ACW Adventures in Basing No.6

A bit more basing of ACW cavalry to show you.

These are some very elderly Hinchcliffe 25mm plus-size cavalry that were picked up at a Claymore bring and buy last century sometime (they weren't repainted - hence the gloss finish).

I rebased these in the usual way - putting them on 40mm by 40mm stands, sticking on coarse shelly sand with PVA and then finishing them off with winter mix static grass.

Overall, they look fine although are a bit big compared to the Airfix/Revell/Esci figures that make up most of our ACW collection.  Nevertheless, they are now based so that's one more thing I can cross off my 'to do' list.

Dreadnought and Castles of Steel

Not much activity of late, other than to to say that, what with my various travels and what not, I have finally had time to finish both volumes of the really rather splendid two-parter - Robert K Massie's twin tomes: Dreadnought and Castles of Steel.

The first deals with the origins of the naval rivalry between the British and German Empires and certainly doesn't portray the Germans/Prussians in a very good light.  As you would imagine, there's also some good stuff on the naval side of the Russo-Japanese War.

What I did find fascinating was the very real concern about Germany's ambitions expressed in Britain and the anticipation that there would be a war eventually.  This to me was interesting as it tied in very nicely with Esrkine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands, which deals with exactly the issue of a supposed build up of German naval forces in the waters around the German islands off East Friesland, poised to invade England.... in 1902.  A fantastic book if you're into sailing, by the way.

The next installment, Castles of Steel, covering the consequence of the development of HMS Dreadnought, Churchill, Jackie Fisher, Tirpitz, U-boats and the whole naval history of the lead up to and progress of the First World War, is great and certainly provides the definitive account of those naval actions.

I am particularly interested in the early action including the Emden, Coronel and the Battle of the Falklands and there is plenty of information on that in this book.

Anyway, both books are a darn good read and I'd also highly recommend The Riddle of the Sands as a ripping yarn in the mould of John Buchan or Rider Haggard (except with much more stuff about the technicalities of sailing without modern instruments).

D Hewins of Grimsby

Apologies for the long hiatus since I last posted but I've been away in various places recently: some interesting and others... not so interesting.  I will concentrate on the former.

I'm not that well travelled in certain parts of England, being from North of the Border, but a current project at work (relating to offshore windfarm developments in the North Sea - there'll be 5,000 turbines on the Dogger Bank in 10 years, mark my words) has recently brought me to Hull, Scunthorpe and lastly Grimsby.  Of these, I was pleasantly surprised by Hull; Scunthorpe I didn't see much of and Grimsby I was a bit worried about until I discovered a gem: D Hewins Models and Hobbies at 7b East St Mary's Gate, unprepossessingly tucked away in a narrow brick courtyard behind an Italian restaurant. (It has no website).

I have to say that although it was well hidden ("You found us though," said Mr Hewins (I presume that it was he)) it was well worth it.  I love shops like that packed from floor to ceiling with models, books, soldiers, and yes, even railway stuff.

The great thing was that I found something that I'd been looking for for ages, which for some reason I had not been able to get hold of easily (or at least reasonably priced - perhaps it is out of print?): the Osprey Frederick the Great's Army (1) Cavalry.

Not that I have much in the way of Seven Years' War stuff, but it is an interest floating around somewhere.  There were a couple of other finds which I may blog about later (the 3 for 2 offer got me).  The things is, the proprietor clocked me for a wargamer right away, raising an eyebrow at my eclectic choice of books covering WW2, the SYW and the Crusades.  Well, I am the Wishful Wargamer, after all.

Anyway, a highly recommended shop and if you're in the area you should drop by and say the Wishful Wargamer sent you.  He won't remember me but he may recall the bald guy in the suit a couple of weeks ago with the massive suitcase barging about his shop grinning, and about to head off to Romania.....

Magna Graecia Campaign Rules

As with most of my wargaming activities there are always themes, periods and rule sets that I constantly turn back to in my wishful way.  These include such things as DBA, DBM, DBR, Operation Warboard, books by Donald Featherstone and Charles S Grant and even Bruce Quarrie's Napoleonic Rules (published in the Airfix Guide No. 4).

One of my enduring interests has been finding ways to run wargame campaigns and therefore discovering campaign rule sets has always been exciting (there aren't that many out there really).  One of the sets that I did find and use was the (free) Magna Graecia Campaign Rules for an ancient campaign in Sicily.  These are by Rob Smith and appear to date from early 1997.

Resolving how terrain affects campaign decisions of when and where to fight has always been an issue but these rules cleverly simplify this by having defined table-top maps for each of the numbered nodes shown on the main map.  Land movement is only between linked nodes and battles can only be fought at each node (a bit like the original Shogun & Medieval Total War computer game system).  Therefore each battlefield can be assessed beforehand and hopefully used to your advantage.

Node maps look like this, although I suppose you could make your own if you wished or you could inject some random element based on scouting prowess, etc.  Here is a sketch-map showing our battle on the node depicted above (No.12 Akragas/Agrigentum) when we actually did fight the campaign (in this case it was Lydians versus Early Achaemenid Persians using DBM).  .

In this encounter the Lydians were advancing from Node 13 so the coastline on our battle map was along the left hand side (North is at the right hand side of my sketch-map).  Note the L-shaped wood and walled town which match those on the campaign map.  I actually won this one.  And here is another example from later on in the campaign and further along the coast at node 03 (Selinus).

My sketch-map of our battle is shown below, from which you can see that my army bravely ran away (North is on the right hand side of the map again).

And the reason for posting about this (apart from the opportunity to highlight one of my rare victories in that particular campaign)?  Well, a few months ago whilst checking my links I noted that the Magna Graecia one was dead and I have only today found and restored them after a bit of searching round the interweb.

So I thought I'd use the occasion to draw your attention to this interesting and useful set of campaign rules and the fact that it can be found on the web again.  It also ties in with my current thoughts on running a DBA campaign and what our options are for doing that.

Edit - unfortunately this link is now dead also.  However, if anyone still wants to see these rules and maps you can view them here.

Quick Marsh!

Having now made sufficient river sections to have numerous river configurations on my DBA board, with enough of it to stretch easily from one end of my main 6' wargames board to the other (I don't know when to stop), I decided that I might as well make some more terrain in the same vein, i.e. some marsh.  As before, my starting point was various bits of spare lino cut to shape conforming to the DBA maximum terrain dimensions.

As you can see I selected lino pieces with a mixture of blue (water), brown (mud) and sand (sand).  The next job was to paint round the edges to cover the exposed white bits, to blend in with my playing surface and to provide something for the PVA glue to key into. As before this was Dulux 'gamboge' emulsion.

I then glued on some coarse shelly sand that comes from a nearby Scottish beach.

I put some of the sand in central parts of the terrain pieces over the sandy coloured and brown areas, leaving the blue(ish) water between.  I then added some of the yellowish green Winter static grass that I'd used previously and that was it.

Here are some close-ups of my handiwork (this one is about 140mm by 100mm).

There are some larger pieces of shell there which fortuitously appeared on this tile from the sand box, so I just painted these as bits of wood or other debris.

And here it is finished off with the Javis style Winter static grass.  I think they've worked out quite well and I now have some more DBA compliant terrain to use.  I'm pondering what to do next but I think vineyards, woods, roads, some more hills and possibly a BUA may well be on the cards.

A River Runs Through It No.2

Random pieces of tile are all well and good but they aren't quite river sections.  Having cut the tile pieces to shape the next thing was to paint the exposed edges the same colour as my DBA board - a sort of yellow orange emulsion named, obscurely, gamboge (that's Dulux for you).

I dry-brushed the river 'banks' with the same colour and then, using PVA, glued on some coarse shelly sand that I got from an East Lothian beach, with the paint showing through here and there.

The sections were finished with a sparse coverage of Javis type Winter Mix static grass, which is slightly yellowish and therefore suitable for the arid type terrain and baseboard that I use for my DBA/DBM forces (mainly Lydian, which I imagine to operate in the dryer areas of Asia Minor).

My DBA board is 'temperate' green on the obverse and the river sections work just as well on it too.  Result.

A River Runs Through It No.1

On the subject of DBA Campaigns, one of the things that I'm always short of is suitable terrain and so I've decided to make some.  I've got a whole list of items to make which no doubt I will blog about but first up is a river.  This will be my starting point:

Yes, we got some nice 'tiled' lino for the kitchen a few years ago and I'd been keeping the offcuts for something.... The pieces are a sort of marbled stone effect and there's quite a lot of blue in some of them.

And here are the various river sections I've cut, mainly from blue parts of the tiles.  They are all about 40mm across (i.e. one 15mm base-width in DBA/DBM) and there are various curved and straight sections.

Here are a few river pieces with some 15mm Magister Militum Skythian horsemen for scale.  I like the severed heads hanging from the saddles - nice touch.

DBM Armies and Their Uses

One of my long term projects (what am I saying?  All of my wargame projects are 'long term') has been my 15mm, 500 point Lydian DBM army (I/50), developed and finally all painted over the embarrassingly long period from 1995-2010.  The thing about choosing and developing a DBM army, at least for someone thrifty like me, is the opportunity to ensure that there was enough variety to generate an interesting selection of (much smaller) DBA armies without having to acquire additional figures.

As Classical armies go the Lydian army is quite useful because not only does it have mounted 'hoplites' - 'knights' Kn(F) (unusual for that period) but it also has light chariots (LCh), (foot) hoplites (Sp) and lots of auxiliaries (Ax), not to mention Psiloi (Ps) and, my personal favourite, wardogs (they count as Warband).

Not the most war-like of dogs really - they were actually some animals I got in the railway model shop Harburn Hobbies (top end of Leith Walk) so they're really just collies (and a labrador).  Still, with a little training..... The dog walker is an Essex ballista crew member or similar.  And yes I know, the basing is a bit, well, basic, but they were done a long time ago and if I redo these then I'll have to do them all, which is 500pts worth of rebasing....

Anyway, this varied collection of troop types lends itself to a variety of DBA armies.  For the sake of argument here are four of them, which also happen to be historical opponents (according to the DBA 2.0 army lists anyway):

• I/41 Phrygian (800BC-676BC)
• I/48 Thracian (700BC-46AD)
• I/50 Lydian (687BC-546BC)
• I/52(g) Early Hoplite Greek (Asiatic Greek) (668BC-450BC)

And here are (from front to back) the Lydians, Thracians and Phrygians.  All figures are/were 15mm Chariot (now Magister Militum).  I couldn't be bothered setting out the Asiatic Greek Hoplites, although the figures I have are very good (check out HOG002 and HOG003 on the Hoplites page).

And the reason for all this?  Well, a good few years ago we did a very successful DBA campaign where Geoff and I both fielded 4 armies that blundered round a rather complicated hex map fighting each other (not using the DBA campaign rules, as such).

It was one of those campaigns using a massive matchbox chest of drawers in true Donald Featherstone style.  I've still got most of the matchboxes somewhere, but my inclination now is to use the Berthier Campaign Manager (currently on v7.6.4), now that I'm thinking about another DBA campaign, which is ultimately the whole point of this rather rambling post.  Yet another opportunity to 'watch this space'.

ACW Adventures in Basing No.5

Actually, this post isn't about basing per se, but does address the issue that the Union forces (i.e. mine) never really had cavalry.  But they do now.

And it's these - 1:72 Italieri Union Cavalry, bought a few years ago (see price tag) but heading to the top of the pile.

They are actually excellent figures and I'm looking forward to getting on with painting them, much though I tend to put that part of the process off for as long as possible.

The good news is that I am slowly inching towards arranging a play test of the Regimental Fire & Fury Rules I bought last year, not to mention a go at Black Powder, which seems to be a strangely persistent set of rules (a good thing!) and which was to be my new project from last summer but work and other things sadly got in the way.

ACW Adventures in Basing No.4

With the infantry more or less all based up, for the legendary 20mm plastic Regimental Fire & Fury and/or Black Powder ACW project (see earlier posts), I thought it was time to start on cavalry.

These are some lance armed cavalry (they are meant to be a Texas regiment) that Geoff did a long while ago and I took the opportunity to base them this month.

The figures are actually very special because Geoff converted them from Esci Napoleonic Polish Lancers, and therefore I thought I'd feature closeups of them all.

As before, basing was done on 2mm thick MDF stands covered with very coarse shelly sand from my local beach, with some Jarvis autumn mix static grass on top, all glued on with PVA.

There is quite a variety of uniforms and in fact each figure is different.  Well, you might as well if you're converting them.

As always, the Esci figures are great in their own right and are a very nice starting point - I think that they have converted across very well.

As you can see, a lot of carving, adding on paper coats and plasticine hats - much more effort than I can usually manage.

Anyway, they're done now so on to the next lot of ACW troops.