On the workbench (March)

Following my last post on "Eking out the supplies" here's an update along with some other productions from March.

First up is a second PVC board off-cut recycled as a paved village base with a 20mm Russian para for scale.

An even smaller piece of the board has provided this little vignette of a cockerel on a dung heap next to a brick wall. The wall is from foam-core with the paper layers removed. The bird was, I suspect, from the old Airfix Wagon Train set; I acquired a number of elements from that set as part of a mixed second-hand lot many years ago.

This latter piece can be used on its own or alongside the previous one.

And here they are serving their intended purpose with one of my old Middle Eastern buildings...

And finally for now, here are some Andreivian road signs identifying the villages (and the routes to the airport) in the game coming up in a couple of weeks' time.

Bases from left-over MDF pieces, signs from cardboard and bits of paperclip! They should help the players remember which houses on the table correspond to which village on their scenario maps.

Eking out the supplies

When I was gainfully employed I had access to an on-site print shop that produced a large amount of public information material printed onto expanded PVC board. I managed to blag several quite large "off-cuts" that were otherwise unwanted and they make great bases for wargaming models. Much easier to work with than MDF.

Now that I'm retired I'm having to eke out the remaining supply. I've even gone as far as recycling the base of one model I decided not to retain.

This first piece is just such. I'd built a 20mm scale French maison on a hill for my Menton 1940 games but I was never entirely happy with it and it look up an enormous amount of storage space so it's been demolished and all but the base went into the bin.

This offcut from the original base will form a generic village base onto which I can place some Middle Eastern buildings, again in 20mm scale.

The edge was already chamfered and I've engraved irregular paving slabs with an old ball-point pen. Some traces of old hot glue and areas of crazy- rather than rectangular paving will add a lived-in look to the thing.

And here's one I made earlier to show what I'm aiming for as the final result.

A small, unbased house should look better on this rather that being plonked straight onto the terrain cloth. While I could have permanently based my Middle Eastern houses, based houses take up more of my valuable storage space. These pieces can just be thrown into an old shoe box with the houses.

Construction (such as it was) used the usual terrain gloop (Quick Drying Polyfilla stained with brown acrylic paint) on the irregular edge with the straight edges kept plain so they can butt up against straight road pieces. 

Speaking of straight road pieces, a couple of long, straight sections of 5mm MDF that came in the packaging of some Ikea furniture seemed too good to throw away so I painted them grey as tarmacked road sections. To link them to my existing glooped-hardboard roads, I created this jointing piece from more of the left-over PVC board.

Crisis Point 2025 - places still available

This year's Crisis Point gaming weekend takes place 12th and 13th April this year at The Old Band Room (aka Dungworth Village Hall), Dungworth, near Sheffield.  This year we have three games all taking place in the 1990s during our fictional Andreivian Civil War.

Battle in the Northern Hills

A multi-player Arc of Fire action that sees the Russian forces moving to destroy Andreivian-Armenian artillery pieces that have been shelling the Russian-occupied Tcherbevan International Airport. Run by Richard Crawley, this game builds on arguments made during a Matrix Game more than a decade ago!

A Hilltop Village

A Force on Force game run by Mark Kniveton. Troops loyal to the Andreivian Government (or at least one faction within it) are attempting to clear an hilltop village of Andreivian-Turk militia. UN Peacekeepers may have something to say about this! <ark's 20mm models are lovely and the game is sure to be visually impressive.

Landing at Mdinar

The 6mm fans among us (Richard Phillips, Andy Taylor and Neil McCusker) will be running a Cold War Commander scenario in which the Russians attempt to reinforce the assets previously landed from the Black Sea Fleet and establish a secure land corridor to supply the airborne troops holding the International Airport. 

If you'd be interested in joining us for what I'm sure will be a splendid weekend's gaming, please contact me by commenting below or by email to crawleystorrs<at>gmail<dot>com

A Warwick! A Warwick!

Baroness Counterpane and I had a couple of days away in historic Warwick over the weekend. Lots of interesting historical stuff to look at. 

I didn't get to visit any of the three regimental museums in the town but Lord Leycester's Hospital is well worth the entry price.

The central courtyard immediately had me thinking of duelling musketeers and cardinal's guards.

In the main building there was a display of muskets, sent up from London so the Brethren (retired soldiers resident in the hospital) could defend themselves from Chartist rioters in the mid nineteenth century. 

There may be a Sharp Practice or What A Cowboy scenario in there somewhere.

Another happy find was Metropolis Vintage Toys. I'm a sucker for an old Matchbox kit and this one caught my eye.

It's not one I remember from my childhood and it turns out that's because it's a 1983 kit. It came out after I'd gone to university and long given up making aircraft kits. Scalemates indicates that this is the original 1983 boxing of the kit. 

I'll have a go at building it using the decals in the box. If they've degraded badly I'm sure I can create a fictional scheme using some from the spares box. Either way the aim is to finish it as a display model but I might have a go at including a rare earth magnet so it can appear in a game using one of my flight stands.  Could be ideal if we ever do a "Sink the German battleship" game in 1/72nd scale!

Napoleonic Prussian officer backgrounds

It's been a while since we first came up with the idea but I'm still hopeful that Richard P and I can get a chance to play some Sharp Practice set during the 1812 French invasion of Russian Livonia (modern Lithuania and Latvia). The idea is for me to play a small Prussian force in French service.

Not this small but you know what I mean

I've said previously that I find the Sharp Practice Officer's Breeding Table a bit too "British" - great for the officers Sharpe encounters in the Peninsula but not quite appropriate for a campaign where all of the characters are Germans or Russians. 

After a little digging through the biographies of Prussian officers I've come up with the following suggestions for adding personal backgrounds to our Sharp Practice Prussian officers. First up we roll 2D6 to see where our officer originates:

Then another 2D6 determines his family background:

Next we can we work out how he first joined the army:

After that we can use the usual Sharp Practice tables to give us the officer's personality traits, skills, physique, looks, and charisma. The exception I would specify is that I don't see any reason to treat all of our officers as "Foreign Johnnies". I'm therefore going to add an additional D6 roll. On a 1-3 the officer's character is rolled on Character Table A and on 4-6 on Character Table G.

I need to determine the character of Leutnant von Hitwunde, the commander of my small Prussian infantry force.

I start off by rolling 10, 6 and 9. So von Hitwunde is from Pomerania; let's say he was born in Rostock. He's the son of a diplomat or courtier so he's not going to be penniless. He joined the army as an officer candidate or Gefreiterkaporal in his current infantry regiment.

A 1D6 roll of 4 indicates that we'll be rolling on the "Foreign Johnnies" table but the following roll of 11 means he's an honourable sort.  He has no particular skills but a 5 on table D means he's a strapping fellow who'll get +1 on tasks requiring strength. 

Finally, rolls of 8 and 2 reveal that he's fair of face but thoroughly dislikable as a character. Given the reputation of the Prussian Army, I'm going to interpret this as meaning he's a rigidly-by-the-book disciplinarian.  It looks like there's a good chance his men will leave him to his fate if he gets knocked out on the battlefield!

I'd appreciate any feedback you'd care to give on these tables. Please drop a comment if you think I've got anything wrong.

Trying out Templars

At Vapnartak I picked up some figures from a new (to me) manufacturer, Templar Wargames. Looking at their website they seem to make quite a range of 28mm figures but it was a small range of 20mm modern types who caught my eye. Note by the way that, contrary to the labels on the packaging, the website is templarwargames.com and not templarwargames.co.uk.

They make a range of modern British troops. These will allow you to tailor your models to your chosen regiment; you can choose to get troops with helmets, berets, Tam-o-Shanters with hackle or Special Forces with a variety of doubtless unofficial headgear. 

By way of opposition for the British Templar make Islamist and African irregular types. Whilst chatting to the owner I picked up a couple of packs of these to see how they would blend in with my Andreivian collection.

Just off the workbench is this Islamist medium mortar team.

Wearing keffiyehs and salwar kameez, they fit nicely with the Elhiem Al-Qaeda models I use as Arab volunteers fighting alongside the Andreivian Turks.

They aren't as nicely proportioned as, say, AB Miniatures; they're a bit dumpy and the hands are rather cartoonish but they fit nicely with Elhiem or the old Dave Allsop-designed Hotspur minis.

The mortar comes as two castings; the mortar tube and the bipod. These are each cast with half of the base and they slot together very neatly to make a good, solid model. I decided to base them all together on a 40mm MDF circle with some sandbags I'd made previously out of left-over Milliput. 

The castings were reasonable; I just had to do a little cleaning where the mould half alignment was not quite perfect.

I also picked up a pack of Africans. I had wanted some guys with AK-47s but in error I grabbed a pack of eight chaps with RPGs. I've since decided one of them would make an excellent Andreivian militia leader. I quite like the idea of a squad- or even platoon-leader who routinely carries an RPG-7.

As you can see, there's nothing particularly African-looking about this chap. In fact I could see him passing very nicely as some kind of southeast Asian.

The pack contained eight figures; four pairs of duplicated poses. Most of them are more obviously African in appearance:

I think I'll paint this chap up as an African volunteer fighting with the Andreivian Turks. I'll probably use one of each pose and put the rest (when painted) on eBay. I don't want to side-track myself into wargaming Angola, Sierra Leone or Somalia; that would defeat the whole point of inventing Andreivia in the first place!

Port Gibson, May 1863

On Saturday Andy and John came over to play the Port Gibson scenario I designed as a reserve game for last year's Steel Lard. 

The scenario covers the initial contact between the pickets of Union and Confederate armies on 1st May 1863. The Union army has just crossed the Mississippi and is about to begin the march that will see it besiege and eventually take Vicksburg. The following text is from a historical marker at the site:

Confederate Gen. Martin E. Green on the afternoon of April 30, 1863, posted his brigade near Magnolia Church, with an outpost here.

Shortly after midnight, Green rode forward to check on his pickets. Reaching this point, the general found Mrs. A.K. Shaifer and the ladies of the house frantically pilling their household effects on a wagon. Green assured the women that there was no need to hurry, since the Yankees couldn't possibly arrive before daybreak. Hardly had Green spoken before there was a crash of musketry -- the pickets had exchanged shots with the Union vanguard, soldiers of the 21st Iowa. The women leaped into the wagon and headed for Port Gibson, while Gen. Green returned to Magnolia Church to alert his troops. The Confederate pickets fell back before the Federal advance.

Our game begins with General Green reassuring Mrs Shaifer just as the first shots ring out.

I briefed John, as the Confederate player, that Green would not step on the toes of the officer commanding the pickets but that he would be available to help if needed. The following scenario rules applied:

• Green could be activated by spending one Flag card,
• If attached to a unit he could rally off 1D6 points of Shock,
• If he rolled a six he would immediately be removed from the game, his staff advising him to withdraw and take command of his brigade,
• He could be voluntarily removed from the game by spending four Command Flags, and
• If wounded or killed he would count as a Level IV Leader for the purposes of the Bad Things Happen roll.

The game began with Andy choosing to place the Union's Deployment Point as close as possible to the Shaifer house. 

John countered this by deploying Sergeant Jeb Bush with one Group of Confederate infantry between the farm and the Union DP.

Andy aggressively deployed two Groups of dismounted Union cavalry under Lt William J Gore and John countered with his own two Groups of skirmishers led by Sgt George W Reagan.

Gore's cavalry were equipped with breech-loading carbines. Their firepower would prove key to the result of the battle. They rapidly started to inflict a fair amount of Shock and casualties on the Confederate skirmishers.

Until a wall of dense smoke grew in front of them (as a result of Tiffin card being drawn immediately after they had fired twice).

Andy had the cavalry step forwards so as to be clear of the smoke but in the process Lt Gore was knocked to the ground.

At this point a small patrol of "Union cavalry" appeared in the sunken lane. 

They would ride through the defile and head off to the east with their true identity not revealed to the players until after the battle. 

John, not having acquired the command flags needed to evacuate General Green, decided to use him to rally off some of the Shock accumulated by Sgt Bush's men in front of the farm. The resulting die roll removed but a single point of shock. Almost immediately after that the Union cavalry inflicted a single kill on Bush's men. The following exchange then occurred:

Umpire:    Roll a D6 to see if a Leader is hit.

John:        One!

Umpire:    OK, one of them is. Roll again; on an odd number it's the General, on an even number it's the sergeant.

John:        Five!

Umpire:    OK, roll again to see if he's knocked out, lightly wounded or killed.

John:        One!

Umpire:    OK, he's dead. Roll for a Bad Thing Happening.

John:        Six!

Umpire:    Hmm, so that's three off your Force Morale bringing it down to... six.

Despite these reverses, John had managed to get the Shaifer family away with their waggon-load of personal belongings and a formation of Confederate infantry under Lt Tim Trump was advancing the threaten the flank of the Union troops in front of the farm.

Trump's men were ideally placed to fire into the flank of Bush's single group of Confederate infantry but yet more unfortunate die rolling by John meant that they didn't spot them through the gloom (I was using my night fighting rules) and instead they wheeled to face the muzzle flashes from the main Union line under Lt Harris Biden. 

Again, though, things didn't go John's way. Shot at by Union infantry and those devastating dismounted cavalry, Trump's men broke and ran carrying the Confederate Force Morale down to zero and handing victory to the Union.

In the end it was a pretty one-sided action over in a little over two hours. John's bad luck hamstrung his efforts at delaying the enemy's advance. His consolations were two. He'd avoided the bear trap of firing on the "Union cavalry"; they were actually a party of senior Confederate officers (prefiguring events at Chancellorsville the following day where Stonewall Jackson would be fatally wounded by his own men). 

He'd also got Mrs Shaifer away safely with her load of household goods. The Union troops had been tasked with securing any wagons or carts they could. The army, recently landed from boats, was sorely short of transport on land.

I was initially of the impression that the scenario was badly unbalanced because of the Union cavalry's ability to fire twice a turn. On further reflection, though, Andy did handle his force very well, aggressively getting to a range where the carbines were murderously effective and concentrating his force where it mattered. John, a less experienced player, was behind the curve as soon General Green stopped that unfortunate Minié ball without a meaningful contribution to keeping the Rebs in the fight.

I think things might easily have gone very differently. I'll probably give the scenario another run out at some point but with some tweaks to the unit stats and briefings.