Wargaming Projects - 3 of 4 - The Present

A Potted History of my Wargaming Projects

Prehistoric; Past; Present; and, Pending

Part 3 - Present Projects: which if not complete (is a project ever complete?) are at least currently being gamed with when I can, for which reason many of these have already been featured on the blog.

This post will be a bit different, as many of my projects which have reached gaming status have already been featured on this blog so many will just have one photo and a link to previous post.

This time I'll go in, more or less, chronological order - fantasy comes last on the basis that it hasn't happened yet.

25mm Ancients (Hinchliffe, with a few Minifigs and Lamming)

I started this army back in 70s and, as discussed under 'pre-historic' projects here, were originally intended as an Alexandrian army but became a generic Successor collection, and the above photo shows all my pike, 250 all told, i.e. just enough for a single syntagma, the smallest tactical unit.

These guys have been used for various versions of 'Ancients' rules by the Wargames Research Group (WRG) and while currently based for the DBx rules series they also get used with 'To the Strongest' (TtS), albeit having to provide the armies for both sides.

The TtS rule-set also encouraged me to make special markers.

The latest use of these troops (here) was for a sort of mash-up of DBM with TtS, i.e. using a grid-based movement system like TtS but DBM for PIP activation and combat.  

Although some further mods will be required to handle recoiling troops (a grid square is too far for a recoil) this is likely to be the way I will continue to use these as the game was quick and fun.

15mm Gladiators (Chariot Miniatures)

A quick filler of a project to make an equally quick game to fill the gaps between bigger games during gaming weekends with friends.  This uses the Ludus Gladiatorius rules and has been featured before on this blog e.g. here.

15mm Normans (Essex Miniatures)

An old project that was originally going to be a First Crusade Army, but not too keen on the Essex Byzantines, I decided to switch it to 1066, but couldn't find an Anglo-Danish and Viking range that I liked.  Luckily my friends have suitable opponents so, while I don't have any opponents for them, they do get used.

15mm Wars of the Roses (Minifigs, Roundway, Peter Pig, et al.)

When DBA first came out, I thought that if you used three armies on each side you would get something like the three Battles that Wars of the Roses armies tended to form up in.  Of course, before I'd finished the armies, many of which I sent off to get painted, DBM came out so I've tended to use those instead, albeit the photo above is from a game using 'The Perfect Captain's' A Crown or Paper - Coat of Steel battle rules. 

These troops get fielded reasonably often, especially in Chit games as described in one of my early posts on Chit Game here.

25mm ECW (Hinchliffe with just the odd Minifig, Warrior or Garrison interloper)

These were mostly Lee Gramson's collection from his now defunct 'Going Back to the English Civil War' blog.  We had corresponded via that blog when he said he wanted to sell the collection as he was moving to Spain, I jumped in the car and drove down to Hythe (IIRC) to pick them up.  My incipient OCD forced me to re-base and re-retouch many of the figures, including: head-swaps; replacing Blu-tack modelled elements with Milliput; adding reins to the horses; replacing swords with steel rod; and, painting new aluminium-foil flags.  The latter was triggered by the kind present of a hand-painted Royal Standard from 'Wellington Man' of the 'Hinton Spieler' blog ...

... which encouraged me to get back into painting flags rather than printing them.

What I was surprised to find during this project, was that I found it much easier to refurbish old figures rather than start from scratch with bare castings, and all this work was done in far less time than I had feared.  I have since added several units to expand the collection further, and Hesilrigge’s Lobsters are the only unit left on my 'To Do' list.  I am pleased to say that these have become one of my favourite collections and get regular use and should be familiar to readers of this blog, like their last post here.

30mm Toy Soldiers (Spencer Smith Miniatures - SSM)

My SSM War of Austrian Succession (WAS) collection, like the ECW collection above, is another of my favourites but unfortunately gets less use than I would like.  I'm also waiting on the new owner of the Spencer Smith moulds to put them back production to complete a few loose ends.

The genesis of this project, inspired by the 'Charge' rule-set, was one of my earliest posts (here) so I won't repeat it here.  Several battle reports are also posted, including a five part series on a refight of the Batte of Mollwitz (here).

15mm 1745 Jacobite (Essex Miniatures plus the odd Freikorps)

This project was started after reading a blog on adapting DBA for the '45 Jacobite Rebellion, and seeing the very nice 15mm Essex highlander sculpts.  It stalled a bit when I found that the rules didn't give a very good game but the project was rejuvenated (and re-based!) by the use of Sam Mustafa's 'Maurice' rules for the '45 on the 'Shrine of Sadness' blog.  

They don't get a lot of use and I think this post is the only time they've featured on the blog. 

6mm Napoleonics (Heroics & Ros, with some Adler artillery)

When these came out in the 70s, they were the ideal answer for students short of cash, space and time to paint.  A group of us all picked an army, and I chose the Prussians (post 1808) and now have three 'brigades' (a Prussian brigade was the equivalent of other nations' divisions) each in its own magnetic storage box like the 'East Prussian Brigade' shown below.

Unfortunately, the problem with everyone doing a different army became apparent when the guy with the French emigrated after Uni leaving lots of allies with no enemies so I also started to put together some French.  I now have four French divisions based on Reille's Corps at Quatre Bras plus Kellerman's entire cavalry corps - at a figure ratio of 1:12 for infantry and 1:15 for cavalry.

Better still new wargaming colleagues have built Austrian, Bavarian and French forces one, even built some sculpted terrain for Waterloo.

The rules for these games have typically been home-grown, based on many others, but recently we've been getting good games using Neil Thomas' 'Napoleonic Wargame Rules' (NTNWR) - the latest being here, and it's likely that, with a few mods, we'll stick with these for a bit.

20mm Vintage Naps (Hinton Hunt, Alberken, DK, etc. - mostly copies I fear)

This project is entirely down to bloggers like 'The Hinton Spieler', 'Hinton Hunt Vintage Wargame Figures' and others who seduced me with the charm (yes, I know it's subjective) of glossy vintage 20mm Napoleonics.

I have a long way to go to get anywhere near completing the planned armies, and the number of unpainted castings in the loft is a bit disconcerting, but at least I've now done enough for a game, the last being here.

28mm Old West Gunfights (Guernsey Foundry)

This project was originally built for use with 'The Rules With No Name' by Bryan Ansell, a free download from Wargames Foundry who now produce these figures.  They have also benefitted from being one of the few projects for which I've actually put together a decent amount of terrain - in this case a scratch-built township.

Nowadays, they tend to be used with the Too Fat Lardies 'What a Cowboy' rules, but have so far only made a single appearance on the blog here.

 

1:2400 Russo-Japanese Naval (Panzerschiffe)

Inspired by a campaign system by David Manley published in both Miniature Wargames (MW) and Wargames Illustrated (WI), this project proved very quick to complete with resin ships from Panzerschiffe.  The entire campaign as played has been posted in four parts: Intro; Part 1; Part 2; and, Part 4.

Wings of War (Commercial 1:1444 WW1) 

Not much to say here, as it's a complete game system produced commercially, requiring no modelling or painting so hardly a 'project'.

20mm WW2 Normandy (FAA, SHQ, MMS, et al)

This project originated with an article entitled 'BOCAGE ‘44' by Andrew Grainger in WI#15 with rules for fighting an Infantry platoon in Normandy.  I was drawn to this by the way troops were more often pinned by fire rather than killed or wounded.  For this I put together an infantry company of three platoons (at about 80% strength) and a troop of tanks (3 Cromwells & 1 Firefly).  I then ran games as a 'Dungeon Master' with players commanding a platoon troop and working together to achieve an objective against a motley collection of Germans.  I as umpire would roll to see if any enemy were present every time players exposed themselves to a new line of sight - the games had a real sense of jeopardy.

But then along came Chain of Command (CoC) and the collection is now used almost exclusively for that.

1/1200 WW2 Fletcher Pratt Naval (Airfix)

Although they haven't been used for some time now, I still consider this project active, but it requires a church hall or similar to play.  These very old rules, that had predicted the demise of the Graf Spee if she met a group of cruisers are very simple but give really convincing results.  At my last club we fought every action of the Bismarck's short career and got an almost identical result to history in every case.  Unfortunately, there's a lack of 1:1200 kits, I had to kit-bash an HMS Prince of Wales to make a Rodney ...

... and getting up and down from the floor plays havoc with my knees so, I'm not sure these will get run out again - shame.

 

28mm LotR Breaking of the Fellowship (Games Workshop)

A lovely quick project that allowed me to game with Games Workshop's (GW) delightful Lord of the Rings figure range - I wanted to paint some figures but didn't want to build armies.  I designed a game to just represent the breaking of the Fellowship from when Frodo has fled from Boromir who tried to take the Ring, until he departs, leaving his companions behind, to take on the quest to Mordor by himself or, hopefully, with Samwise.

The use of playing cards for a very simple movement and combat system was stolen from a Three Musketeers participation game I saw at a convention, and the 'hidden movement' system I read about somewhere so long ago I don't recall where.  This was all described here.

28mm LotR Dragon Rampant (Games Workshop)

This project was really just an expansion of the Fellowship project - see above.  I had been picking up cheap GW LotR figures from eBay for a while with view to doing different scenarios when I encountered the Dragon Rampant rule-set.  This fired me up to send off the stored plastic to Fernando Enterprises for painting as I knew I'd never spare the time from my historical projects for this.  The end result, some fun games of Dragon Rampant like that here.

Well, that's all for this instalment of the potted history of my wargaming projects past, present and future, the previous instalment can be found here.

Wargaming Projects - 2 of 4 - The Past

A Potted History of my Wargaming Projects - part 2 of 4

Prehistoric; Past; Present; and, Pending

Part 2 - Past Projects: in no particular order, that were either pending or in play but have since been sold or passed on to others.

Among my late friend's Seleucid army that I inherited (see earlier post here), were a few 25mm Garrison Hoplites.

As I have a 'thing' for old-school gaming and figures, this started me off acquiring more figures that could make up a couple of small forces.  But then the big ECW project[1] came along and I realised these were never going to reach the table so they were sold off on eBay - I still feel some pangs of regret over this - these are just two of the half dozen lots I sold off:

Another Ancients project that bit the dust around this time was my 6mm Seleucid army[2] using Heroics and Ros figures.  This was given to a friend who also had a 6mm ancient army so I do still the get odd game with these figures, so no regrets here.  And these photos are from one of those games, with my ex-figures attacking an Indian fortress ...

... and breaking in!

While I'm not fan of the prevalence of skirmish gaming which seems to be pushing classic battle gaming aside, I have always done some skirmish gaming.  One set I was particularly fond of was this set of Samurai rules.

While I started a few Citadel Samurai for this ... 

... I quickly abandoned them for 25mm Dark Ages[3] figures by Citadel and Essex figures, with Huscarls, Thegns and Fyrd replacing Samurai, Chugen and Ashigaru.  These fell victim to the down-sizing of the last move and disappeared into the abyss that is eBay.

My tinkering with 15mm Thirty Years War (TYW) using Freikorps figures never got beyond a handful of units that were eventually sold to another friend and long-time gaming opponent - so like my 6mm Ancients (above) I still get to play with these now and again.

Another fleeting dalliance with Freikorps was with their 15mm Texan War of Independence range.  This didn't get beyond a dozen Mexican infantry, a few Texican skirmishers and some personality figures.

My 15mm Old Glory Seven Years War (SYW) project, Prussians and Austrians, was an altogether more serious affair.  This was an attempt to branch out into a different period at a time when I didn't have the spare time to paint anything myself.  So, I went with a pro-painter and all went well to start with.  

Unfortunately, after receiving one batch of cavalry I asked for a different shade to be used for horses' hooves in future batches and the painter promptly decided he was not going to paint any more for me.  I tried a couple of other painters but they just didn't match well enough to suit me (did I mention I have incipient OCD?) and the collection was consigned to the loft, only to go in the 2022 down-sizing episode.  All in one big lot together with my SYW OSPREYs.

Another project that fell casualty to my fussiness over painting was my long enduring desire to do Pony Wars in 15mm.  I have been around this buoy several times, but the last and most recent was with Blue Moon's 'War Paint' range and Fernando Enterprise's painting service - see below.

This was the best Fernando said they could do with these (sample) figures, so we called it quits and the Pony Wars project was once again still born.  I have tried other painters since but they have taken one look at the Blue Moon castings and declined to try.  

As you will have gathered, I can be quite fussy when it comes to figure matching, and this extends to the sculpts as well as the painting.  This has kiboshed two attempts to get into the Colonial period with 15mm Zulus, first with Naismith which I painted but then the figures went out of production (OOP) which brought that to a halt.

Then with Old Glory, where the bulk orders didn't match the quality of the initial samples ordered from a pro-painter.

The Colonial period seems to have a jinx on me, as another abandoned project, again when the figure line went OOP, was Ral Partha's 25mm Sudan range, albeit very small 25mm by modern standards.  

It's possible that the American Civil War (ACW) is another jinx.  I was much taken with the sculpting of Mike's Models 15mm ACW range.  Having bought several packs I found, as expected, that they painted up beautifully with a minimum of effort - just blocked in colours and a quick black wash (Tamiya Smoke) which picked up the sculpting really well.  Unfortunately, Mike's was taken over shortly after that and this range seems to have been lost for ever.  I can't find any photos of these, so I'll move on to my naval aspirations.

Naval gaming has always appealed because of the simplicity of the 'terrain' required and after toying with some ancient galleys, passed on to friend, I tried some 1/1200 ACW Naval gaming. Riverine warfare unfortunately demands more terrain than gaming on the high seas, and I found the games didn't do it for me.  So, my small flotilla, including fire rafts, all with removable smoke to signify when alight or with steam up, went in the great clear-out of '22.

My next foray onto the ocean wave was inspired by this delightful book by P Dunn.

And this time it was with 1/1000 Houston's Ships, for a fictional 'colonial contest' naval campaign between forces of a Gallic and Teutonic flavour.  And the curse struck yet again, this manufacturer went 'OOP'.

In parallel, and in the background of these naval calamities, was my desire to get into the age of sail, again stimulated by an old rule set.

With a vague idea of what I wanted the games to look like I had been bought lots of kits, mostly Airfix's HMS, but also HMS Shannon and kits some by others e.g. Heller, Pyro, Lindberg, Glencoe, etc.  

The plan was to modify them as described in this old article from the Airfix Magazine.

This not only proved a lot more difficult than I thought but I was also unhappy with the end result as the tumblehome was all wrong.  Buying all I need before experimenting whether something will work, or not, seems a common point of failure for my 'projects'.  Anyway, these kits have also now been sold on.

A more successful project, was my WW2 Convoy collection, inspired by yet another book, this time more a set of mechanics than rules.

For this I used GHQ 1/2400 for escorts and U-boats, 1/3000 merchant ships from Navwar and 1/1200 aircraft by Skytrex.

This was played on hex sheets, and gave a very interesting game, the tension of not knowing where the U-boats were, trying to locate them, and then drop your depth charges to best effect was a real challenge.  Unfortunately, my opponents only ever wanted to play as U-boat commanders as that was a lot less work, and the game fell into disuse.  Why I let this go in the '22 down-sizing, I don't know as it took up little space and would be good to run at the club I now belong to.

Not conventional naval gaming, but a good segue back to world of figures, was my Hornblower phase.  This really just consisted of acquiring and painting some 15mm Minifigs and in the end went nowhere other than out the door.

This acquisition of figures that I just 'liked' also saw me return to Hinchliffe 25mm Napoleonics with some Peninsular Dragoons and Guerrillas, the latter much modified.

My guerillas did at least get on the table ... 

... for "The 95th Rifles in the Peninsula [sic.] War (1813)" scenario from Don Featherstone's book, Skirmish Wargaming.

But that was not enough to see them safely through '22.

And a couple of odds 'n' ends to finish with.

First a WW2 aerial wargame with 1/350 planes by, the long since defunct, Helmet Miniatures.  This used a set of rules called 'MiG Alley' in an article in Wargames Illustrated issue 54 - this is not the same as the commercial set now available with the same name.  I modified the rules for WW2 and centred the game around the Luftwaffe attempting to stop a formation of B-17s defended by USAAF fighters.   

This game worked well, the B-17s were not player driven and just flew across the table and shot at anything that came near.  The players were either Luftwaffe fighter pilots only concerned with stopping the bombers, or USAAF fighter pilots similarly focused on the bombers getting through.  This meant the game was not just a turning contest between fighters as the USAAF often had to break off as another threat to the bombers appeared. 

These also went in the great down-sizing, and I really regret letting them go.

I have plans to re-do this, but that will have to wait for the last episode in this series of posts.

And finally, my 10mm Kallistra Wildling Army (Game of Thrones) for the fantasy rule variant of DBA, 'Hordes of the Things'.  I completed all the interesting units for this: mammoths, giants, some cavalry; and even Varamyr Sixskins on a Polar Bear with three wolves, and a shadowcat (all by Eureka IIRC).  But I never got round to the warbands of warriors and these have joined a friend's collection but have seen little use since.

I'm sure I haven't covered everything but this is more than enough to illustrate how badly my butterfly has led me down so many dead-ends.

Notes:

[1] These will be featured in the 'Present' part of this series of posts.

[2] Why I keep doing Hellenistic armies is an interesting question as I find pike armies rather a staid gaming experience, but clearly there is some deeper need within me for such.

[3] Or, Early Medieval, as we are now supposed to call it - so mundane!