Preparing for Campaign.

Before and after the dry/overbrush.

The last bits of prep for taking 'Archers In France' to Campaign in Milton Keynes this weekend. We're there both days, although if for some strange reason you want to see me, I'm only there on the Sunday. And I'm on a deadline because Grahame is picking this lot up tomorrow!

So - today, after Andy had done some more stonework on the castle, I drybrushed the ink-washed stone heavily with cream acrylic. It's pretty much the same trick as the limestone cliffs but it certainly works.

The finished article.

Basically it's several massive chunks of XPS foam, stonework scribed in with a pencil, textured by rolling a ball of crinkled foil on it, painted grey, drybrushed white, ink washed brown, drybrushed cream.

After all. Why change a good thing if it works? :D

Last up I finished off the wound markers. 10mm MDF disks, green on one side, red on the other, white ink pen to draw a stick figure on each, then black Sharpie to mark the wounded area. Fun, simple. 

Preparing for the Royal Armouries Agincourt weekend....

Don Featherstone's original game.

As previously mentioned, I have been on a quest for various 54mm figures. These are for our club's game at Royal Armouries' (in Leeds) Agincourt weekend on the 23-24 April, where we will be putting on one of Don Featherstone's delightful little skirmish wargames from the book of the same name. As far as I can tell from the one photo in my digital copy of said book, his original game also used Britain's 1/32 (54mm) figures.

Bigger toys!

The quest has been pretty fruitful, although I continue to be surprised how wince-inducing the prices for some of the more recent out of production Britain's figures are - they used, for example, to do a box of 6 French crossbowmen, which have been discontinued for I think less than a decade. Someone on eBay wants £34.99 for THREE!!!

Anyway, I'm sorted bar one solitary crossbowman, which I hope to be able to track down in the next week or two, and possibly a bombard as I've just discovered Britain's do one. The last box, barring these, arrived today - actually these are new (unpainted) plastics from a Singapore company, but they're of a scale and largely of a style with the classic Britain's mouldings.

Hope to have these painted by Wednesday - they're already undercoated.

Battle Report - 30-Jan-2012

This week, Carl ran an ECW participation game using Warhammer ECW, which was a refight (after a fashion) of the Battle of Powick Bridge.

For those unfamiliar with this, it was more a skirmish than a battle, with the Royalist cavalry under Rupert duking it out with the advanced Parliamentary cavalry of Essex's army, who were chasing after a baggage train containing the University of Oxford's silver plate.

The battlefield basically consisted of the aforementioned river bridge at the Parliament end of the table, over which a hedged lane ran between fields along the length of the board towards Worcester and the Oxford silverware. Gary and I took the Royalists, and Carl and Al the Roundheads.

It didn't start at all well. Gary's unit of horse, camping in the field next to the manor house, were the first to notice the Roundheads, charged, were repelled, and chased off the field in disarray, Al producing some prodigious dice rolls to do the deed.

On the other side of the lane, I sent Rupert's horse down between the hedges, to charge the second unit of Roundhead cavalry. This turned into a running battle of charge, retreat and countercharge, not helped by Al's dragoons lining one of the hedges, which I somehow managed to avoid taking a full first volley point blank in the flank from despite several attempts.

The Royalist horse follow through on the retreating
Parliament cavalry. In the distance, Prince Rupert's
gallopers have just routed another unit on the bridge.

Meanwhile, the third unit of our horse cut across the lane towards the manor house. Gary and Carl had another back and forth cavalry scrap, eventually resulting in Gary's unit getting chased off. Back at the lane, the dragoons wavered and fled at the sight of Rupert's troop chasing off their opponents, and I led the Prince's troops into the field and delivered the final charge on Carl's cavalry to wrap things up.

Fun game - I have to admit, I was expecting to lose a lot of units very fast to failed break tests, but a combination of fighting longways down the table and some decent dice meant we had an awful lot of charge, retreat, rally, repeat...

A nice small encounter: bodes well for our campaign starting in April.

Operation: Squad scenarios 3

Last one of the current batch of Op: Squad scenarios - this one is another paratroop assault, this time an attempt to demolish a vital railway line. As before, it can be found on the Scenarios page.

I should note straight away that this is the scenario of the three that didn't get play tested, due to there not being enough players on the night. It can be fine-tuned by moving the relative positions of the para drop, the German entry point, and the railway line: if anyone gives it a go, I'm eager for feedback and tuning suggestions.

I should also note that these three scenarios can be played side by side: 3, 1, 2, west to east - the maps are designed to link up.

Operation: Squad scenarios 2

[No, there wasn't another incomplete post here earlier. You were hallucinating. Move along. Nothing to see, and besides, I have other series of posts to finish yet. Like this one.]

Next Operation: Squad scenario up is the second in the D-Day set - a paratroop landing. There are, I'm told, paratroop landing rules in the original Operation: WW2 rules, which I don't have. The set we played when we did this are not the same as the ones in the PDF - the latter are courtesy of Dan Phillips from our club, and would have been much better on the day!

As before, this can be found on the Scenarios page.

Operation: Squad scenarios

I'm in the process of tidying up the briefing notes, and providing maps for, the Operation: Squad scenarios I ran first thing in the New Year at the club.

They will appear on the new Scenarios page on this blog - feel free to make what use of them you like.

The first one up is the glider landing scenario. Note that this took us a couple of goes to get it close to balanced: feel free to tweak and tune it as you like. Nothing is set in stone - these are all just suggestions to try and produce something a little different to the usual Op: Squad encounter battle.

Renewing old memories

Many years ago, the library in North Ferriby (where I lived with my parents) had a really rather good collection of wargaming books, including most of the Don Featherstone's and Charles Grant's (as well as Battle by Kenneth Macksey, but that's a story for another time). I must have borrowed everything they had several times. Contrast, if you will, with Peterborough Library today, which has, count it, precisely one solitary wargames book. And it's not even very good.

While discussing campaigns with fellow club members, some of the ideas from Don Featherstone's War Game Campaigns came up in conversation, as well as being reminded by some of the Pig Wars games about the scenarios in Skirmish Wargaming. Gav from the club has the former, which he's promised I can borrow sometime, but I succumbed to the lure of the latter on Amazon...

It's definitely of its time. If the past decade has been the era of buckets of dice and command rolls, Featherstone's books are definitely of the 'look it up on a combat results table' era, much like some of the other rules I grew up reading. Basically its a set of core rules, plus variations for each period. Each period comes with a scenario which is introduced by a pretty reasonable two or three page short story that sets up the battle to come.

You know what's really really scary?

I have not picked up that book in thirty years until last week. And I could remember every bloody piece of dialogue from every one of those short pieces.

Battle Report - 28 Mar 2011

Still no photos for this, but it was kind of fun.

A three-cornered game of Pig Wars: the basic scenario (thanks Carl) was that a raiding party (Carl) was returning home from raiding a Welsh village (AndyH) and passing by a Saxon village (your humble scribe) as it did.

I set up my RoSaxons in the village, 15 foot including 5 archers manning the palisade, and 5 cavalry waiting to charge out the gate. We had a brief and fun scuffle at the gate between my and Carl's cavalry, resulting in casualties on both sides, before Andy's Welshmen came and distracted Carl's troops, in search of their missing sheep (hehe) and loot.

About that point I lost my standard bearer, which necessitated a morale check - result, fall back for my archers, and everything else was fine. Next round I started mixing it with Andy's troops as well, and a combination of Carl's cavalry and foot killed my leader. Another morale check, and everything got a fall back result.

So, next round I attempted to rally what was left of my force (by now about 7 or 8 figures), and drew a heart (Pig Wars uses cards, remember) - all troops rally. Fab. Just time to get stuck into the two guys of Carl's that were herding Andy's sheep, and for Andy to lose his standard bearer and get an 'everyone fall back' result on the morale check  Next round? I took out Carl's last cavalry, Carl killed Andy's leader: another morale check, and I think Andy drew a 2 or a 3. And all his troops rout.

Which, much to my surprise, pretty much left my guys in charge of the battlefield and the captured sheep and gold. I suspect there will need to be a rematch so Andy can get his sheep back :D

Battle Report - 28 Feb 2011

Having flipped another coat of Army Painter anti-shine on the Rohirrim at the last minute (literally, it was just about dry when I boxed the figures up for transport), I made it, somewhat late, to the club to take on Carl's Norman's at the rather fun Pig Wars Dark Ages skirmish rules.

We set up on opposite sides of a village, each with 5 cavalry, 12 spearmen and three bowmen. Carl set up clustered in the middle, whereas I sent four spearman up the right flank and through the village with the bowmen. Things started badly - we converged just outside the village gates, and I declared a charge with my cavalry on his spearmen. Distance, no more than 14". Charge move for the cavalry? 12" + d6. And I rolled a 1.

"Axe Bloke" and Carl's leader duke it out.

Result, rather unpleasantly, was me getting charged in the (fortunately shielded) flank by his cavalry, and in the front by his spearmen. The resulting dustup consumed most of the battle from there on, to be honest. We both lost standards early on, and both passed morale checks (Pig Wars uses a deck of cards, not dice). I really thought I was done for, losing three horsemen early, but my leader (aka Axe Bloke), proceeded to stand firm when surrounded by Normans and lay waste to all about him in a manner which will without a doubt go down in the sagas. Were I better gifted in alliterative verse, I'd give it a go!

The flanking spearman finally get stuck in.

I was cursing my decision to send four spearmen up the flank, as I was sure the cavalry would be toast by then, but, as you can see from the picture, they and the bowmen did eventually make it across the village square in time to lend a hand. For a while, it looked like my RoSaxons would actually carry the day, but my pack of cards was stacked against me, and his leader was lucky enough to survive and knock the final wound off Axe Bloke. After that, it was just a mop up job for Carl.

So, thoughts on Pigs Wars?

Great fun, very fast paced. The game mechanic of using the cards works really well. Technically, you can get away with odd base sizes (like mine on 25mm and 40mm rounds) as figures meet 1 on 1, but WAB-style basing is probably saner all things considered. I wonder if archery possibly isn't deadly enough. There are no real command rules (which I'm starting to enjoy in games like Blitzkrieg Commander and Prinicples of War), and not enough morale checks to prevent the other issue - it's lethal. In a campaign context, you'd have to roll for casualties to see if they were dead or incapacitated, as between Carl and I we had 5 figures left out of 40 at the end of the game.

All in all, though? I had a ball.... Big thanks to Andy from the club for introducing us to the rules.