrylics. Still trying to get the hang of the oils thing, it seems to be getting easier, but it is very clear that certain sculpting styles are much more rewarding of oil paints than others.

February 17, 2014

The Saga of the Irish

I have had all the usual wargaming interests, I suppose; Seven Years War, ancients, Renaissance, WWII. As I thought of it recently, I did realise that some of my interests were more obscure than the general gaming ones; I always liked naval wargaming, and preferred WWI to WWII; preferred the Seven years war to Napoleonic gaming which was all the rage; more interested in the Italian wars of liberation/Six weeks War/Franco-Prussian war than in the ACW. My friends have noticed this tendency toward obscure subjects, and have been ridiculing me for it (and other things) for years. They would, probably, play the Chaco war game I have been thinking about, though so maybe their ridicule is not completely deserved.

Despite all this, there are a few periods to which I really have a complete indifference. Not an antipathy; I do not dislike them, I just cannot be moved to care. Modern, post WWII games fall in this category, and ACW, and Dark ages stuff. Even when, years ago and dinosaurs roamed the earth, we were all buried in WRG followed by DBM ancient and medieval stuff I had no interest in the dark ages. Happily paint and play Chariot bound Yul Brynner type Egyptians, or Sumerians complete with donkeys, but no interest in the dark ages.

So of course, the current local gaming horizon, Saga and Longstreet, is more or less an arid wasteland for me. Being a good gaming citizen I play the games. I chose the Irish in Saga, and thoroughly annoyed everyone by shooting at them out of terrain features which had no-one in them.

After a long delay, I was moved to paint a Saga army, rather than using a rather motley collection of other people’s cast offs (the ACW guys I promised have taken even longer, I just finished them). Even then I did not buy new figures; I poked around in the lead mountain until I came up with a bunch of Redoubt Miniatures renaissance Irish I had bought lord knows how many years ago and a for long forgotten purpose. I did invest in some dogs, because I could not find any in the lead mountain (quel surprise).

So here we go. Here is the entire war band; it escapes me now as to how many points there are… 6 or 7 maybe, because there is a a couple options. I even got enthusiastic and painted a wagon (I read there was a scenario with a wagon. I painted the bloody thing before I was informed that all the local guys hated the scenario). I messed around here with the water based oils again, and rapidly found that the sculpting on the Redoubt figures was very unrewarding of oils, so retreated rapidly to the comfort of acrylics.

While I spent my teenage years in Ireland, I am functionally illiterate in the language, so cannot tell you if the labels the nice folk at Gripping Beast have hung off them are accurate. But here are the bits and pieces.

Here we have the Fianna and the Bonnacht. As I think of it, I am not sure the Saga folk use the term Bonnacht, or if that is a renaissance one. In any case the Fianna are the hearth guard types, and Bonnacht are the warriors. I used gallóglaigh figures for the Fianna in armor with axes, and the lads with the javelins and wicker shields for the bonnacht types.

Individually based as more or less required in the rules, and if they are not properly dark ages, they look ok, and at least I can tell which is which. One unit of 8 hearth guard, and two of 8 warriors (I guess, if memory serves, thats 3 saga points)

Then we have the Kerns and the Curaidh. The Kerns are the unfortunate peasants who have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and have been conscripted.

The Curaidh are some sort of individual sociopath, a warlord-lite warrior guy in rules terms, who runs around on his own causing trouble. A sort of nod to the Irish champion sort of thing, I suppose.

I have 3 of them painted here, but I recall only using two, so I have a spare. They are the chaps on horses. They each replace a hearth guard from the 8 I have pained above, so more over production. My enthusiasm will be the end of me.

In front of them, (most likely being driven into battle) we have the unfortunate Kerns (levies) shown by not having shields, and generally being a motley assortment of whatever guys I had left over.

Leading the lot (at least for presentation purposes, in any game I played the lead from the very rear) is the warlord, complete with piper. Yes, again, I have no idea if Dark ages Irish had bagpipes. I liked the figure; I like the warlord figure also.

Finally, we have the bunch the RSPCA are going to get soggy and hard to light about; the dogs, complete with wagon full of kibble.

Honestly I have no idea if the Irish used packs of dogs in battle. Nice idea though, so here are the pooches, with Igor, their kennel master (yes, Igor is not an Irish name. But the guy looks like an Igor, so Igor he is). They get to move around really fast, if I recall, and die a lot. Painted in grey, as proper wolfhounds, of course, except for the one brindle one, which is a homage to our own pooch, a mastiff/Irish wolfhound mix, who the local lot know well and would be completely useless in any sort of fight because she would be too busy greeting the nice men with licks and a wagging tail to actually bite anyone. I tried to remember who was the vendor for these figures, but it completely escapes me. Google should be your friend, there cannot be too many people selling 28mm packs of war dogs.

So there we go, an Irish war band. I have had them painted for a while, but Saga seems to have died down a little locally in the face of the ongoing Longstreet campaign; I do hope to use them sooner or later though.

January 31, 2014

A French Brigade

After an incredibly long hiatus, caused completely by my own apathy (honestly I was rather unwell for a number of months, and it took some time to get restarted) I’ll post more bad pictures of stuff I’ve painted. Badly. Oh well, never mind. The painting and gaming proved a little easier to continue than the whole blogging and tiding up thing, so there is a backlog of stuff that got done.

Another brigade of froggies

Here we have more French troops for our (now somnolent) Maurice campaign. Some more exist on a previous post also. While Maurice ran well for a long while, the group felt that all the battles were “samey” and interest dropped off. Personally, I think its right that all Age of Reason battles be samey, and that some of the issues we had with the game were caused by scale/table size things. I never had the motivation to press especially hard, though.

Grenadier de France used as a guard regiment

I decided to paint some remaining French figures I had (all Front Rank) with water based oils again, more or less as experiments. I was not entirely pleased with the results I got; it is clear my technique needs work. They do look well enough though, for a gaming table.

The Grenadier de France were painted a fill in for an elite battalion in Maurice; which is a terrible stretch as they apparently were the Grenadier companies of Militia regiments from all over France. They look fairly pretty though, so I suppose we can accept them.

Behind them is a battalion of Champagne, which are older figures I rebased and supplied new flags for. Fairly certain I did not paint them, and once of the other locals did, but I fear I have no idea who.

I think Champagne are Old Glory, but again am not sure.

Vol. Schomberg backed by Vol. Bretonais

Then we have the goofy irregular chaps. Apparently the French Army in the middle of the 18th century was much beset by volunteer irregular regiments, which I am sure were a trail to the classically trained generals. As all such regiments throughout all times, they were uniformed in what their contemporaries could only describe as a bizarre manner.

So here we have the Volunteers Schomberg, wearing the Schomberg hat that would become more and more common in the French army as the century progressed. I must admit I feel constrained to ask “WHY” it became used more; while it may look interesting, it is clearly not as practical for some guy slogging along in the sleet as a hat with a nice wide brim. And it probably rusts.

Never mind, here they are. I am even more unhappy with this paint job than with the Grenadiers. It just does not have the shading I was look for, which is terribly unfortunate as that is why I was using these paints in the first place.

The Breton guys behind have an equally bizarre uniform, with the wrap around hat (mirlton) which was popular among hussars, and once more I only rebased them they were painted by someone else.

Hussars

Finally we have the hussars. Probably the paint job I’m happiest with, but the bloke who was running the “French” army in the campaign wanted the Grey on Grey and Grey uniforms (Most unhussarlike) so they came out fairly bland. Hussars, in my opinion, should not be bland, they should look like the blokes most likely to start the evening with a lampshade on their heads, or to be in the front row at a rastafarian concert. Or whatever the 18th century equivalents where. They probably involve lots of “s” words like swilling, and swiving and supping….

Never mind, thats just me.

More stuff coming up shortly.

October 13, 2012

Just for “The light of Europe”

So, one of the locals was complaining we didn’t have enough French troops for our Seven years war extravaganza.

L’armeé Français

Of course we (not me, much too lazy) have epic amounts of Prussians, Austrians &tc, &tc, but that is just good enough. It is essential, mon vieux, that there be French.

Now we had some French, but we did not like their flags, which were old, and the basic, which was (wait for it) basic. I, on the other hand, had been dissatisfied for

Regt. de Picardie. Conde in the background

some time with the effect I was getting paining white cloth with acrylics. So I decided to experiment with water based oils (again) to see if I could produce a better effect.

This is the result. Figures are Front Rank (and I would not care to be questioned in court, or by my wife, exactly how old they are) for Picardie, and old glory for Condé in the rear. Flags are linen stiffened with white glue, and painted with acrylics.

For once, for me, I was happy. Now, I need more practice with the oil paints, but for all that was pleased with the result. Need to increase the contrast more, I think.

All the same, think they are ok to look at, and the locals should be able to use ’em without too much complaint.

August 9, 2012

Tussle at Grosser Stuhlgang

General der Cavalrie Ferencz looked glumly across the country at the village of Grosser Stuhlgang. It was teeming with Hanoverians, supported by cavalry and guns. The woods, orchards, plowed fields, and farm field walls near it just made it even more impractical to attack. Especially as while his cavalry arm was strong, his infantry was doubtful. Full of bohemians, he thought. There was no manner he could see to assault the place with cavalry, and he was instructed to take the place to secure the crossing over the Danube. The English had rested their right flank on the village. The plains contained the rest of the enemy; infantry with a smallish contingent of cavalry. He feared that the enemy infantry knew what it was about; it looked to be able to do things like march, and dress ranks. More than his crowd appeared to be capable of. Well then, it was to be won, it would have to be on his right. He would deploy his cavalry there, move forward, smash the enemy horse, and move on the flank of the infantry. His motley crew of foot would stay to the rear.

Ed and Mark had a game of Maurice last week; Ed ended up attacking with a cavalry force, using the “Maison De Roi” and “Great Captain” cards; Mark, with the English had the “Lethal Volleys” and “Steady Lads” cards. The English were deployed with one flank on a village and 3 cavalry minding the other side. The Austrians massed 5 units of cavalry and a hussar against the 3 English horse, and held their unimpressive infantry and guns in the middle.

The hussars leapt forward, crossing the field in best Hungarian fashion. In response to their appearance the English cavalry moved forward, prompting the Austrian regular cavalry to do the same.

Seeing his cavalry facing the horde of Austrian horse, Sir Bently ffolkes-Smith, the English commander, moved his infantry forward to engage the Austrian foot, and support his cavalry with the leftmost regiment (they were only Scots, it would not matter much if they were run over by the Austrian horse). Unfortunately the Hanoverian forces on his right did not get the memo about moving forward, so they stood and watched the others. ffolkes-Smith’s report on the action stated the message “went astray”. The memoirs of Graf Count von-und-zu Katzehaarekugel, however, state that the message was soaked into illegibility when the courier, Captain Rupert Fotheringay Upper-Class-Twit, on seeing some ducks in a farm pond in passing, promptly leaped from his horse and spent a quarter of an hour splashing around in the water, waving his elbows with his hands tucked in his armpits and saying “Quack, quack” at the top of voice. However it happened, the Hannoverians stayed put.

The Cavalry dukes it out

It now came down to seeing would the superior Austrian cavalry dispose of their opponents before the british infantry disposed of theirs. It certainly went the Austrian way. The English cavalry was swept away, even including an infantry regiment that had been sent in support. The only loss was the unfortunate cavalry regiment that found itself in front of the highlanders. On the flip side, the Austrian infantry, supported by their guns, proved surprisingly resilient, standing up under the lethal English volleys, and giving very much as good as they got. The Austrian horse rolled up the English flank, and their opponents went down to bitter defeat.

The Infantry firefight

The 2 main comments to be made here, is that we are getting better at this game, and that a spread out defensive deployment is counterproductive if your enemy does not oblige you by attacking a difficult objective; you really lose the use of the units.

On a side note to ffolkes-Smith: attacking when your job is to defend may result in unpredictable results….