Secret Santa and other things

A big thank you to Roy for organising this year's gamers Secret Santa. Due to haring out of the country like a mad thing on Boxing Day morning, I've only just got round to catching up with things Christmas-related (there's still cake left! yay!), so I'm delighted to note that my recipient seems to have liked his gift, and also thank you to my Secret Santa for the Napoleon At War French cavalry blister.

Currently feeling a bit inspired for non-skirmish Napoleonics after the game with the ATF guys in the Twin Cities, so I think this year will be the year my N@W figures finally get painted; the Carabiners are lovely sculpts, and they'll go in the N@W "to be painted" box just as soon as I can get into the workshop to do so...

The latter is a small problem just at present, as... well...

...Tim's relaying the floor. And all my wargaming stuff is shut in the tiny cupboard/room (The Cabinet Of Temporal Insufficiency) on the far left end wall...

100 days campaign finale

Being live tweeted on @TatM_blog

Fighting 15s at Colours Sept 14-15

As a blogger who gets a fair amount of traffic, I feel obliged to share this from Henry at Miniature Wargames:

As a result of an administrative error, the incorrect version of the Fighting 15s ad was published in the Colours Show Guide which was published this week as part of MW365. 

Huge apologies to Ian Marsh of Fighting 15s, who had been beavering away painting up samples of the Eureka range for which he is now the UK distributor. Naturally, he was extremely disappointed that his hard work would not be seen by the MWBG audience. 

Therefore, I'm placing his ad here and I'd be grateful if you could help spread the word – by all means post the pic of his ad on your own blog. 

Being an 18th century fan, as you know, I will certainly want to see those beautiful 18mm Seven Years War figures 'in the flesh' at Colours.

It's probably a good job I'm not going to Colours, as Fighting 15s stock AB's 'large 15mm' Napoleonics, which are a pretty decent match for the Napoleon At War 18mms in my unpainted pile... :D

I should get round to reading this month's MW, too - been madly too busy this past few days!

Commission Miniatures Kickstarter

I don't normally re-plug Kickstarters, but the rather superb one for modular buildings and ruins I mentioned a while back has four days left to run and is a couple of grand shy of its target.

If you or your club are into Bolt Action, FoW, IABSM, the Lardies' new Chain of Command or anything else that lends itself to WW2-era city fights, you owe it to yourself to grab a deal here, be it in 15, 20 or 28mm. This one deserves to succeed, IMO: there are club deals at £200 if you want to club together, in all scales.

Kickstarter Watch - Commission Figurines

Modular Buildings and Ruins for Wargamers - basically they're looking for funding to allow them to extend the already very tasty 15mm and 20mm range to 28mm. They do a whole range of modular city buildings designed for WW2 mostly (except the walled farm, which is just TOO nice - see right).

I am awfully awfully tempted by this,. but I can't decide which pledge level I would want - do I want stuff for 15mm (IABSM and the farm for Napoleon at War) or 28mm (Chain of Command)?

Decisions, decisions.

Works in Various Stages of Progress

First off, apologies for what, by my standards at present, is a long silence - the family took turns at a two day tummy bug this week, and I've just about got over my go at it. On the good side, I have got the workshop a BIT tidier than it was, and was disturbed to discover how many 4L Really Useful Boxes I seem to have filled up with figures since I last did a serious audit. And I have had a couple of days to Think. And Plan.

It, um, looks like I'm going to have to update the Figures page on here sometime soon, or actually get stuck in to Sekrit Project W again. Suffice it to say the painted pile's gone up by Early Saxon and Christian Spanish WAB armies, as well as my Imaginations army (which I need to dig out again!)...

The unpainted and project piles, and the plans, on the other hand... let's see. This is turning into a 2013 resolutions list!

Vive l'Empereur!

Wednesday marked the start of what promises to be an interesting campaign, courtesy of Gavin and a mix of folks I know from the club and folks I've not met before, but are part of his regular gaming circle.

I'll not steal his thunder, as the superb web-based campaign system is his doing and he's blogging about it in detail: but I will note that this promises to be fun, though I'm a little nervous about being the overall french commander of eight whole Corps.

My first set of orders went in today, and the master map (at least, as far as I can see it from my viewpoint) is ready to be updated with reports from the field. The plan is, I gather, that battles will be fought using variously Principles of War and Grand Armée in 6mm, and possibly, if we have a brigade-sized skirmish, I might petition to see if we can give Napoleon At War a crack.

All in all, I'm looking forward to this. Watch this space, although updates will be, perforce, a little behind, partly because it's Gavin's show and partly because, well, les Anglais might be reading!

[As a note - these posts will be tagged with 'vive l'empereur' if you want to find them!]

Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy issue 58

Another magazine review, not least because I sort of promised the folks on Man At War's forum, but also because I happen to rather like the magazine.

So - Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy. Rescued from the ashes of its previous English-as-a-foreign-language incarnation by the good folks at Karwansaray (try saying that after a few), who are the publishers of Ancient Warfare and Mediaeval Warfare magazines as well. They've kept going with the same title and issue numbering sequence, at least in part, I understand, to keep their distribution deals with folks like WH Smiths going. Not that I mind, since good old Smiths is where I bought it, right next to Wargames Illustrated and under the last copy of this month's Miniature Wargames, for £4.20.

Right at the start that makes it pricier than an electronic subscription to Battlegames, but having said that, I do find myself on the horns of a dilemma in that I love the convenience of reading magazines on the iPad, but I do also enjoy physical paper magazines. Still - production quality is top notch: unusually the cover is satin-finish rather than out and out glossy. Minor gripe in that the colophon on the contents page (the list of things you don't really care much about like ad rates and publisher contact details) is grey on black and almost unreadably small, but the rest of the magazine has a beautifully clean layout. The graphic designer in me (he keeps trying to get out!) wonders if the page margins are a bit wide on the article pages, but otherwise - lovely look, easy on the eye to read.

Content-wise, plenty of ads, from most of the usual suspects. Each issue has a theme, to which maybe 40% of the articles stick - this time out it's Napoleonics, with a focus on the Austrian campaigns. Several good articles, with almost universally well-composed and taken photos: the one that interested me, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the comparative reviews of various rulesets, including Napoleon At War and Warhammer Historical's Waterloo set. Good set of reviews, in which all the sets came out well. None of his complaints about Napoleon At War actually seriously affect the playability of the rules: I don't really think it's fair to criticise them for the fact that the tournament rules restrict you to 6 turn games. We're all intelligent people, and I can't remember the last time I actually stuck to (for example) WAB turn limits just because The Book Said So. Equally, while Man At War have specifically designed the rules to suit their figure sets (like Battlefront, they have a vested interest in selling them!), it's not rocket science to figure out the core concepts behind the rules (infantry move == effective musket range == infantry line frontage) and scale all measurements for standard 28mm figure basing to within pretty close tolerances. That aside though, I found it a useful comparative review.

Outside of the themed articles, we have a mix of reviews, painting guides and other articles. The ones that grabbed me were an excellent set of skirmish rules for the hospital fight at Rorke's Drift (must not buy the Warlord box set, must not....), and a set of tweaks to the Warhammer Gladiator rules, which I most definitely will be making use of. In general, I find myself wishing I had figures for a number of their little one-off scenarios, as they'd make great participation games for a club night.

There were also a couple of opinion pieces, one from Rick Priestly on IGOUGO systems, which seems to have provoked some debate, if not outrage, on the TFL list, and one from the Lardies' own Rich Clarke on what he calls 'snack pot' gaming (the next size up from skirmish). On top of that there's an interview with the Lardies about I Ain't Been Shot Mum 3.

And that rather sums up where WS&S gets it right - it's not afraid to stray away from the mainstream rule sets (oh, come on, you know the ones I mean!), and it's not afraid to get stuck into meta-discussions about the hobby. My kind of magazine, very much like Battlegames. I think my long-term plan will be to subscribe to these two, and pick up WI and MW when the contents pique my interest.

How to create raving fans....

There's a theory I learned back when the subsidiary of EDS I worked for was doing QA/QC/Leadership training, called the Raving Fans theory of customer support (I recommend the book, by the way).

It's really very simple: it says that spending relatively small amounts of money, time, and effort to do that bit extra for your customers is worth the same as spending many times its cost in marketing. If you screw up, customers will let their friends know, loudly and often. If you just deliver according to expectation, no-one bothers to mention it. If you go the extra mile... magic happens. And it really isn't rocket science.

A few examples (bear with me - this is about wargaming, honest!):

• A while back I bought a second-hand Marshall guitar effects unit from my local music store, and happened to ask if they had the manual. They phoned Marshall, passed me the phone to a nice lady who asked for my address. Less than 24 hours later, free of charge, a manual (for a product on whose sale Marshall were making no money, remember) dropped through my letter box. Cost to them, one large letter stamp, one manual. About a fiver.
• I buy guitar strings from Strings Direct. Why? Because the first order I placed on a friend's recommendation was for a dozen sets: twenty minutes after I placed the order online, there's a phone call from Tony at Strings Direct, to say they've only got three sets in stock - the rest will be on their way as soon as they arrive, no extra postage. The three sets arrived the next morning. The rest arrived the following day. Cost to them, one 0.5kg parcel, one phone call - maybe £1.50?
• I ordered a set of drumsticks one evening, online, this Christmas for my son from Newcastle Drum Centre - they called back the following morning to say they weren't in stock, but there were some equivalent ones for a little bit more: they'd cover the difference, but would that be OK? Cost to them, one phone call and about £2.

In all three cases, they've probably spent under a fiver, and in return they have bought themselves a loyal customer who is going to sing their praises (like I am now) every time the subject comes up, to everyone they know. In the first two of those cases, I've been singing their praises for over a decade, and I don't intend to stop. 

(As an aside, the reason I'm not an eBuyer customer is they had a chance to do this, to rectify a mistake of theirs, at the cost of maybe £3 to them, and blew it. Which is also why they don't get a link from here, and why they didn't get the hardware business from one of the biggest single-sport websites in the world. And that was most of a decade ago.)

What's this got to do with wargaming, I hear you ask? 

Well - if you remember the unboxing shots I did for the Napoleon At War figures, you'll note I mentioned that there was a cavalry figure and an artillery limber missing. It's nice to know that Man At War read my blog, and even nicer when a couple of days after the post I get a forum PM apologising for the missing pieces and asking for my address. They arrived just before Christmas! From Spain! 

So, I'd just like to use this opportunity to say a big thank you to Ricardo and the rest of the guys at Man At War for going that extra little bit. You have a raving fan here.

Napoleon at War French - unboxing

So, having reached the end of the month with, to my considerable surprise, some money left, I grabbed a couple of boxes of the Napoleon at War figures - specifically the French foot artillery and the light cavalry brigade. They arrived today, in a surprisingly heavy (yes, I know - I'm used to Warlord / Wargames Factory / Conquest Games plastics. Sue me!) and small (18mm, not 28mm) box.

And here's what you get - apologies in advance for the less-than-perfect iPhone camera pics.

Good looking boxes - the back contains a parts callout and a very basic but useful painting guide: there are front and back pack shots on the Man At War store site, so I won't bother reproducing them here.

French Light Cavalry Brigade


The box claims 2 regiments, and 2 mounted officers, which is, indeed, what you get. It breaks down as

• 2 mounted officers, both pointing, 
• one in a bicorne, 
• one not, 
• 2 unit commanders, 
• 2 trumpeters 
• 20 regular cavalrymen, 
• 15 with shakos 
• 5 with bearskins
• 9 cavalry bases (one too many, I think!) 
• 2 officer bases

These are all packed in a two-compartment clear plastic tray with some foam padding: a few sabres were bent, but nothing too serious. I gather that some infantry boxes have arrived with broken muskets and bayonets, though.

The bearskinned troopers are, I assume, for elite squadrons - as there are only 5, I guess I'll be basing 3 on a base, and the odd two each with the trumpeter and unit CO on the command base. 

Moulding detail is excellent, but I'm not going to put any detail photos out this time round - once I get the DSLR charged and the figures undercoated, I'll stick up a round of photos.

French Foot Artillery Battery

Same again - plastic tray with foam padding. The box contains:

• 18 artillerymen
• 5 guns
• 10 wheels
• 5 medium gun barrels
• 5 heavy gun barrels
• 2 howitzer gun barrels
• 4 horses
• 2 drivers
• 1 limber base
• 4 gun bases

What it doesn't contain, and is visible on the box, is the trail axle and pair of smaller wheels for the limber. Whether this is an oversight in the box art or the box contents, I don't know.

Again, nice detail, pictures later :D

Summary

These are great, and (despite the fact that they're a LOT smaller than the stuff I'm used to painting) I'm really looking forward to getting some painted troops for Napoleon At War. Watch this space for the next stages.

Napoleon at War

I've been keen on the Napoleonic era for a long time. My school wargames club used to play Bruce Quarrie's rules from one of the Airfix Magazine Guides, and occasionally a set of (dreadful) home-grown rules that were entirely my fault. For a while, I started painting a bunch of Airfix figures as well as some Lamming Miniatures British light infantry, but in the end, university and D&D won out. On top of that, I absolutely aced my final (3rd year of secondary school, or year 9 to you youngsters) history exam before dropping the subject, largely due to getting to write scads and scads of stuff on Waterloo (based on the account in Ugo Pericoli's 1815: The Armies at Waterloo).

As I have commented in the past, I\ve been toying with shelling out on a bunch of Victrix and Perry 28mm Napoleonics and having a crack, probably with Black Powder. Gavin at the club has most of the Penninsular order of battle in 6mm, which is another way I could get a fix :D However, I was skimming a wargames mag last month when I happened on a full page ad for Napoleon At War. In a classic case of the Bader-Meinhoff phenomenon (look it up!), this was rapidly followed by an in-depth review in the most recent Meeples and Miniatures podcast which had me definitely intrigued.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the rulebook arrived on Tuesday :D Lovely presentation, in the modern tradition of colour hardback with pictures and diagrams. Well-written, clear and interesting ruleset - has some nice touches, particularly in the handling of reserves/unengaged troops, and of skirmishers, and in the national characteristics of each army (boy, that takes me back to Bruce Quarrie!). In fact, the latter are, to a degree, what makes the rules - British line vs French column would appear to take on the atmosphere one expects.

It's designed for tournament play, but will clearly lend itself to handling scenarios/recreations of battles. Army lists are quite nicely done - currently available from the website for the Hundred Days, and a Hundred Days campaign book is on its way, and then (one assumes) other eras of the war.

The other key thing? They're producing box sets of brigades of figures for the Hundred Days - in some ways this is intended to be Flames of War for the Napoleonic era. The figures are heroic 15mm (i.e. about 18mm, matching AB and Eureka, and maybe other ranges at a pinch), and the basing is a little idiosyncratic. It could be scaled to 6mm or 28mm, provided you adjusted ranges etc to match. The figures look, from the photos, to be very nice, and comments on the forums suggest that they're sculpted well and take paint very easily.

In short? I think this has real potential. I've (sadly) blown this months disposable income already on some figures and paints for Operation: Squad, but next month (unless a couple of eBay sales pan out) I'll be picking up some French.