Wish List No. 1

When I started this blog I characterised myself as a Wishful Wargamer: someone who spends most of the time looking out the window thinking and much less time at the workbench or wargames table doing. This tendency is exacerbated when living on a remote, and admittedly tropical (it’s raining, actually), island (as I am now), mainly because: I’ve no wargaming kit with me at all (apart from copies of DBA 2.0, Regimental Fire & Fury, Great Captain, etc.), everything takes months to get here, mailing costs are high and anyway by the time anything arrived I’d be off the island and gone.

So, I’m currently spending a lot of time thinking and planning, perhaps when I should be doing something else. Anyway, here are some of the projects I’m thinking about and hope to get going again when I get back to Scotland at the end of April. Note that these represent periods where I’ve got the armies and resources more or less in place already and the wishfulness relates mainly to tweaking forces, adding terrain items and arranging and playing games. Subsequent posts will dwell on periods I’m aspiring to but haven’t started yet (but may do).

15mm Ancients
I’ve got a 15mm 500pt DBM Lydian Army - mostly Chariot figures (Magister Militum now), which I really like. I bought the first of these in 1994 and it took me 15 years to get them all painted (yes, really). I’ll probably stick with DBM as we’ve had some great games with it (Geoff has an early Achaemenid Persian army (Essex) which can be a challenge), although we might try out Great Captain (if I get time to read it here) or maybe even FOG instead. I’ve also got a copy of WRG 6th edition at home to use some winter weekend.

The Lydians need some additional odds and sods to be perfectly compete and I really have to rebase them properly (plain painted cardboard won’t do anymore). There are also one or two terrain items still to be made including scrub/rough going using sisal brush bristles and I’ve always fancied some walled vineyards and olive groves so these are on the list to make.

1/300 ECW
We’ve enough Heroics and Ros figures painted and based up to play DBR comfortably and have had some good games with them in the past. After reading Angus Konstam’s Journals though, I’m minded to try out Very Civile Actions as an alternative although I’m not sure how it will translate to 1/300 scale.

1/300 WW2
I’ve got enough Afrika Korps (DAK) vehicles and men to be getting on with here. We normally use Rapid Fire for our 1/300 games but incorporating more detailed AT fire tables and rules based on those in Bruce Quarrie’s Airfix WW2 Wargaming guide. Our experiments with WRG’s 1925-1950 rules proved that these were too detailed for 1/300 scale gaming.  Following recent discussions on various blogs it may be time to get Operation Warboard out again though.

I’ve made quite a few 1/300 desert buildings but still have one or two desert terrain items to make to be really ready though, although some of these (rocks and such) can be used with the Lydians (see above) and other planned periods. We had started an Operation Crusader campaign using the Berthier Campaign Manager a while ago and may need to kick start this again.

We also have some 1/300 forces for France 1940 and I have a long term plan to build up Russian and German armour for late Ostfront. Terrain and buildings for 1/300 ECW works for the French countryside nicely.