40mm AWI Grenadiers

 Next off the painting table (also known as the Painting Bureau of Shame) are 12 40mm AWI Grenadiers from Front Rank.

Painted Toy Soldier glossy style as they will eventually be used for playing The Wargame.  At the moment I am building towards Rebels and Patriots.  One more British unit to go and then onto the Americans.

These have probably sat in the Bureau for over a year waiting to be finished.  Just a unit of 12 light infantry left....

Initial Sketches for Dendermonde

 I have made an initial sizing sketch in google Sketchup of how I think the layout of Dendermonde will look.

This shows 3 Bastions, 3 Ravelins, 2 Demi-lunes and the Glacis.  Still not quite sure about the shape of the Bastions.  I am basing my designs on the original Dendermonde article rather than any models of actual Vauban forts.  They might need to be a little less pointed.

 

Ron Miles admiring his city with a bastion in the centre.

 

The model takes up 60" across from table edge to table edge and is 28" deep which means I might need to reduce the depth of the bastions to make them less pointed and thus less deep.

The Glacis shape also needs to be played with.

But it is a good initial start and once I have played with it a little more I will cut out the shapes from Card and see how it looks on the table top.

Neil Thomas ACW

 

 

 

I played a game last week using the ACW rules from the Neil Thomas Introduction to Wargaming book.  I have played a lot of his rules from the other books and really like them but I had never played a game using this book.

The rules are "odd", they are very loosely defined (even for Neil Thomas) and have some quirks that made the game feel rather flat.  You can rally back bases to units if they can't be fired upon.

In practise this means you knock a base off a unit, it fails a moral test and retires behind another unit and gets all its bases back.  It is more likely to retire if Militia and thus more likely to get out of the action and get some bases back (admittedly only on a 6).

It also uses saving throws and possibly we had too much cover in the game but it was really hard to kill a unit!

I have spent some time today rewriting the rules to not use saving throws or base rallying, added things like disorder, etc and added minus to hit factors for cover instead of saves.

The original RAW rules were two pages retyped, the new version is three and a half pages but a lot clearer - the QRS is one page.

I always try to play rules as written for an initial game but even part way into this game both my opponent and I felt they weren't working...

Hopefully we will try these out soon and see how they work.  I'm looking for a set of rules for fairly fast games that let me use all my collection.

I have considered Rank and File which a lot of people like or possibly Field of Battle 3.

I have also just bought the Carmage and Glory II computer moderated rules which I have been thinking about for solo games for a number of years.  Not had chance to look at them yet...

Books and Ospreys for Sale

 

 

 

 I have added a For Sale page here as I am clearing out some books and Ospreys to free up some space. More to be added...

https://littlewars1913.blogspot.com/p/for-sale.html

Gaslands Game

 Ran a game of Gaslands - the post-apocalyptic car racing/destruction game at the Guildford Club on Monday night.  Just two player and trying out my new Gaslands mat and some new scenery including the 3d printed Sentry Guns to play the Arena of Death scenario.

Allowed the cars to respawn and Bob eventually won with 6 kills to 5. 

My funniest kill was when Bob decided to reverse his car so he could use his rockets, misjudged the distance, rammed me with the back of his truck and exploded!

Recreating The Siege of Dendermonde

 The Siege of Dendermonde, which took place in the War of Spanish Succession and saw the allied army besieging the French, was the subject of a famous article by Ron Miles that ran in Battle for Wargamers magazine from December 1976 and covered his reconstruction of the siege by building Dendermonde in his wargames room.

As a 13 year old when this article came out I was fascinated by it and eventually did play out a siege similar to it using 1/300 Heroics and Ros Napoleonics and drawing out the city and siege waorks on a large piece of paper.  I cannot remember which side won in that refight.

Henry Hyde has made the original series of articles available as a scan into a single PDF download here:

https://battlegames.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Siege_of_Dendermonde.pdf

for those people who have never seen it before.

I have always continued to be fascinated by the article over the yers have have dug out the original issues and reread the articles on a number of occasions.

As I now have the time and (at the moment at least) the space I have decided to finally press on with a project to recreate the siege in the article and play through the siege in my own wargames room.

The original article shows the figures that Ron Miles used which were around 1,000 Minifigs S Range figures.  They are not easily available (I know that John Cunningham has been recasting them but I don't believe the range is complete and friends have had no response to enquiries to him) so I have decided to go with the current Minifigs 25mm Marlburian range which is available from Caliver Books.

I am hoping to pick up some older figures (so if anyone has some they no longer want, I am interested) in order to keep the cost down but I have bought some samples to paint up from Caliver.  

These are 3 British Infantry.

Gloss painted (of course) and I have also gone for the 1970s black-lined look - very quickly painted so could with some tidying and I haven't yet decided what to do about faces.

I did consider the Irregular Miniatures 20mm range and did order a battlepack, but decided that true 20mm Marlburians are scarce and that the range doesn't offer some of the extras that I wanted.  Also Minifigs have the "Old School" look that I want to have.

This is intended to be a long term project (probably 1-2 years before it is ready to play) and the first stage with the scenery for the game is to decide on what size to build the town to...

The original article has this map of the town

which, from Ron's suggested measurements of 1" to 10 yards gives a model 10 foot square!  He does say in the article that he realised that was too big and he couldn't fit it in so he planned on building only half the town.

That would imply he built something that was 10' by 5' which he then had to cut down to enable there to be space for the attackers.

I think, looking at the photos and from the description that he cut it after the 3rd bastion on the side wall and produced a model that ran from table edge to table edge.

At his scaling (16" for a bastion, 12" for a wall. and 10" for the moat and 12" for the Glacis) the model would still have been something like 7' long by however deep he made the town.

I can fit a maximum table size of 12' x 6 at a push'  (but 5' wide is really the largest practical size) into my wargames room but for practical reasons I don't want to leave that size table up for a year or so while the game is played out (which is how long Ron Miles took!).

So, I am likely to limit it to 8' x 5' as a maximum and plan to make it in sections so it could be moved out of the way to provide table space for other games.  

The question is going to be can I make it 6-7' wide and 3' deep and then have only 2' for the attacking forces or should I try to give the attackers more space?

Lots of things to think about!

FPW Command Stands

 Next off the "Painting Table of Shame" are some Franco-Prussian Command stands.

They are mostly Foundry - the Mounted figures are North Star Prussian Commanders.