Black Powder 6 Weeks war

This weekend I managed to convince my son to try a game of Black Powder. We used my 6mm APW figures. These are based on 60x45 bases with a mixture of formed infantry with a skirmisher screen. We counted each base as a "standard" unit with each Prussian brigade having 4 bases of line with a jaeger and artillery base attached. The cavalry was in a seperate brigade.
On the Austrian side, each brigade was of 4 bases with attached artillery. There was also a seperate artillery reserve as well as a large cavalry brigade. The scenario was of the prussians advancing to try and command a road junction with the Austrians rushing to prevent it.
I wasn't sure that BP would deal with the age of rifles, but it worked really well. The nature of the rules allows for tinkering so I made the prussian rifles have an extra dice when firing at less than half range to represent the breech loading rifles. The Austrians got an extra dice for every 4 cannon they fire at the same target to represent their preference for massed artillery.
The game flew along and we were able to play 8 brigades a side to a conclusion in 3 hours. The Austrians managed to break 3 prussian brigades through a combination of massed cannon and a well timed cavalry charge.
A really good game.

General update

It seems that it happens every year. I go off to the Featherstone weekend and come back full of enthusiasm for the period we've just played. Couple that with a small amount of cash for my birthday the next week and you get magpie central.

Long time readers (if any) may remember that I had all my stuff in storage but now it has been moved into my new shed/man cave. This has allowed me to really look at what I have and what I need to get useful armies for each scale/era.

It has also allowed me to group projects together so that as the unpainted figures change into actual units the impact on the lead/plastic mountain is more pronounced.

I have mainly been working on 3 projects. Firstly my 28mm ACW. I have decided that since I commanded Rhodes' division at Chancellorsville at the Featherstone weekend, it would make sense to replicate this in my Confederate forces, whilst their Union opposition would be generic. A quick google search showed 30 regiments plus a battery of artillery. Keeping with 20 man units that means 150 bases of 40mmx40mm. I have already done 12 units from boxes I had to hand but there are Zouave units since one of the boxes was the Perry ACW battle box. I might just have to paint some more units and keep the zoaves as a reserve elite regiment.

By sticking with 40x40 bases I can use either Black Powder or Pickett's charge, or even Guns At Gettysburg.

At the same time I am increasing my 10mm Acw units. I have completed the 4 blisters I had for Xmas so have added another 24 stands to each side for F&F, although they could be used for BBB, or on a sabot for Altar of Freedom which I have just got and like the look of. Of course I do have some 2mm Acw which would do for the latter....

The last project is my imaginations SYW. The not-French side has seen the addition of several regiments including the Grenadiers du Roi and Musketeers du Roi, as well as the Grenadiers du Concorde. These are all 20mm soft plastic SYW or AWI figures which I buy from eBay whenever there's a job lot for sale. Each regiment is 8 bases of 12 figure on a 100x40 base which gives a really impressive 800mm frontage for a regiment.

I have 120 28mm Union troops on the painting table and aftet that I might need to change eras for a bit but if I just do one more zoave unit and another CSA I will have painted all my existing 28mm acw figures and then can plan my next purchases.......

The Featherstone Weekend

My annual trip to Basingstoke has come and gone. This year the battle was Chancellorsville from the ACW. I was Jackson so had command of most of the Ocnfederate 2nd Corps. The scenario was sneaky, a holding force attracts the bluebellies attention then a flanking force bursts from the wood. Or rather didn't. There were simply too many troops to deploy sensibly.
Most of 2nd Corps started off in woods, so was limited to small moves unless in column of march. This meant quicker movement but made the troops very fragile if fired upon. There was also a large log jam at the edge of the woods as the columns chaged to line formation. This doubled their frontage, so made advancing difficult. Regiments had to wait for the ones in front to be shattered before taking their place.
The Union managed to place a unit in a building that held up the whole right flank for nearly the duration of the battle. So this and the delay in the woods gave the union commanders lots of time to reorganise to the flank threat, meaning that the Confederate troops had an almost WW1 experience advancing into entrenched (behind stone walls and picket fences) troops with lots of Artillery.
A union battery of 5 guns managed to get into a flanking position. The enfilading fire on lines of troops was devistating, and many units were broken without firing a shot themselves.
The rules we used were Black Powder with the ACW supplement. I think we saw the best and the worst of the rules during the weekend. If you are lucky then your troops can make a sweeping advance of up to 36", but then can't fire. So the furthest you can move and still shoot is 12", which makes moving over 6' of table a long process. The ability to recover wounds means that units hang around for ever unless you direct the fire of a whole front on them, and then they vaporise with little chance of mitigation. Artillery fire is devastating or ineffective, and has no real effect on morale.
The worst rule in my opinion is the behaviour of "broken" or "whipped" units. One of my brigades had been badly shot up and so became broken. They retired over 12" to the edge of the woods where they reformed line. This line was of 3 regimenta and 2 cannon facing down the road out of the wood, so a fairly strong defensive position, which even a weak unit could have held, even by being a potential threat.
Under Black Powder, broken units must maintain 12" seperation from all enemy units. So my opponant used this rule to force my units back, just by moving closer to them. This exposed the flank of my Corps to his massed cannon and carnage ensued.
I understand the need to denote demoralised and defeated troops, as well as the concept of moving the game along to a conclusion. I think it would have been better to devise some house rule that allowed the broken units to trickle back to the front, as this is what happened historically. Perhaps coming back at half strength after so many turns out of firing range and without additional casualties.
The weekend was fun, but that was due to the company and the beautiful figures I had access to. The game itself won't be logged as one of my better ones. By lunch time on the Sunday my only purpose was to roll dice to see how many casualties I took, with no way of countering them. It was probably a result of my generalship and lack of intimate knowledge of the rules, but when huge numbers of my troops broke, with no real warning, then the only one having fun was the opposing general who looked to maximise my discomfort at every step.

Still, it was great to catch up with the gang. Even though we tend to see each other only once a year, the friendship is still there. Traditions such as the sheep and penguin jokes continue, and this years best dressed was Henry Hyde with his art deco bovver boots. Steve Dix was the most sporting General, and was awarded a model of Longstreet.

Next year is Colonials with Fancy Dress and Pith Helmets. Can't wait!

Year end stats

It is unlikely that I'll get to do much more painting before the fat man comes so here are the stats for the year:

2mm 2 armies for the Acw
6mm 25 bases for my 6ww project.
10mm 304 figures for my acw and crimean armies
15mm 844 figures and 18 AFV including 2 whole armies for the french wars of religion.
20mm 359 figures and 6 AFV
28mm 173 figures and 2 AFV
40k 73 figures.

So overall not a bad year. Still not lead neutral but starting to make dents in the mountain.
My plan for the new year is to only buy stuff if it allows me to complete a project. So command units for the multiple plastic sets are ok but NO NEW PERIODS.
I'm having a wobble about scale, again. The new shed is built but is  unlikely to allow me to have anything bigger than a 6x4   table. This means big skirmishes or packed tables only. My recent experiments with 10mm and 15mm have made me think that this might be the way to go.
What worries me is moving all the sruff back into the shed from storage and realising there isn't room for it all.

An interesting discovery.

I was clearing out the hard drive of my laptop as an excuse not to do any work on my dissertation, and found this article which I had written hoping that Henry Hyde might publish it if he needed to fill space in MWWBG. Sadly not long after Henry emailed back saying to keep taking the pills, and then before I could edit it, Henry was no longer associated with the magazine.
So in a extraordinary piece of vanity here it is in it's glory. After all, if you can't be vain on a blog, what's the point?

Wargaming my Way - Losing Frequently!

In the Beginning

Each one of us reading this magazine will have his or her own back story as to how and why they war-game. I grew up in the eighties, and followed the usual path of reading the Lord of the Rings to discovering that you could “play” an Elf in a game called Dungeons and Dragons. This led me to discover my innate megalomania, I needed a sword +4, +10 vs Dragons, and my friend Brian the DM was foolish enough to allow me to get one. This led to the first example of what I have now decided must be a law of nature, Melvyn’s first law if you will. No matter what I do, and no matter how easy it should be to achieve a positive outcome, if it involves dice Melvyn will fail. 100% guaranteed. Hence the death of my character, Fleetwood Plantagenet (see I told you I was a megalomaniac) in single combat to a Red Dragon. This was followed by the death of my Judge to the Dark Judges, and my smuggler to the dreaded space lice of Blaart. My love affair with role playing was waining, but I still longed to do something with Elves, Goblins etc. As I went to Senior School, the D&D group split up and I discovered rugby. This was a sport that I have continued to enjoy although these days it’s as a coach. Rather surprisingly it was a hot bed of nerds, and I was introduced to the idea of wargaming by one of the team who had an older brother with a couple of ancients armies. At the time we thought they were brilliant, even though they were plastic and the paints were Humbral enamels with a gloss varnish. The rules must have been some version of WRG ancients but might just have been the Dead Sea Scrolls for all they meant to us.  Sadly the friend moved away and rugby took over. 

By the time I was 14 or so, I still had an interest but hadn’t played with figures for a while. As part of the school socialisation programme (I went to an all boys school and they were worried for the future of the human race), all the children in the Town spent one week in a central “business experience”. Essentially the “team” would be given a brief by a real company to develop, and the team would split up to pursue different aspects of product design. The week I went the company wanted us to work on a board game with miniatures they were calling “Quest and Heroes”. By the end of the week I’d convinced them to call it Heroquest and had suggested the design of the games master screen. It was only later that I realised how much my youthful enthusiasm had saved them on a professional designer, but still had a thrill when my parents bought me the game for Christmas that year.

I dabbled briefly with Warhammer but couldn’t afford the figures on my pocket money so decided to get a Saturday job to supplement my burgeoning Elf habit. This had two effects. Firstly I bought several boxes of the Citadel regiment sets (Elves, dwarves and goblins in the same box if anyone remembers them), and secondly it caused me to stop playing with toy soldiers as I discovered that the young ladies with whom I worked in the shoe shop didn’t really think it was cool. However, I still kept hand in by painting my brother’s squats for Rogue Trader, which he then sold to buy a guitar. As with most gamers of my generation, I stopped whilst at university and only really came back to wargaming when my wife suggested `I needed a hobby’. Whether she was concerned for my mental health or just wanted me out of the way, I’ll never know. So my second wargaming period started with a visit to Crusade 1998, a visit which has become an annual trip, now with both my sons. 

The second era

I think if it hadn’t been for the boys, I might have remained a collector rather than a gamer. In my mind I needed a complete army before I could even think of gaming, and given that I have what Neil Schuck calls a “magpie nature”, I ended up with several part complete armies for several periods but no opposing armies. Tom (now 14), said he wanted to play with dad’s toys, so I had to finish at least one army. The first game we ever had was a Seven Years duff up between British and Prussians (I know, I know) using the dice from a board game and rules based on my garbled memories of 40K. Even though we’ve moved on to other periods including 40k (Sorry Mr Clarke), those homegrown rules have stuck. I think one of my proudest moments was when Tom explained the rules to his younger brother. We were in a local gaming store, and a “proper gamer” overheard. 

‘Oh, that’s 40K but you’ve got it wrong’ says helpful gamer. Tom looked him in the eye and replied ‘These are my Dad’s rules and they’re better than 40k’. Helpful gamer retreats with a smile, and leaves Melvyn to be beaten again. I will state for the record that I have never ever thrown a game so the boys can win, I don’t need to. When Tom hits 21 I’m taking him to Vagus so I  can retire on the profits. 

Having two sons is also an excuse to try new periods and scales. When my ever observant wife hands me the latest package, I can reply that these are the new Warperrylord figures that I though the boys might like. Over the years we have gamed WW1 with Warhammer Historical rules, AWI with Spencer Smiths, WW2 with 15mm figures and Rapid Fire rules. There can’t be a bit of the Market Garden Campaign we haven’t done using British Paras and Heer, and there’s always a Tiger tank. Plus lots and lots of 40k,(Sorry again Mr Clarke). I think we’re probably using 2nd/3rd edition rules and very few of the ‘fluff’ rules but still have a lot of fun. I think that it’s this sense of making it up as we go along and by negotiating that is why I’ve never joined a club or done a tournament. I was always worried that I’d hear that I was ‘doing it wrong’, and that I’d not enjoy it anymore.

Painting and the Lead/plastic Mountain

I realised a while ago that whilst I like painting I’m never going to be much good at it, and the only way I’d do three colours was if one of them was a dip. However, all of the figures in the pictures accompanying this article are painted by me, and I’m happy with how they look. I will now utter heresy. I don’t care if they have the wrong buttons or facings, they are my toys to play with and I’ll paint them how I want, thank you very much. I might even confess to having played with unpainted figures from time to time! I know, I’ll get my coat, now in a minute.  The point is, that I just want to get big armies on the table, so readily accepted Mr Berry’s mantra of painting the unit, not the figure, and applied it to all my figures. 

I have painted and sold, and painted and sold several armies now. On occasion it has been the same army that I regretted selling so got again only for it to remain in the pile for several years then be converted to paypal balance for the latest trend. My current kick is for all things 19th Century. This has manifested itself as Spencer Smiths and Perry/Warlord plastics for the 100 days Campaign, based for “In the Grand Manner”, together with Perry plastics for the ACW Eastern theatre and Spencer Smiths for the Western, and  finally 6mm Baccus for the 6 weeks War. Not forgetting the 40mm forces for “Sharp Practice” in the Peninsular, some of whom used to belong to a certain podcaster from Birmingham.  Yet at the same time I have managed to achieve something I never thought I would. I have A FINISHED ARMY! Admittedly it’s in 15mm and could use some more heavy infantry but I have managed to paint all the packs I bought. The same cannot be said for the Persians I got to oppose them. 

Each year I keep a tally of what I’ve bought, what I’ve painted and what I’ve sold. It is a vain attempt to keep me lead neutral, and fails every year. However it acts as a chronicle of projects past, whilst keeping encouraged that my output is such that one day I might actually have reduced the mountain to zero. Of course at that point I’ll die but it will have been worth it. Although my wife shakes her head every time I enthuse about a new period and/or scale, she is still glad I didn’t take up golf.  

The Third Age

It was a fortunate coincidence that at around the time I decided that I was happy in how my hobby was going, I discovered the “old school wargaming movement” championed by a certain magazine with a bright red cover. This led to my youngest son getting a regiment of Spencer Smith’s for Christmas painted by Santa (or perhaps a fat bloke without a beard) as the Royal WELCH regiment of course.  At the same time I stumbled upon the existence of the podcast and as a result of this I entered in email conversations with Henry and Neil, and was extremely lucky to be a part of the first Featherstone Memorial Weekend. It is not an overstatement that this led to the third part of my wargaming life, the part where I game with alleged grown-ups (Mr Freeth, I’m looking at you). Although a serious wargame, that Featherstone weekend was full of laughter, awful dice rolls and the making of several new and lasting friendships. All weekend I charged Heth’s division at the Federals, up and down a hill, never achieving a breakthrough but it didn’t matter. I was having fun with a capital F. The second year was Arnhem, and I was Colonel Frost on the bridge, as well as the Polish para’s on the other side. I was shot to pieces but managed to immobilise a Tiger with a grenade in a greasy sock, so left a very happy man. This year I achieved the impossible, I overturned Melvyn’s first law and won. Not the battle, don’t be daft, but the most sporting General. I have never been so proud as when Henry handed me the trophy (ok, the kids’ births may have come close if the wife asks). So what is wargaming my way? Easy- lose, lose,and lose again but always have fun, otherwise what’s the point?

Moving stuff

I am about to move my wargaming stuff back out of storage and into the new mancave/shed.
Not being able to access most of my collection has made me really think about what I want to do with my hobby.
Even with the new mancave the largest table I'll have regular access to is 6x4. This means that Waterloo in 28mm in a no go. For that kind of megalomania I'll have to wait for my trips to the Wargames Holiday Centre (hello Mr Freeth).
I'm moving more and more towards less than15mm for everything except skirmishes.
This could mean a second big ebay sell off. I think as I restock the shed, a stock take is in order. So watch this space, interesting times are approaching

Latest work

The 15mm WW2 American units have made it across the painting table. They are all winter units in greatcoats so essentially have been drybrushed, washed and highlighted. The thing that took the longest was the bases. They needed 2-3 drybrushes with progressively lighter grey to give me the right melting snow look I needed. As the entire point was to develop units for the Bulge, they have been worth the effort. I have lots of Shermans in my XXX Corps army, and I have deliberately left off decals that would prevent me switching them from UK to US ownership. I'm sure someone will point out that they're the wrong colour green for one or the other, but I don't care. Since they are all basecoated in Vallejo Nato green and then washed in green or brown ink, they are meant to look generic. After all, a sherman is a sherman is a sherman.

Most of my hobby stuff is in storage after the shed collapsed, so I am limited to what I can do. For example, I've just done a load of 10mm ACW but have realised that the 1'x3/4 bases I was using for F&F are in the storage unit and right at the back. So I've moved on to some Imaginations stuff. I have 300 20mm SYW Austrians, and at the moment I'm experimenting with colour schemes. One of the nations represents Prussia, but I don't want to follow Austrian colour schemes as the whole point of imaginations is to be as wacky as you want. I'm toying with the idea of Bavarian Blue coats with pink facings and white breeches for the first regiment. They will be the La Reine's Regiment de Fru Fru, commanded by his lordship Le Baron du M'Oncle, who once left his pen somewhere he can't remember.

Eventually these two nations will be joined by one based on AWI British and US Militiamen. I'm doing all this in 20mm plastics, and buying units when I see a likely job lot on ebay. Although set in the Horse and Musket period, I might bring in some Napoleonics, especially for cavalry and artillery since there are few sets of these for the SYW/AWI period, meaning I may have to pay full price for them. Alternatively I could pad them out with a few 20mm metals.