Projects Old & New.

Sadly I did not make it to the Phalanx Show in St Helens. I had too much to do trying to sort out moving into my new flat there, and as time was limited something had to give. It was the show.

However I put the money I would have spent at the show to good use on eBay and at a local railway model shops, buying some terrain kits, paints and a few old Warhammer Fantasy figures.

 Because I think that bug has bitten again.

 I admit to having a Love/Hate relationship with Warhammer. I love painting the figures and I love the rules, and the fun element that is evident in both. But I hate the pricing structure,where you will pay more for a figure's in-game prowess than the figure itself is worth. I mean can you imagine having to pay more for a box of Italeri Tiger tanks than for their box of M4 Shermans? But that's the GW deal and one does not have to buy into that side of the game-system if one does not wish to.

And I hate most of all the gamesmanship that the Army Book system inspires in so many of the players. To their credit, GW have in the past tried to counter this with articles in White Dwarf telling the boys (it always is the boys) to behave and stick to the "spirit" of the game  but youthful testosterone and geekiness, coupled with the Army Books, does tend to bring out the worst in the little dears.

So whilst I love the game, I now stick to the core rulebook and don't bother with all the special stuff. Nor do I play against hard-core players.

On other fronts, my 20mm Assyrian Army is almost complete now, and painting should start soon. I am using HaT figures, which I think are a little chunkier and easier to paint than the lovely Caesar ones. I am also hoping to pick up a couple of the Assyrian Rams and Siege Tower kits out there. They are rare as hen's teeth but I have seen a couple and will order them next month. Rules will be Warhammer Ancients.

The 30mm Spencer Smith ACW project is also continuing, with some new purchases planned, and I must also remember to contact John Preece about some old SAE figures we had an interest in. That's on my to-do list, so if John reads this,....

Oh, and there's my Fictional 20mm WW2 project. I got rid of all the old stuff in my massive clear-out, but as soon as I had a decent income, it stared to revive again and I now have a half dozen AFVs and about a hundred soldiers to paint up. I am using the same theme as before, but this time I am being a little less ambitious and will limit myself to small-sized forces. I got too carried away last time and ended with scores of tanks and maybe a thousand figures in the Build and Paint queue, and that is almost a guarantee that the project will never really take off.

 The Victorian Steam Punk Battles remains a dream project. Again, it had not got beyond the purchase stage, and 90% of it went in my enforced clear-out. So work will start again as soon as I move into my new flat next week.

Campaigning Across the Board

Back on the topic of boardgames, I have managed to find one that I can tie into my interest in fictional wargames. I spent a few months searching on eBay until I found one that I thought would suit.

The game, which I had previously owned (but never played) many years ago and had long sold on, was Avalon Hill's Blitzkrieg. It's a fictional wargame between two nations. Great Blue and Big Red. It's fought over a large mapboard and is based on WWII and modern era conflicts. I thought it would be ideal for generating campaign clashes between the Vulgarian and Moldovian forces, as well as possibly allowing for the inclusion of neutrals and allies.



So next month I shall start work on some campaign rules to make it work. Basically the core of the game's rules are fine, and it should be possible to just leave out the combat results for those clashes one wishes to play on the table top. The only real work will be to convert the counters' unit strengths into OOB's for the table top forces.

Another recent acquisition, this time purchased on a whim, was Iron and Fire. It's a cross between a boardgame and a tabletop game, which includes unit counters and card terrain to get one started, somewhat akin to the old Avalon Hill Napoleon's Battles system. The game dates from the mid-'eighties and covers the ACW, specifically the Shenandoah battles of 1862. It was going cheap on eBay and as I have an abiding interest in the ACW, and had some recall of seeing the game advertised way back then, I thought I'd get it.

The game itself is strange. It uses dice-less combat resolution, based on a comparison between opposing units' command, skirmish "superiority", and moral at the time of combat. It's a very odd and not at all intuitive rule system, which I suspect is the reason the games (there were two of them) sank without trace quite quickly. Nevertheless, with my devotion to all things ACW, it was worth a fiver. It should not be too hard to think up some decent rules for it.

First Battle!

Today John Preece and myself set up and played through a quick ACW game using the 30mm Spencer Smith and SAE figures that have been completed to date.

John took the pesky Rebels, and I the stolid Union forces.

OOB was as follows.
Rebs.
1 x Mounted General Officer.
3 x Infantry Regiments @ 20 figures each
1 x Infantry Regiment @ 16 figures.
1 x Cavalry Regiment @ 15 figures.
2 x Artillery Batteries @ 1 gun and 4 crew each.

Union.
1 x Mounted General Officer.
6 x Infantry Regiments @ 20 figures each.
2 x Artillery Batteies @ 1 gun and 4 crew each.

The table was about 6 x 4 foot.

Scenery was scattered around to give an ACW "feel", and care was taken to ensure neither side had an obvious advantage in terrain.

The battle was a Meeting Engagement, with no real attempt to outline any victory conditions. We really just wanted to play with the shiny toy soldiers!

The rules were slung together by me over the last few days, and were based on the old 1962 Featherstone ones, with a little (but not TOO much) Warhammer Fantasy Battles thrown in.

They actually worked okay for a first run-through. A tweak here and there is certainly needed. But the game was fun and I think John especially enjoyed the Artillery rules, which worked very well indeed, much to my dismay when one of his guns managed to enfilade a whole Infantry regiment in column, using roundshot. Ouchie..!!

Anyway, here are some photos. They are pretty much in the order taken.
The dark blues are a little light in the shots. That's down to the camera's flash.










Ouch! That's GOTTA hurt! The effect of roundshot down the length of an advancing Infantry column.


Those damned Rebel guns!







Steady, Boys! Here they come!



Two Reb Infantry regiments advance across the railway line.


Hitting back!


Rebel Cavalry moves up.


Bracing themselves fo the Rebel Cavalry charge!


The flanking move comes to grief, routed by the Rebel's very accurate Artillery.


The Confederate horse routed a Union regiment on the Reb's left flank, but was too weak to follow up the advantage. Instead it swung around to attack the rear of of the Union regiment by the woods, and its survivors were shot from their saddles by the Union infantry in the forefront of this picture.



And STILL they held..!!

Looking For Pretty Uniforms.

It's been a bit on the slow side as regards painting. I've not been in the mood to tackle whole regiments, but instead have concentrated on researching some of the early war ACW units, and completing single figure "templates" for each one that takes my fancy. Of course at a future date, when finances allow, I shall buy more lead and use those single figure templates to paint up whole units, but until then I am just appreciating the painting joys offered by the variety of such one-offs.

Yesterday's attempt was of an old SAE figure of a mounted cavalryman, with a brimmed hat pinned up at one side, and with a large feather in it. My good friend John Preece identified it as Black Horse cavalry. He was correct; the figure is certainly a representation of the early war 1st Virginia Cavalry, under the command of Jeb Stuart, as it appeared during First Bull Run. Now I only have six castings of this figure, and ideally would like some more. But even so I decided to research the uniform and paint one up.





It was quite fun. Not the prettiest early war uniform out there, but it will add a little flavour to the Rebs. Oh, and I know the horse is brown and not black, but it seems that they were not slavish adherents of the Advertising Standards laws, and didn't feel the need to stick to the letter of their product description.

Brothers In Arms

Today was a day for a slight change of direction. Whilst I did crack on and block-paint a load of Union Cavalry and a few odds and sods of Union and Reb Infantry, I also decided to complete one of the little vignettes that came in the box of lead from John Preece.

There're some charming little groups in there, many of which I have identified. This particular one I have not yet managed to, though. I suspect, from the other sets I have seen, that this is supposed to be two wounded Rebs staggering back from the battlefield.



But I thought it would have rather more impact if I made the two figures a Johhny Reb and a Billy Yank. Perhaps they are brothers or past friends, both wounded on the same battlefield, and helping each other escape. OK so I'm a bit sentimental, but why not?



Anyway it seemed to work OK, and I was happy with it.

The Joys Of Painting Spencer Smiths.

Actually, sometimes they are NOT a joy.

As there's no detail to speak of, it's usually a matter of how much one can be bothered to paint on. The thing is that sometimes there is just a HINT of something there in the casting, but one is not quite sure.... For example, I painted up several Regimental officers for the Union forces, and just gave them a black leather sword belt. Even that was barely visible, but as they had a scabbard I knew the belt had to exist. There was a rather vague blob under the scabbard (which seems to be empty, so where's the damn sword?). I assumed that the sword was there and that the blob might well be another leather belt attachment. I painted the blob black.

Once I saw John Preece's Reb officers, I noticed he had painted in the officer's sash on each figure. and that the vague blob was in fact a tassle or two. The fact that the casting HAS a sash is a little more evident on the old plastic Spencer Smiths. And after checking out a few similar poses in the SAE castings I had, the sash could be clearly seen. Oh Poo!!!

OK, I knew ACW officers often wore a sash, but just as often they didn't bother with it. But now I know it's supposed to be on the casting, I am in a dilemma as to whether I paint it in on the Union officers. I've done it on one, and it's a chore on an already painted and varnished figure! I guess I shall not bother, even though the afore-mentioned blob is there... Will I lose sleep over it?

Aside from that, I managed to complete the first Union Brigade commander. This is the first mounted Spencer Smith I have attempted, and I am happy with the results.





And yes, I know I forgot the stirrups! They've since been added. Doh!!

Slow Down. You Move Too Fast.

It's been a slow couple of weeks, certainly as regards my painting. I've not been in the mood, post-Xmas housework and tidying/sorting has been higher on my To Do list, and I also had to take a few days off to visit a very sick friend who is just recovering from a major operation. Lots of excuses, and not a lot of work done. But that's the way of things.

I re-started the other day, and cracked on with the ACW figures. I have now completed the painting on all the Union Infantry and Artillery, and am working on the Brigade and Division commanders. I have a few Union Cavalry in kepis, but am in no hurry to start on them. I also did a couple of mild conversions of Reb Cavalry who's slouch hats were a bit mis-moulded. A few quick snips and a bit of filing quickly turned the slouch hats into kepis and added a couple more figures to my Union Horse. The centre figure is the conversion; the headgear is now close enough for me to be happy.



As far as the Johnny Rebs are concerned, I have based the two Infantry units and the Cavalry unit I swapped with John Preece, and have added two guns and their crews. I am currently working on two more Infantry units and the Reb Brigade and Division command.



I am looking at adding at least one colourful Zouave regiment to each side. But there things are a bit problematic. Spencer Smith produce but a single ACW Zouave, and that one is turbanned. One pose is rather a limited choice, especially as SAE produced many poses for these regiments. So I have to look elsewhere and am wondering how well the Tradition 30mm figures will work. Granted they are over double the price of Spencer Smiths, but they have a larger range of Zouaves including the command figures. Now sadly there are no images of them on the Spencer Smith website... So does anyone know if the Tradition ACW ranges will be a good match for 30mm Spencer Smiths? The last thing I want is bulky modern caricatures alongside the "toy soldiers".

It would not look right.

The 30mm SAE ACW "Themed" Figures.

Here's a shot of the SAE vignette "themed" figures. They will all add a little character to the armies.



I paint all my 30mm ACW in an old-fashioned "Toy Soldier" style. These SAE have much more detail than the current Spencer Smith figures and one doesn't have to paint in what is not there. But even so, they were designed to be toy soldiers, and to be honest even if I had the inclination to do a modern paint job on them, I think it just would not work as art.

Having A Break From Battle!

Finally the routine of painting drab, dull uniforms and AFV camo wore me down, and I put aside the Battle! project for a while. So far I have painted perhaps 100 soldiers, and maybe a dozen or so vehicles and guns. Not bad going. However, I now know that there is no way I am going to be able to stick to the original budget. I have perhaps 60 more infantry to paint and another dozen vehicles and guns, but much more is needed just for the basic one battalion and support per side. I had hoped that I could pick up cheap kits on eBay and elsewhere, but lately the prices seem to have hardened. Never mind. I shall just have to slow down a bit so as not to break into the household budget..

So I broke out the ACW project and had a go at that. I just felt like bright colours and glossy varnish for a change!

I am in the process of basing a load of Johnny Rebs that John Preece swapped with me. He got a load of 20mm WW2 early British AFVs and trucks and a fair bit of infantry, and I got a load of his painted 30mm ACW Spencer Smiths, the original plastic ones. John has done a very nice job of painting them, and puts more detail on them than I do.

He also tossed a lot of other stuff my way; a heavy box full of old lead. This box contains some strange stuff. Essentially the figures are what looks like first generation copies of some of the old SAE 30mm ACW range. Very few of them are in the present Spencer Smith range. All of them seem slightly larger and bulkier than Spencer Smiths, too. I would expect that is because they are first generation copies, whilst Spencer Smiths are third or even fourth generation, and thus have shrunk over time..!

SAE used to do many different boxed sets, some of which were themed "vignettes". Many of the metal figures in the box seem to come from such sets. One batch represents wounded men, either on the battlefield or being treated in a field hospital. Although their use is limited on a wargames table, I have started to paint them up just for the hell of it.



There are also some figures that seem to be from a HQ vignette. Certainly one looks like a mounted Robert E Lee. There are standard bearers, a few buglers and drummers, similar to those currently in the Spencer Smith range but a little larger, a cute campfire scene along with a camp follower, and lots of cavalry, none of which are in the currently available range.

The infantry is a mixed bag. A few Advancing in Kepis look similar to the latest Spencer Smith offerings but again, as they are larger, they look a little out of place in a unit with them. So in the end I took the two dozen or so various foot poses and decided to make a Reb regiment from them. Usually I like all my troops to have the same pose, but in this case I shall make an exception. And it's OK if they are Rebs, as a degree of unconformity is surely true to form?

Taking A Rest

This last few days have seen me take a rest from pouring molten white metal into rubber moulds. One needs to back off now and again or else the smell starts to permeate the house. Not too sure it does my lungs much good either.

But really all I have left to do now is the rank and file, and I already have around 80 of those done. The rest can wait, perhaps until after Christmas and the New Year.

In the meantime I have been enjoying watching our little one learn to tie her own shoelaces, a task which has resulted in many tears and angry tantrums on her part.

I've also been reading Charles Grant's The Battle of Fontenoy, which as Jean-Louis pointed out in a comment earlier, is the natural follow-up to The War Game. Let down only by a lack of photos, it is nevertheless an excellent book and great fun to read.

Other than the normal household routine, and getting soaked taking the little one to her Stage School on Saturday, I have been cleaning and undercoating a few 30mm Spencer Smith and SAE metal figures, and basing some of the plastic Spencer Smith Rebels that John Preece kindly swapped me a few weeks ago. I have managed to mislay my usual green basing paint somewhere, so they remain unfinished.

More Spencer Smiths.

I managed to pick up some more Spencer Smith ACW figures yesterday when a good friend of mine, the erstwhile and erudite Mr. John Preece, star of Tywyn's legendary Red Light distict, swopped me some of his old 30mm plastic ACW figures (painted) in return for some of my 30mm plastic ACW figures (unpainted), and a few odds and sods of old SAE metals which he wanted to use in a skirmish unit.

Overall it was a great deal, as the figures are painted to John's usual high standard. While I am content to stick to the fundamentals on these old-fashioned and basic figures, Johh will go that extra mile and add the detail I don't have the patience for. So they look very pretty indeed, and photos will soon be forthcoming. Actually many will have already seen them, as I believe these ones appear in CS Grant's new book The War Game Companion, being used in the images gracing the ACW sections therein.

In the meantime, I am at the mercy of the post. I am still waitng for a number of eBay items to drop or be rammed through my letter box by the Royal Mail. I do intend to knock out a couple of fictional "WWII-style" armies, and with this aim in mind, had last week ordered a couple of boxes of the quick-build tank kits by Italeri. Alas, they have still not come....

Nor has the re-published copy of Charge! I purchased. I did have the original, a first edition, which I cherished dearly but, knowing that a new paberback of it had been released, I felt able to sell that copy (for a tidy sum, too) in the knowledge that I would soon replace it, in facsimile at least.

When these items arrive, it will be like Xmas.

In fact, given the Royal Mail's sad performance, it will be at Xmas....

Best Laid Plans

I fully intended to bash out a few dozen home-cast figures today but, as so often happens, the plans went a little awry. And in the end I got nothing done at all, save a few more bits of junk removed from the loft. That diverted my mind, as I now have to think long and hard about which bits of terrain I shall take with me when I move, and which I shall sell on. Do I need two dozen large TSS terrain boards?

And my twice weekly browse of various sites has now put a lot of temptation my way, too. 28mm hard plastic figures were sure to be a wonderful invention, or so I hoped. In the run-up to the first few releases, I anticipated being enamoured of the Perry ACW, but felt sadly let down when I saw them; far too many fiddly little bits, many of them moulded separately for no good reason at all. Too much like hard work.

Their Napoleonics, and the Victrix ones, also seem to feature lots of little parts. For me, the MAIN virtue of hard plastic figure should be that they wouldn't require a lot of preparation work. I had high hopes that the Perry and Victrix Naps might provide a good excuse for me to use them for my fictitious armies, and enable me to leave out all the extra effort involved in home-casting.

But after looking at what was on offer, I turned my back on 28mm hard plastics, and resigned myself to the stench of hot lead.

Until today, when I saw the HaT 28mm hard plastic Napoleonics figures.

Now these are more like it. They are simple moulds, in good poses, and with at most a couple of extra pieces (ie, backpacks) which one can glue on or not, as the fancy takes one. THESE are what I had hoped for when 28mm hard plastics were first announced.

Much depends on cost, of course, but it seems around £12 a box is on the cards. And at a later date they also intend to do Seven Years War stuff, with masters for Prussian Artillery already pictured on their site.

I am also intrigued by the way they have marketed them, with separate boxes for Marching, Action and Command poses. I am one of those old-fashioned people who HATE action poses in Horse and Musket games, and so this means that I don't have to waste around 30% of the figures in every box I buy.

Clever HaT..!!

So what to do?

My Lack Of American Civil War Rules.

Last night I was going through the old bookshelves up in the loft, trying to sort out other stuff to sell on eBay to raise some much needed funds, when I came across a couple of old books on the ACW.

Now, I game the ACW.

Or to be honest, I more sort of don't.

I have a reasonable library on the history of the conflict, and have been studying it for many years. That interest has lasted from my childhood, and the first set of Airfix Union Infantry I was given as a present for being good when my mum was having my third sister. Oh, and down to the old Civil War bubblegum card sets, complete with bar of red bubblegum, gratuitously bloody picture cards of the war, and Confederate Dollars.

So a long history, there.

And given that, one would expect me to be a fanatic when it came to wargame rule sets on the period. And yet I game the ACW using old, slightly modified 1962 Featherstone rules. Yes, I know there're tons of other rules out there, loads of them really good, and I've bought a few and played them and... gone back to the Featherstone rules.

Why?

Because I like them. I know they're not "realistic" or particularly "historical", but I play my wargames for fun and those rules are really all I want. Every other set of ACW rules I've bought, I've sold on shortly afterwards. No offence to their writers, but they are not for me.



So these two books came to light in my search. Both are old, and both contain ACW rules. The Stevenson one is the more modern work, dating from around the early 'nineties. The rules (or rather some rules) are in there, although not really organised or formally presented as a set of rules. It's worth keeping because.. er... well. is it worth keeping? It doesn't get referred to, has little in the way of interest now. But for old times sake I shall retain it. It's not as if it takes up much room.

The other set is the old Airfix Magazine Guide no 24. American Civil War Wargaming, by Terence Wise. It is dated 1977.

Now there is NO WAY I will let go of this puppy. I had a copy long ago, and made the mistake of selling it. Two weeks later I regretted that move, and carried on regretting it for five years, until I finally found another copy.

This book also has a set of ACW rules inside, actually presented as rules and not just as a few ideas to kick around, as in Stevenson's book. Even so, Terence Wise was humble enough to suggest that his rules were not definitive, which was rather rare for rule writers at that time!

I especially love the old photos in the book. Airfix ACW plastic figures, train set trees, Airfix Trackside houses, used regardless of their total incongruity to either period or nation. Marvellous!

The rules are, sadly, not. One might expect, given the background of this series of books, that any rules presented would be simple. Not so. By the second half of the 'seventies, wargame rules were getting rather carried away, with layer after layer of complexity, in an attempt to find that elusive Holy Grail of "realism". And Terence Wise's rules follow that trend. OK, they're not the worst, but even so they are still hard work.

Tracking individual casualites for each unit, until one finally reached whatever number was needed to remove a "man" from that unit... Yuck!.. It was all the rage then, but it's a pain in the butt now.

Loads of rules for various weapons, many with tiny differences between them, offered in the mistaken hope that, somewhere in all those tiny details, one would find realism.



Oh, and lots of smoke. Now fair enough, the smoke of battle DID play a part in many clashes, but even now most rules writers can't be bothered with it, and these rules will show a reader why. Clouds of cotton wool scattered around and in front of every unit that fires, visibility blocked, movement through smoke made erratic, it's final direction governed by the roll of a die.

Realistic? Yes, maybe...
Fun? No.

Now my comments are not meant as a pop at Terence Wise. That was just the way most wargame rules were going back then. If my memory serves me well, compared to the Newbury set from the same era, these Airfix ones are simplicity itself.

There & Back Again.

Well, after a gap of many months, and one momentous life-changing decision, the Poacher has returned, albeit in another form.

This blog represents a move away from the topic featured in my previous one, and will concentrate instead on a wonderful pastime that has remained my principal hobby for as long as I can recall: Wargaming.

I wargame with miniatures and boardgames, although circumstances have now seen a drastic reduction in the eras gamed, and armies used. I have also largely moved away from the historical side, now only gaming ACW and Ancients as historical periods.

The rest of my gaming is now centered around totally fictitious clashes in various eras, 18th century Lace Wars, 17th Centry Musket & Pike, Modern Jungle Warfare and a rather fun World War II era game, based on Charles Grant's Battle, where I happily mix various nations' equipment in my two armies, based simply on the notion of whether I like the look of it.

It is a wonderfully liberating experience, freeing oneself from the strait-jacket of a historical perspective. Gone are all the arguments, internal and external, about who were the good guys and bad guys. Gone are the arguments about the correct colour to paint the tanks and uniforms (in my WW2-era game, one side are Green, the other Brown). Gone are all the worries about the correct OOB for the armies. I make up my own, so I decide if they are correct.

Even with the historical periods that I do play, ACW and Ancients, I use highly stylised and, in the case of ACW, very old-fashioned rules. Purists may well shudder. For Ancients I use Command & Colors: Ancients, the wooden block boardgame designed by Richard Borg, which is fun, fast and furious, and probably not too bad from a historical perspective, if that's important.

My ACW gaming is based around a slightly modified set of Featherstone rules dating from the early 'sixties. Anyone familiar with Games Workshop Fantasy Battles will have no problem with them at all. The figures for the ACW games are old Spencer Smith 30mm plastics, or the newer metal versions, painted in an old-fashioned glossy toy soldier style. These armies are due for serious expansion soon, especially as John Preece (of Flanderkin Serjeant fame), a good gaming friend, passed me a load of wonderful SAE metal figures which have not been available in the range for around 30-40 years.