Over at Andreivian Tales...

You can now read the account of the British attack on a ruined fort held by the renegade Turkish officer Iskender Bey at Andreivian Tales.

A Vintage Classic

My mate Mark P bought me a couple of Airfix kits as Christmas presents. This one has just reached completion:

It's the Tank Mk 1 from the Vintage Classics range. It's a 1967 moulding so nearly as old as I am!

The kit comes with a single decal and a painting guide for a vehicle at Fleurs-Courcelette during the Battle of the Somme in September 1916. However, I decided I'd paint mine in an overall grey scheme representing a vehicle prepared for testing at the Lincoln factory earlier in the year.

It's generally not too difficult a kit to build. A little filling and sanding was necessary to hide some of the joins between the armour plates. The biggest problem is attaching the steering trailer to the complex mechanism of springs at the rear of the hull. I think a permanent display base is going to be needed to prevent future breakage.

Joy of Six report

So Joy of Six is behind us for another year and I have to say I enjoyed it despite Sheffield Hallam University being on sauna setting for the day.

The Cold War Commanders Operation Vijay game was a success, I think, with Andy T and Neil M actually running/playing the game and me chatting to punters. Considering that the detailed scenario and the table set up were pretty much improvised on the day, it all worked out very nicely.

I think the Geek Villain mat worked well

An Indian Canberra flies over the victorious
Indian infantry

Other games included a marvellous Nomad assault on Pavis using the Midgard rules put on by author James Morris and pals:

Great fun to see a 6mm, massed-battle version of an action I've gamed in 28mm at skirmish level.

The MaDGamers of Maidenhead and District did a recreation of Alam Halfa, 1942 using the Rapid Fire Reloaded rules. Interestingly their handout says that they used both Baccus 6mm and Heroics & Ros miniatures in the same game. I can only assume this refers to men rather than vehicles as otherwise the scale differences would have been too noticeable.

Again the printed cloth worked well and the game certainly gave the impression of mostly empty desert.

Adjacent to our table were the Ilkley Irregulars, who put on Waterloo using Bloody Big Battles, something that I myself would like to do one day. In fact I bought a copy of the scenario book from them!

It wasn't the prettiest game at the event but the participants were clearly having a great time. I believe Napoleon was successful this time.

Given the very zoomed-out scale it's not so easy to produce lovely-looking terrain for a Bloody Big Battles game but the COGS group from Chesterfield achieved it with their Mons 1914 set up.

And finally among the Bloody Big Battles offerings was Per Broden's Gravelotte/St Privat, 1870.

This was lovely despite ParcelForce losing Per's dedicated game mat and his having to rebuild the battlefield using a borrowed one! 

Another very attractive game was the Siege of Bastogne by James Mitchell and Brendan Dolan. 

It's far from obvious but the table is actually organised on a square grid to support the rules in use, Eisenhower by Sam Mustafa. Very subtly done!

Total Battle Miniatures put on a small but beautifully formed representation of the 18th century Battle of Lobositz.

I thought the river was particularly nicely done.

Two American Civil War battles were represented. At the smaller scale was the Poe's Field portion of the battle of Chickamauga put on by the Three Shires group.

While the Leeds Wargames Club used Pickett's Charge to portray the Champions Hill battle during the Vicksburg campaign.

There were many other games but I didn't manage a comprehensive photo shoot this time I'm afraid.

I greatly enjoyed the day. Peter Berry tells me numbers were down this year but given that it was one of the hottest days of the year, I'm sure many who might have attended on a whim decided there were better ways to spend their time. Certainly for me a refreshing pint at the nearby Rutland Arms was much needed at the end o the day!

Christmas scenario

I'll be running an Andreivia 1918 game this Christmas. Here are some figures that will appear. 

You can learn more on the Andreivian Tales blog here.

Steel Lard 2022

On Saturday fifty-odd wargamers (fifty odd wargamers?) gathered at Patriot Games in Sheffield for the third annual Steel Lard gaming day. We had twelve games in total from across the Too Fat Lardies catalogue. In no particular order:

Sidney Roundwood provided the smallest game with his The Lost Sword of Lord Akiyama. On a table only eighteen inches square, this game used Sid's own When the Last Sword is Drawn - a Lardy-style Samurai skirmish system. As usual with Sid's games, the presentation was excellent:

Thick as a Brick was Jeremy Short's game. Run using an adapted version of Dux Britanniarum, it featured Robin Hood, the Sherrif of Lardingham, Friar Tuck, and the minstrel  Jethro Tull. Jamie really enjoyed this game in the morning and I believe Friar Tuck was sent to meet his maker.

John Savage can always be relied upon to produce a good-looking and immersive game. This time it was The Sands of Shah Wadi Wadi, a Mahdist Revolt-themed game using the Sharp Practice rules with some adaptations to cope with repeating rifles and later-nineteenth-century tactics.

Also run using Sharp Practice was my own A Spy in the Suburbs the development of which you'll have seen documented here over recent months.  That this was the first running of the game with the intended Russian figures was due to the heroics of Richard Phillips, who got off his sickbed to drive them over the Peak District from Staffordshire. Richard, if you were a Hordes of the Things element you'd have a combat factor of +5 and would always count as mounted.

It was a tremendous pleasure to run the game with such enthusiastic players.

In two run-throughs, the French spy was captured by the Russians on the first occasion and managed to escape to the Prussian lines in the second game.

On the next door table I also "ran" A Bridge Too Far Up River, a Woebetides Sharp Practice scenario that had previously seen the light of day at Virtual Lard in July 2020. 

Originally Richard Clarke had been scheduled to run a Chain of Command game but recent health concerns led to him withdrawing. We decided to take advantage of Richard Phillips being semi-available (he and I were going to work together on the Riga game) and have him run a Woebetides Sharp Practice scenario of his own devising.

Unfortunately as we know, Richard P went the way of Richard C when he contracted a nasty gastro-bug from his grandchildren. Fortunately I'd already printed off the player briefings for the old scenario and put enough terrain in the car just in case.

Great honour is due to the allocated players who demonstrated good humour in running their own game as I was inevitably focussed on the more complex Riga game.

Jim Catchpole and Simon Mann in particular seemed to relish the opportunity to get to grips with learning Sharp Practice. Thanks guys!

If Sid's game was the smallest in the venue, Ken (Yarkshire Gamer) Reilly's game was definitely the biggest. Using the less-well-known If the Lord Spares Us First World War set, Ken ran the battle of Um At Tubul from the Mesopotamian campaign. This was a single game run throughout the day and seemed very popular with those involved.

Also in a Middle East setting was Graeme Atkinson's A Box Near Tobruk. This used Chain of Command rules and lovely terrain to simulate an Italian attack on a defensive position near that beleaguered North African city. 

Graeme's expert modelling captured the dry desert so well that it was like watching an episode of SAS: Rogue Heroes. I expected to hear the strains of AC/DC at any moment!

Meanwhile, back in the temperate north, Ken Welsh ran Mission to Croquette - another Sharp Practice game, this time set during the French and Indian Wars. 

I believe this may have been Ken's first time running a game at an event. If so he did a great job!

Alex Sotheran ran Up the Arras: Bloody April 1917. As the name suggests this was a First World War scenario, in this case using the Algy Pulls It Off variant of the Bag The Hun aerial dogfighting rules. 

Unfortunately unphotographed was Tom Davis's Havana Take Your Island. In my defence this game didn't actually involve anything to photograph. Set during the Seven Years War, this was a Kriegspiel - effectively a role-playing game - about British efforts to capture the island of Cuba from the Spanish. Tom spent most of the afternoon running about between multiple tables where different national command teams were based. I've had some really positive feedback on this one.

There were two more games that I'm afraid I didn't get pictures of as they were only run during the morning session and had been put away by the time I finished in Riga.

Charley Walker ran Red Hot Frigate Action off Le Coup de Cheveux, 1795. This was a Kiss Me Hardy game with Charley's really nice French Revolutionary War ships.

Finally, Mike Wilkins ran The Eagle Has Larded - a Chain Of Command game based roughly on the old TV series Allo Allo. Again, I didn't get to see this much but it was great that Mike stepped into the mix late on to allow some of the other games masters to spend some of the day playing rather than refereeing.

As a new venue for Steel Lard, Patriot Games was very well received. The gaming space is pretty much ideal, the in-house café is excellent, and the staff were uniformly terrific. Only the presence of on-site parking could have improved things and as we didn't have that at the previous venue we didn't miss it too much.

In the evening we enjoyed the traditional beer and curry. This may be the subject of work to improve next year's offer but it looks like I may be organising the event again in 2023!

Value for Money 28mm

Of late I've been painting some of the figures I picked up cheaply at my local friendly local games shop (Wargames Emporium in Sheffield).

First up is a small selection of Bavarians. They come from a Victrix command sprue that was cheap because the horse was damaged. I thin they look fine.

Next up is a familiar chap who came from the assorted-bits-for-a-fiver bag I picked up six months ago. In the words of Charles Boyle, "Yippee-ki-ay other buckets"!

And finally, we have this WW1 German officer from the same bag as Mr McClane above. I don't have an obvious use for him. Maybe useful for a Pulp Alley game?

A Village in Andreivia

Tom D came over on Saturday and I ran a small Arc of Fire scenario to introduce him to the rules in preparation for the Crisis Point game in April.

The scenario was a simple one.  It's 1918 and a small Turkish force (four-man HQ, 15-man rifle section, LMG team, and five-man "bomber" team) have to capture an Andreivian village.  The village is held by a small Andreivian army team and, unbeknown to the Turks, a temporarily immobilised Renault FT light tank.

The above pic shows the table from the southern (Turkish) edge. A brick-built warehouse dominates this side of the village but it has only two windows on the south side so it's not readily defensible.  Tom elected to advance to the right of the road, across the recently harvested wheat field and either side of the small copse of trees.

Pretty soon the Turks came under ineffective rifle fire from the back of the warehouse.  The Turks returned fire and were sure they'd achieved some solid hits.  In fact the first fusillade wounded the Andreivian forces commander, effectively ending his involvement in the fight.  The second round of firing from the Turks killed his second in command outright and the Andreivian HQ unit ceased to exist as a fighting unit!

As the Turks closed in on the village I knew that I'd have to move the only remaining Andreivian infantry unit (a six-man rifle section) from the graveyard to the central square if I was to buy time for the tank driver to repair the engine.

The tank driver was reasonably lucky with his TAC rolls.  As the Turks approached the village square they heard an internal combustion engine splutter into life (I was going to say roar into life but come on guys, this is only a Renault FT) and heard the grinding of caterpillar tracks.

The FT managed to get off a shot from its 37mm Puteau cannon.  37mm HE is not very powerful and the commander (the FT has a two-man crew) was firing while the tank was moving.  Even with a densely packed infantry target the shot was ineffective.  It would prove to be the tank's only shot of the game!

As the tank commander tried desperately to reload, a firefight developed across the village square.  The Andreivian infantry scrambled to take what cover they could but they were severely out-numbered and once the Turkish LMG came around onto their flank, their days were numbered.

It came down to race to see if the Andreivian tank could extricate itself from this unsuitable tactical situation before the Turkish bomber team could get close enough to use their grenades against it.

In the end a single Turkish bomber launched two heroic close assaults on the tank but he was unable to prevent it wheezing and clanking its was off along the northern road towards safety.

So that was Tom's first AoF game. The Turks had seized the village to a win for them.  The Andreivians had also met their aim of extracting the tank to safety but the loss of both commander and sergeant in the first few moments of the action took the shine off this achievement.

A fun game. We got done in a leisurely couple of hours and AoF again showed that new players can pick it up within a very short time.