Gangs of Rome - the Patrons

With Episode 1 of our Gangs of Rome campaign coming up this weekend, I knew that sooner or later I'd need miniatures to represent the patrons of our two gangs. The way the campaign is organised, there's always the possibility that one side or the other may have to deploy their patron on the table during an episode.

What luck, then, that issue 462 of Wargames Illustrated, out this week, provides just the minis I need! As a promo for a gladiatorial combat game called Blood on the Sands, WI this month includes a cut-down version of the rules and a sprue of suitable figures from Wargames Atlantic. 

The sprue provides the parts to build two gladiators (a murillo and a thraex) as well as these two:

They're intended to represent a pair of lanistae (owners/trainers of gladiators) and as that pretty neatly reflects the day job of our two gang-patrons, it was a no-brainer to pick up a copy.

They've had a fairly rushed paint job because I wanted them ready for the weekend. The basing is designed to work in either the arena or on the streets of the city.

-o0o-

Because a rule of the campaign is that player characters don't appear if their player is unavailable, I needed a few more gang members. A quick rebase of the servi castrensi from my Polybian Roman army gave me some useful additions:

Secundinus the Assassin

Plinius, who thinks the blood
of a snake can cure poison

Titus, who prefers camel meat
to pork or chicken

Maximinus, who only uses
arrows with barbed heads

Iovianus, born half a world away

and Balbus, who once killed
his landlord with the leg of a chair

Sharp Practice terrain sources

On Friday Baroness Counterpane and I were at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire to see our daughter give a talk about the history of the estate's private fire brigade. 

The talk, a ticketed affair, took place in the Harley Gallery and while we were waiting for it to start, my eye was taken by a seventeenth century oil painting.

Apparently 'View of Antwerp' has been attributed to a number of artists including the elder Breughel and Peter Paul Rubens. What caught my eye, though, was the foreground detail.

When building terrain for northern European Sharp Practice games this kind of thing is gold dust.

This one, for example, has a nice old cottage with washing drying on the grass outside, a field of enormous cabbages, and a couple of fence lines overgrown with long grass...

While this one has a wonderfully tumbledown fence...

...as well as a nice little chapel.

Finally this one shows an interestingly wide street as well as a nice selection of outbuildings.  

Worth noting by the way that at least one of the horses towing the wagon in that last section is hitched centrally. That's going to be pretty typical. It's my belief that the country lane we're familiar with today, with its central strip of grass between two channels of bare earth, is an artefact of the internal combustion engine. It shouldn't be seen in horse-and-musket-era or earlier terrain.

Gangs of Rome - The Campaign

Chatting with a few fellow gamers after the installation of the new Lord Mayor of Sheffield (congratulations Andy), I was reminded that people are keen to do some more Gangs of Rome.  This prompted me to finalise the structure of our campaign. 

I wanted something that be low-maintenance, time-limited and capable to progressing when enough of us could get together to play, rather than needing all participants every time a new episode took place. Ideally, players who aren't able to get to Sheffield to sit around the table should also be able to contribute. This is what I came up with.

Spurius Verdius and Tarquinius Caerulius are competing big-wigs in Rome at the time of Emperor Vespasian. They are deadly rivals whose followers contend to control the neighbourhoods where their territories overlap. This contention is often violent in nature, at least until the Vigiles Urbani turn up to restore order!

Our campaign will consist of a maximum of six episodes (in addition to The Brawl scenario that some of us played last Christmas, which counts as Episode Zero). Each gang has a list of six missions they must complete over the course of the campaign. Each mission may be selected once. Note that these lists are not the same for both gangs. The Gang with the highest total of Victory Points after six episodes is victorious in the campaign.

Each player in the campaign is associated with either the Spurius Verdius (Green) Gang or the Tarquinius Caerulius (Blue) Gang. In addition, each player has a personal character that only they will play. If that player is not present, their character will be replaced by another, either the personal character of another player or a non-player character to be run by the rest the gang’s players.

Choosing a Scenario

Before each episode of the campaign, the umpire will ask the players of each gang to agree which of their six listed missions they wish to carry out.

At that point, Victory Points earned in previous games may be spent to influence events:

Victory Points spent in this way are lost to the Gang’s running total.

The umpire will work out the details of the scenario taking account of the missions chosen by the two Gangs. Where the chosen missions clash, for example if one side has chosen a mission that can only take place at night but the other has chosen a daytime scenario, priority will be given to the side that has spent most Victory Points to influence events in this episode.

Status Quo Ante

Following The Brawl, the Blue Gang have six Victory Points while the Greens have only a single point! The Greens are going to have to work hard to catch up.

Finally, a Fairey Delta 2

Following shortly on the recent Jet Provost model, I've completed a kit that's suffered a very chequered past.

The Fairey Delta 2 was a British research aircraft from the 1950s. In 1956 test pilot Peter Twiss flew one at 1,132 mph, beating the previous world speed record by over 300 mph! Information learned from the aircraft would later inform the design of Concorde's delta wing plan.

I received the Dora Wings 1/72 scale model of the Delta 2 as a Christmas present in 2024. It looked like a challenging model to build as it included photo-etched brass parts, something I'd never encountered before.

Nevertheless I made a start early in 2025 and got as far as completing the main airframe before disaster struck. The front part of the canopy was meant to slot into a cut-out in the sides of the fuselage. However, it was at best a tight fit: as I forced it into place there was a sudden 'click' and a piece of plastic flew off past my head!  

On further investigation it emerged that the windscreen had split in two and half of it was now missing. Failing to find that half I sadly consigned the remains of the kit to its box and accepted that I would probably never finish the Fairey.

But then, a few weeks ago whist clearing the workbench to make room for a large painting job, I came across a small piece of clear plastic. Yes, it was the missing piece of canopy! My Fairey Delta would never be a perfect model but it could at least be finished.

It's far from perfect; I'm not happy with the attachment of the etched-brass wing fences and the long nose probe that survived initial construction and storage got broken in the process of applying the decals! It is moulded as part of the fuselage rather than as a separate part that could be fitted towards the end of the build. I just knew I'd not get through without breaking it but I'm furious to have got so close to the end before doing so!

In posing the thing for these photographs I've also noticed some stray bits of decal that have somehow ended up near the tail. They'll have to come off or be painted over!

Things to watch out for if you're building this beast:

• the ill-fitting canopy,
• that delicate nose probe (I never even attempted the tiny, etched-brass airflow probes that should be fixed to it), and
• for some schemes a yellow stripe decal needs to be added below the nose before you attach the lower aerial and pitot tube.

All in all I don't think the Dora Wings kit is bad; it's just better suited to a more experienced modeller than I am currently. If I saw one going cheap (unlikely) I'd probably pick it up and model one of the preserved aircraft taking advantage of the option to depict the nose in its Concorde-style drooped configuration. 

Gabr-el-Ahmar

Regulars here will be aware that a month ago I managed to get my 3D printer working again. By way of celebrating the return to productivity I decided to start some WW2 Western Desert armies in 1/300th scale. The resulting burst of creativity means that four weeks later I've not only completed Italian and British forces and accompanying terrain, I've also managed to play a first scenario!

On Thursday evening Alex and I took advantage of a table booked at Outpost Games in Sheffield to play Frank Chadwick's Gabr-el-Ahmar scenario.

Gabr-el-Ahmar, the Red Tomb, my own 
3D design (let me know if you want the STL file)

The scenario appears in the Benghazi Handicap sourcebook for Chadwick's own Command Decision rules. I amended it to fit with the TacWWII rules and was pleased to get this chance to give it a first run-out.

At TacWWII's 1cm = 40m ground scale the table is just three feet square. I set it up on my 6'x4' desert cloth folded in half. I have some left-over Venetian blind slats cut to various lengths to mark out the small tables often required by TacWWII. Our tiny models got some odd looks throughout the evening from the surrounding Warhammer players!

Alex took charge of the Italians.

This left me with the Brits. Gabr-el-Ahmar is an odd scenario for the British player; you're out-numbered badly by the Italians. Your few 2-pdr-armed A9 Cruiser tanks out-gun the Italian M11/39s but they're in mixed companies with Light Tanks Mk VI that are in turn out-gunned by the Italians!

Alex handled the Italian force very well, bringing his infantry forward to occupy the ridge beside the tomb and concentrating his tanks where their firepower could do most good.

I managed to stop a couple of M11/39 companies with long-range fire...

... but then decided to throw the British forward to get the Light Tanks' heavy machine guns into effective range. 

The resulting debacle saw 6th Royal Tank Regiment failing a battalion morale test at which point I conceded the battle.

If I recall correctly we had the action completed in a couple of hours of play, which I think was pretty good considering Alex hadn't played TacWWII before and I was explaining things as we went along. 

Alex kindly agreed that he'd give the rules another try. He's keen to try them with later war tanks so next time we're going to try using Bob Mackenzie's "Attack towards Valkenswaard" scenario. I think Alex should be able carry off an impression of Michael Caine in A Bridge Too Far!

Jet Provost

The latest addition to my collection of small jet aircraft in 1/72nd scale is this beastie from Airfix.

It's a Hunting Percival Jet Provost T.4 painted as an aircraft at the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell in 1962.

The model is built straight from the kit using one of the two decal sets provided. The only change I've made is to paint in the red and green navigation lights on the tips of the wing tanks. In the Airfix instructions these are shown as black.

It's an enjoyable kit to build and goes together with only minimal filling and sanding required. The hardest part of the build was the sweeping curve of orange paint under the nose. I couldn't find a way to mask it so I had to handpaint it. I'm pretty happy with how it worked out.

I think I might get another of these kits. The other paint scheme also has a tricky curved demarcation line to paint so I might invest in a pack of Xtradecal after-market decals to finish it.

Operations near Morris, Mississippi

Word recently reached Stately Counterpane Manor that our good friend Ron had been rather poorly but was now keen to get back into the social whirl. So knowing his predilection for the American Civil War I volunteered to put on a Sharp Practice game.

The scenario was loosely based on operations by the Union's Mississippi Marine Brigade in 1864. In August of that year a Mississippi Ram Fleet flotilla was operating along its namesake river with orders to intercept civilian river traffic:

During the operation, the quartermaster boat Fairchild, lagging behind the fleet, came under fire from near the riverside village of Austin. The fleet returned and dispatched mounted and infantry elements of the Mississippi Marine Brigade to deal with the enemy forces. The result was a rather poorly handled engagement near Beaver Dam Lake that involved the marines accidentally trapping a Confederate cavalry force between their infantry and mounted elements!

I used the outline of the Austin engagement to create a smaller game more suited to Sharp Practice. Ron had five Groups of Confederate cavalry, three of them mounted and two operating on foot as skirmishers. The skirmishers had been given all of the force's available long arms and so were treated as armed with muskets. The horsemen had pistols and operated using the Sam Colt's Equalisers rule. The Confederate plan was that they could ambush any Union troops sent to capture the (actually recently withdrawn) artillery that had fired on the flotilla.

The field of battle from the south - the Duck River is mostly off-table to the left but you
can see the hill from which Confederate artillery yesterday bombarded the ram fleet.

And Union troops there were, mostly entering from the northern end of the field. Mark commanded two groups of MMB infantry with a single group of skirmishers attached. The latter were armed with breech-loading carbines, which yet again proved their worth in this game. 

Also available on the Union side were two groups of cavalry but these would arrive at the southern end of the table with their time and place of arrival somewhat randomised.

The Confederates had two usable Deployment Points and a third, dummy one on the riverside hill. At the start of the game Ron chose to deploy two-thirds of his cavalry in the woods to the left of the advancing Union boys.

The Union advance - Confederate cavalry start to appear in 
further clump of trees

I'm afraid this was a mistake by Ron; there was little room to manoeuvre and the presence of fencing along the road would make a powerful charge difficult.

However, the Union forces were commanded by Mark and he can always be relied upon to get the wrong end of a random event. Major Wilbur Warnefield slipped and fell and would spend an inordinate amount of time getting up and dusting off his uniform!

This did, however, allow time for Captain Falke's Union cavalry to complete their ride around to the southern end of the field

Ron also took advantage of Warnefield's delay by deploying two groups of dismounted cavalry, causing some casualties to the Union line.

On the Union left the dismounted skirmishers advanced up the road to oppose Ron's horsemen...

and then took up a position behind the snake-rail fence.

Meanwhile Falke's cavalry advanced. Mark was keen to keep his options open - should he charge the enemy skirmishers in the open or engage the cavalry in the rather cramped space alongside the road?  In the end, the opportunity to put in a proper cavalry charge won out and blue-clad riders began accelerating towards the Confederate skirmish line.

The result was slaughter. Both Confederate groups were routed and out of the battle. Confederate Force Morale dropped from ten to six in an instant!

Another random event saw the cavalry discovering that the ground was rougher than they thought (perhaps slick with Rebel blood?) so I had a chance to deploy one of my specially designed markers.

At this point, as Mark carefully marshalled his dice, we realised that the Union line was firing in an uncontrolled manner.

It would continue to do so for several turns, the men firing mechanically into their own powder smoke despite the presence of their own cavalry to their front. I'm sure some harsh words were exchanged once the cavalry managed to extricate themselves from the position.

On the left, Ron finally managed to manoeuvre his cavalry into position to charge the Union skirmishers but, attacking a defended obstacle and rolling spectacularly poorly, they were forced back with significant losses.

At this point, despite the late arrival of more Confederate cavalry under Sergeant Wilkins...

...with just two points of Force Morale left, Ron ordered a general withdrawal and the Union had won the day!

It was great to get the ACW collection on the table for a game other than Running from Bull Run, lovely to catch up with Ron and Mark, and pleasing that a scenario planned in relative haste worked so smoothly. We must do this more often!