I am a bad man

Hello, my name is Melvyn and I've been bad. I've neglected this blog for nearly a year. It's not really my fault. Life got int the way. There are only so many hours in the day, and I've got more responsibility at work, as well as now coaching rugby twice a week. All this eats into gaming and painting time, reducing my ability to get anything done, let alone update the blog.

So what have I done? On the plus side I've managed to get several regiments of SYW Spencer Smiths painted. I've based them for Black powder (4 castings on a 40x40 base) which I played for the first time this week. I did it originally thinking it would be perfect for the British grenadier or Kreigkunst sets of rules but never got round to playing them and eventually sold them on eBay!

I'm also interested in the Bolt action rules, although I'm worried they might just become WW2 40k given the podcasts etc I've heard. I want to game ww2 in 28mm, but havent found a set of company sized rules yet. I did wonder about IABSM, but i'm not sure how my sons (my main opponents) will deal with not being able to move all their units every turn. When we played black powder, Tom (11) seemed to be ok with the concept of issuing orders to get troops to move, but this might have something to do with the fact that I rolled far more blunders than he did. One of these required a brigade to take 2 moves to the rear, promptly removing them from the board!!

My wargames collection is in a state of flux as well. As we are having work done on the house, they are all packed away and relatively inacessable. It's made me realise that I've lost interest in some periods and scales. I have decided to get rid of my 28mm Napoleonics as I've never used them. Even the beautiful plastic sculpts from the Perrys and Victorix have not rekindled this era. I think the problem is that this period screams out for massed figures which I just cannot manage in 28mm, given that even when the building work is done the most I'll have to game on is a 6x8 table. At the back of my mind is the thought of going to 15mm, but I've tried this before (all be it with 6mm) and lost interest in the shear numbers of figures needed. Perhaps when the Plastic Soldier Company releases their 15mm plastic napoleonics then I'll come back to the era, but we'll wait and see.

oops

I've just realised that i've left the blog alone since january! This is primarily since work has been hectic and together with my MSc studies, free time has been limited. Since this blog was meant to be about my wargaming, if I don't game I don't post.
I have been painting and now have a new warband for Saga of skraelings which i could use for Muskets and Tomahawks which interests me more.

Is it really 6 months since I Posted?

it seems only yesterday that I was updating my tales of gaming woe. However six whole months have passed. Why the big gap, well things at work are really busy as I've just taken more education on. Now I have to design and run a whole module for the final year undergrads, & on top of that I've started my masters so that has severely cut into gaming time. I have managed to have a couple of games of 40K with the boy (losing them all of course). All this down time has allowed me to really reflect on the hobby. I'm definitely a 28mm gamer so have bitten the bullet and sold all my other scales on Ebay. Then I promptly used the money raised to by the new Warlord Games Zulu boxed set. This I justify as an investment as the siege of Rorke's Drift will fit on the kitchen table and is a firm favourite with the boy (if he sees the film once more I think he will be in it).

Crusade (Penarth) is at the end of the month, so I'm saving my money till then. I thinnk the main purchases will be Cold War Russians/Warsaw Pact for Force on Force, and I may see what deals Warlord are offering for Hail caesar armies. Hopefully once the next essay is in I can spend more time painting etc.

PS - having said I had no time last year, I just worked out that I painted over 800 28mm castings in 2011, what's more surprising that this is MORE THAN I BOUGHT!!!!! The Lead mountain is shrinking at last, time to go shopping then.

Gaming again!

I managed to get some time the other week to go to my LFPGS with the boy. This time we too k my WW1 troops for a battle through a ruined city. I thought I was going to do ok when I routed his French from one objective with a round of concentrated fire from my Jaegers but then as has happened so many times, some awful roles for morale so the whole of one flank disappear back to Berlin. I thought that I might sneak a victory points win but lost 106-50 (we have our own scoring system based on differences in casualties suffered and inflicted as well as objectives held).

I bought the new D&D 4e red box with the aim of playing it with my two eldest. I have to advise that it is not what I thought it was going to be. The players guide is confusing and is designed to guide you throught he development of one character at a time. I was confused by the end and back in the day I had most of the charts etc memorised. So I've bought the new 4e players handbook and the old 1st edition one from e-bay. I'll see if these make it easier and which version the kids prefer. If they go old school it could mean some more ebay shopping so ......

Going going gone!

So given that this is to be the year of frugal gaming, I've been in the curious position of selling more on e-bay than I've bought, what's more I've usually made a profit! It has to be said that there is something cathartic about admitting to oneself that the plans you had made to game certain periods in certain scales where never going to come to fruition.

I think the epiphany came when I allowed myself to admit that I don't like scales other than 28mm. Although I can see the use of 6mm for moderns or massed combat, I think I can now accept that I'm never going to get someone to game waterloo with me in 6mm as it would take forever whichever set of rules we used. I think that I need to set my sights on not having more troops for each army than I can use in a game that lasts 4 hours. This is an time based on my son's attention span, since in the last 3 years he's been my only opponent (excluding the time he and my brother double teamed me).

So I'll be clearing out a lot of stuff on ebay (search for jenkii3) and who know's you may find a bargain or two.

I just can't win!

Having had some epic fails in 40k against my son, I thought I'd try flames of war with him. We took over two tables at Firestorm Games allowing us to play a megabattle. The scenario was loosely based on Market Garden, with XXX Corps attempting to cross one table to link up with the airborne on the other.

All was going well for the first couple of moves, the Shermans made little impression on the Tigers lurking in wait, and some good shooting from the Stugs allowed the SS Pioneers to overun the Para anti-tank guns. Then my son asked if he could try to place stickie bombs on the Tigers (army socks covered in grease and filled with C4). I thought that that was allowable but would be difficult so said he needed to roll 5+ to get to the tank without being shot, then 6 to attach the bomb. So yet again his dice rolling skills were my undoing, both Tigers dying spectacularly. This triggered morale checks that routed halve my blocking force and so allowed the air and ground troops to link up. Yet another win for Tom, and on my birthday too!

I'll post some more photos below ( or above depending on what blogger lets me do).

A year of frugal gaming

She who must be obeyed has decided that I spend too much on little lead men ( or plastic). This has caused me to put some of the projects I'll never get around too, often bought when they were the new hotness, on ebay. Yes I may actually earn more from the site than I spend this year.

So what am I going to do this year, (yes I realise almost a quarter of the year has gone but hey cut me some slack). I think I'll aim to finish my 19th Century WW1 project (apart from the Austrians), and try to get all my FOW stuff done.

I'm coming to realise that I probably don't like history, as all the projects that have got me thinking in the last couple of months have been for alternative history, especially with the release of Dystopian wars. I thought I could use the main rules for the fleet and air actions, then use my modified WHGW rules to do the land battles at a company level, with the dystopian rules for the large battles (Kursk type stuff anyone). Then I read Harry Turtledove's 'Hitler's War' (WW2 starts in 1938 over the Sudetenland), and before I new it I'd bought a BEF platoon for FOW with thoughts of using Old Glory Dutch as Czechs.

But now I'm reading the Peter Tsouras book disaster at d-day and thinking about trying to game that....

Perhaps I should stop reading for a bit?