The week that was!

I’m amazed at how much thinking and reading I managed to achieve whilst immobilized for three days!

The cause of my immobility was the re-occurrence of a work related back injury, sustained over thirty years ago.

The following is what has occurred in the intervening time within my wargaming World:

DBA with a Twist ‘In depth’

Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to Canberra two weekends ago as planned, due to my back injury.  I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to travel down to catch up with friends and push some lead!

Equally, I was disappointed with the low number of players who attended.  Despite great organisation by David Lawrence, a Canberra stalwart, there were only six players competing this year, about half the number who attended the event last year!

Honours went to Doug Melville, who won the event with his Alexandrian Macedonians, (DBA Bk II/12) sourced from Tin Soldier.  Doug is an excellent player!

Mark Baker took out the Handicap or Magister Militum prize with his bow heavy force from Hatra (DBA Bk II/22 c) and Greg Kelleher achieved the Executor Award, taking five kills in a single battle, using his Asiatic Early Successor army, under Eumenes (DBA Bk II/16d).

Well done!

I note will be good practice for Greg, as no doubt he will be running this army in the campaign to be held at MOAB, later this year.

Little Wars Adelaide

Armed with a newly acquired Qantas voucher due to my cancelled Canberra trip, I have decided to trek to Adelaide, to compete in the DBA campaign, ‘Carthage must be Destroyed’, organized by Marcus Tregenza, as part of the Little Wars convention to be held there on 12 July 2014.

This will represent a number of firsts for me.  I have not previously played in Adelaide, I have not competed in a competition using the DBA 2.2+ variant of the rules, nor have I used a 28mm army in DBA.

At Marcus’s invitation, I have registered my interest to command a Polybian Roman legion (DBA Bk 11/33) from the pool of available loaner armies.  My selection is perhaps unsurprising, govern my election to use the tag ‘Scipio’ on the Fanaticus website.  Yes, delusions of grandeur!

I have downloaded all the material for DBA 2.2+ from the Washington Area De Bellis Antiquitis Gamers (WADBAG) website.  It’s a great resource for DBA gamers.  Marcus has also generously supplied me with a copy of his Quick Reference Sheet for DBA 2.2+.  So I have all that I need for a great weekend!

I’m looking forward to competing and attending at a different gaming venue and having an enjoyable weekend with friends, some of whom, I am yet to meet!

Projects

I started this blog in December 2013, with a mission statement, essentially to motivate myself to reduce my pile of unpainted lead which I have accumulated over thirty years. 

Four months into the challenge and I have not managed to paint as many figures as I had hoped, however I have been able to organize several projects, which for various reasons, I had allowed to stagnate.  Four projects are now on track, but in each case, more has to be done.

It is clear I have to many wargaming interests, which in turn, have generated projects that are incomplete. 

I have no intention of culling my interests/projects.  In fact, to the contrary, I will be expanding into several new areas, primarily 28mm skirmish, using rule sets such as SAGA and Chain of Command.

I already have two SAGA warbands, Anglo Saxon and Normans to be painted, the former, I acquired whilst in the UK in 2012.  Those figures have quite an accumulation of frequent flyer points! 

I also have figures to be painted as several factions in a Very British Civil War environment.  For several years, I have enjoyed reading blogs and forums detailing the ventures of other gamers in this era and am looking forward to getting into it.  I am also thinking of morphing this collection into a Spanish Civil War environment, but this remains in the planning stage.       

Essentially, I need to develop self-discipline to focus upon one project at a time, and keep at it until it is either complete (ie I have two armies or opposing forces painted and based ready for gaming) or I have eliminated all of the unpainted lead I have on hand for that particular project.

The first project to be subject to this new regime will be 15mm Colonials.  

To date, I have based all of the available painted Pathans in my possession.  I have none that are unpainted.  This represents the equivalent, in terms of ‘the Sword and the Flame’ rules, five clans of warriors (ie about 100 figures), led by a Mullah. 

To oppose this warrior horde, I have based the equivalent of a company of two platoons of British Sudanese, manufactured by Essex Miniatures and painted in the 1980s.  These figures are intended for use in the Sudan, but can initially be deployed as proxies for the correctly uniformed British forces which saw action in the North West Frontier.  The proper figures will be purchased at some later time.

The important factor is that once all of the bases have been properly flocked I can start to game with these figures in a campaign.  I can follow the likes of wargaming greats, Featherstone and Gilder, by naming the leaders of the opposing forces and develop a background for the units and give the various encounters I will game solo a context.

I also have painted: 78 Beja and 144 Dervish warriors, of whom 40 are armed with rifles.  Again these figures were sourced from Essex Miniatures and painted in the 1980s.  I have an additional 86 unpainted warriors to be added to this force, together with 21 Dervish warriors mounted on camels and 17 Dervish cavalry.

In terms of the rules, the infantry will initially be organized in three units of Beja warriors, five units of Dervish and four units of Dervish with rifles.  Re-enforcements will provide an additional unit of Beja warriors, and three more Dervish warriors.

These warriors will be supported by two captured artillery pieces and a unit of camel mounted Dervish.

I’ve ordered 300 20mm MDF bases from Back 2 Base IX in South Australia, so the first stage will be re-basing 222 15mm figures.  Then on to painting and basing the remainder!   

By mid July, I want to have painted the 104 15mm figures including 38 mounted and based 346 figures. 

The next task will be to base and paint any British stragglers I have, roughly a further hundred including a small Egyptian contingent.  This force will comprise artillery, a small party of naval brigade, camel corps and cavalry.

The completion of these forces will mean I will be able to plan and game another campaign, this one much larger to be contested in the Sudan.                      

Muskets and Tomahawks

Whilst mining Mt Neverpaint, another term I use for repacking the plastic tubs in which I store my unpainted toy soldiers, two Mondays ago, I came across a box containing twenty six 15mm painted Native Americans, and seven Rogers’ Rangers, all manufactured by Essex Miniatures, together with a beautifully executed and well researched camp, I purchased off eBay years ago from Barry Scarlett.

Barry is one of the best scratch builders of model terrain in Australia.

As has happened a lot in my wargaming, a foray into the French and Indian Wars stagnated for the want of a reasonable set of rules providing for skirmish play reflective of the various raids the Indian Nations engaged in during this period.  Representatives from the Indian Nations fought for both the British, and the French during this conflict, whilst also settling blood feuds amongst themselves. 

Initially, the figures had been painted and individually based to allow play with ‘Warfare in the Age of Reason’, as allies/enemies for my French Seven Years War figures.  I found the rules unsuitable for the level of action I wanted to recreate on the table.  Additionally, the bases were unstable due to their size (i.e. 10mm square) and I found moving, in excess of thirty individually based figures, representing a large warband of irregulars very tedious, especially when these figures would often fall over during the process.

After some consideration, I thought these figures would work, rebased on 25mm diameter MDF circles, for use with the rule set ‘Muskets and Tomahawks’.  Why did I select this size base?  Simple, I had purchased a large order from Back-2-Base-IX, as part of my SAGA project, so as these were on hand that was the size I used.  On reflection, perhaps 20mm diameter bases might have been preferable.

As I lacked a copy of these rules I placed an order with the great people at War and Peace Games the next day together with a pack of cards necessary to play the game. I also ordered one of all of the 15mm MDF buildings, manufactured by 4ground, which could be used in the French and Indian Wars.  This gives me a blockhouse and a settlers’ hamlet, consisting of three buildings of varying size.

Within in three days of determining the new direction of this project I had my order delivered! 

War and Peace Games charge a flat rate of $A7.50 postage within Australia.  I checked my order and actual postage was twice that amount and the parcel was extremely well packed at no additional cost!  I highly recommend this trader!

After a quick read of the rules, I determined I had sufficient figures to field an Indian Nation force of 200 points.  The force consists of two leaders or Sachems, one unit of bloodthirsty braves armed with muskets, three units of six warriors, two more armed with muskets, while the other are armed with spears and tomahawks.  

I already have some wooden snake type fences, again courtesy of Barry’s talents.   I’ll need to make about the same amount of dry wall fence sections and a palisade to surround the blockhouse, I might used some sections of metal palisade I sourced from Eureka miniatures years ago! 

I’ve re-based the Indian village (the long house can be used as a DBA camp for my Eastern American Indians).  I will need to build a palisade for this camp as well.

The photograph above depicts a long house.  It has been based on a 80mm square base. 

The photograph above deposits two dome huts and a large drum.  All three have been based on 40mm square bases.

The 4ground buildings are now assembled and the blockhouse is on a base of 80mm square.  More work has to be done to the building's roof.    

When based, the three houses depicted below will have various additions such as barrels, woodpiles and livestock added to the bases.  A ploughed field and another with crops will also be added.

The standard of detail in all 4ground buildings are outstanding, though there are some detail which requires subsequent rectification.

 

Above is an example of the three buildings pack.  It is the smallest, depicted rear right in the group photograph.  It covers an area of 100mm by 80mm. 

After a more detailed read through of the rules and some painting of twenty French regulars, I’ll be ready for my first solo game!

Afghans!

"...When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

An' the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,

An' go to your Gawd like a soldier...'.

Extract from 'Young British Soldier', written by Rudyard Kipling, circa 1886.

---

One book, which influenced my wargaming is ‘Solo Wargaming’, written by the late Donald Featherstone and published in 1973.

I think I bought it in 1974.  Through its pages, I became entranced by Mr Featherstone’s approach to gaming.  The black and white grainy photographs, showing his table set up with figures depicting actions on the North West Frontier: the relief column being formed up and then the punitive attack on the hilltop village captured my imagination.  I wanted to create my own wargames journal, just as he had done!

Well that was the objective – unfortunately the reality was that I did a lot of planning and very little gaming!

I did manage, in the mid 1990s, to purchase a quantity of painted 15mm Pathan or Pashtun warriors from the now closed Tin Soldier store in Sydney’s CBD.  The talented Peter Callan professionally painted the figures to a very high standard.  There are two different manufacturers of the figures, half the cavalry were made by Minifigs, the other half of the cavalry and the infantry were by an unknown manufacturer, however given the style of the sculpts, these could have been made by Mike’s Models.

These figures remained on unrealistic, green flocked balsa wood bases, the infantry in groups of three, the cavalry singularly based since purchase.

I came against this group in a box last week and my mind went back to all those unrealised plans I had made forty years ago!

Perhaps, it was the memory of Mr Featherstone’s recent death in September 2013, but I decided that these warriors would be fielded in a wargame, depicting various actions, both real and imaginary, during the British involvement in Afghanistan in 1897!

These two photographs, to the left and below, depict a test base I did for the Pathan infantry.  The warrior is armed with a jezail and is hiding in anticipation of the approaching British forces.  The stones are painted unused kitty litter and fine sand was glued to the 20mm base with PVA glue.

The next photograph depicts a test base for a mounted

warrior, armed with a tulwar.  He also has a jezail slung

across his back.  The same basing technique was used here

as for the infantry, but the base size was increased to 25mm.

The final photograph depicts the tribe's Mullah or leader. 

The opposing British force, the organisation of which will be based upon the Malakand Field Force will be sourced most likely from Blue Moon Miniatures, due to its extensive range of figures, and the quality of the sculpts.  Additionally, I will be sourcing some Woodland Indian villagers, settlers and British regulars for the French and Indian Wars project from this supplier, so I will make it one large order to reduce the cost of postage from the US. 

As for rules, based upon the interest it has maintained since first being published in 1979, it is difficult to go past the timeless ‘The Sword and the Flame’ written by Larry V Brom for Colonial encounters. I already own the 20^th Anniversary set, published in 1999. 

Based on these rules, I can field a Pathan tribe, when based, consisting of a mounted Mullah and his staff of two mounted figures, 61 infantry figures, all to be individually based on 20mm circles, a clan of 20 cavalry figures, individually based on 25mm bases (now complete) and one muzzle loading artillery piece, together logistic support comprising of three camels.

I also have an unassembled Airfix Fort Sahara, referred to by Mr Featherstone in his book, as being prefect, with slight modification for use as a hill fort.  It will get assembled and painted in the interim ready for a garrison.

Another project back on track and being progressed!