Cabinette Wars: 25mm Napoleonic

A Potted History of my Wargaming Projects

Prehistoric, Past, Present, and Pending

A commenter on a previous post remarked on how many armies I have. While not as many as some gamers I know, when I thought about it, it came to more than I realised. So, I decided to list them all for the record and own the shame.

To keep these posts to a manageable size I've broken them done into four categories which will each get their own post, namely: Prehistoric; Past; Present; and, Pending.

Part 1 - Prehistoric Projects: that date back to the origins of my wargaming (with rules as opposed to just playing with toy soldiers, e.g. my Britain's multi-part Wars of the Roses and ACW 54mm figures - now sold).

Like most gamers of a similar vintage, I started with Airfix 1/72 kits and moved on to HO/OO plastic figures, or 1/76 as they're now marketed. I have no photographic record of any of these as they were all thrown away when I went to Uni' as I felt such childish past-times should be left behind[1]. Imagine my anguish when I discovered the wargaming society at the Freshers' Squash, AND they had Airfix armies as well as metal ones - D;oh!

My first 'proper' metal wargame figures were Hinchliffe 25mm Napoleonic's, my Dad buying me half a dozen to get me started on what became a small King's German Legion force all based for the Airfix rules by Bruce Quarrie and consisting of: 4x Line Battalions, 1x Light Battalion, 1x Horse and 1x Foot Artillery Battery (each having a gun, crew, limber and team); 1x Regiment of Hussars; ½x Regiment of Light Dragoons; and, a few command figures. All now sold and being shown some love by another. As these were only finally sold off recently[2], still in their original Humbrol gloss enamel paint-jobs, I have a few photos of these

My next army, started back at Uni in the 70's, was another 25mm Hinchliffe collection, only this time it was Ancients. WRG Ancients was the big thing in the Wargaming Society. With thoughts of emulating one of my heroes, I opted to start putting together an Alexandrian Macedonian army, and by this time I was using Humbrol matt enamels. As it failed to replicate the success of the original it soon morphed into a more generic Hellenistic Successor army. This one, is however, still going strong so will appear in a later post on Present projects.

Perhaps the inspiration to move on to a Successor army was influenced by my best friend from Uni who had a Seleucid army. Sadly, he passed away a few years ago but left his army to me, as it was what had brought us together[3].

But while I still have, and still use, these figures, they are now the oldest I have, so I thought I would feature them here, in the beginning so to speak.

They have some really nice painted shield designs.

All I did with these figures when I got them was repair ant wear and tear and re-base them to match my army. Also, he had a half-painted general that I finished off and added a shield to the base to have a go at the shield pattern and blend him in with the army.

I did repaint the tents from his camp; they were just painted as plain canvas so, I thought they should be jazzed up a bit.

This army also came in for some recent attention, when I expanded the pike blocks. The original army (not based to DBA/M) were about a dozen figures too few to make 2-element wide blocks so I bought some painted Hinchliffe Successor pike of eBay and re-touched them to match the existing pike; effectively doubling the number of pikes that could be fielded - covered in an earlier post here.

The other really early project was a collection of 6mm Napoleonic's by Heroics and Ros, nice and cheap and easy to paint in those days when I didn't need to wear glasses. But, like my Hinchliffe Ancients these are still in use and will be covered under Present Projects.

And finally, back in the day, I did buy and paint some Warhammer Fantasy figures to placate my Tolkien urges, but they have been sold off and I can find no photographic record of them anywhere.

Next in this series will be a litany of abandoned projects, often only with a few figures being painted - the lure of the pretty figure range.

Notes:

[1] The fact that my parents were moving house at the same time and obviously didn't want too much of my junk cluttering their new home, also played its part in this.

[2] They were let go, because I was let go and needed to move and down-size, but they hadn't seen a table-top for many a year before that.

[3] I'd heard about someone with an impressive army in the same hall of residence so I tracked him down and knocked on his door. I was somewhat taken aback when a 6' 5¾" giant opened the door, but, right from the start, we just hit it off; he is still sorely missed.

The anniversary of my blog that is, not the Wargames Holiday Centre.

[Pre-Cabinette Archives c.1980s]

It's a year since I started my blog so, as a sort of commemoration, I thought I'd post the photos of my visit to the Wargame Holiday Centre back in the 80s when it was still up near Scarborough and being run by Peter Gilder. The photos have already featured on the Peter Gilder tribute site but I rather fancied putting them up on my blog as well.

Back then it was all film, no digital, so I've had to scan in the printed photos that I still have. The quality isn't great, but it's in line with what we were used to seeing in the magazines of the time. But nonetheless, classic units like these Saxon Cuirassiers still look pretty good to me.

I went with a couple of friends to do a 'Leipzig Weekend'; well, if you're going to go big, that's surely the one to do. The table was probably the same dimensions as that featured in Peter's magazine articles[1] called 'Let's Fight Leipzig' which included the map shown below (north is at the top).

The first of my photos was taken looking east along the upper / northern edge of the table.

And then one looking east along the bottom / southern edge of the table.

This final one showing some of the players (luckily old-fashioned cameras didn't do selfies), is taken from the middle, looking north-east towards the deployment area of the Army of Silesia.

Comparing this with the map, shows that Peter was either using different 3-foot square terrain boards or had assembled them differently from the map. Also, the gap in the western edge was the same width all the way, but there was a spare terrain board that could be used to fill it if required - leaving the French players surrounded in the middle.

IIRC I was in charge of Marmont's VI Corps and Latour-Maubourg's I Cavalry Corps. Unfortunately, I was assigned the north-east corner to defend. This meant was that I was advancing out of a corner and into a terrible cross-fire.

My cavalry corps, suffered terribly, as units were destroyed or driven back through those following up behind, which prevented them from advancing while being interpenetrated. And so was born the amazing 'disappearing cavalry corps'!

Into the Jaws of Death ...

Into the Mouth of Hell ...

... rode the six ~~hundred~~!

Clearly someone had blundered, or had I just been set up? Never mind, aside from being disappointed by my cavalry's poor showing I remember it as a closely fought action. In fact, I recall it being a fairly bloody draw.

And, as I can recall not much more at this remove, I'll just post some more photos without comment.