Sunday, 30 December 2018

End of the year sprint to the tape...

   Blimey, that's nearly 2018 done and it's been very, very good for me, hobby wise, and for other personal reasons too. I'll stick with the hobby stuff but I will say that I had the great good fortune to get married in September to a wonderful woman; wonderful in many ways but especially in being so understanding about my hobby. Understanding to such an extent that she has given me something I have desired for a long, long time. No, not that, she has given me a man-cave in our rather wee flat here in Glasgow. 

    We live in a tenement flat, a rather old style type of housing that was designed with bed recesses, to allow for more living space for the average sized families of years gone by. Each flat having two recesses, one for Mum and Dad and the other for the kids!!. And it is in one of these former bed recesses that my man-cave is located. From that description you'll have gathered that I won't be doing any gaming in it nor swinging any cats, for that matter but it does allow me to get all my gaming stuff; armies, terrain, painting area, books etc etc in one area and have my painting stuff  set up permanently!! Which has dented my blogging output somewhat as I have been over indulging in painting



Small but perfect...like Felicity Kendall's
bum used to be, back in the day..the man-cave




     So, now that I have been blessed with a wife AND a man-cave (I will need to give it a much better name than that; Danny has the Dan-cave (or Dannigrad) and Richie has Der Kriegschule Kampfbell so I need to name my man-cave....any suggestions, readers? ..clean ones I mean.... ) what have I been doing in it? Well you may ask: since it's inception in early November I have been as busy as a busy thing that's been given a deadline to meet in the middle of a particularly busy time of the year by a particularly nagging boss. Well, in the last few weeks I have managed to get the following painted up...  

Galloping Major's FIW British Line Infantry. Fantastic figures

Early Imperial Roman Auxiliaries from Warlord Games
for Hail Caesar. Shield decals by Little Big Man 


     Along with some other family members, we booked a holiday cottage for a few days to see in the New Year and I thought I should get some board games organised for them so I purchased a copy of Cluedo Super Sleuth which includes these rather lovely sculpts by Mark Copplestone that cried out to be painted
The usual suspects; Professor Plum, Mrs White, Reverend Green,
Mrs Peacock, Miss Scarlett and Colonel Mustard. Extra pieces are
Hogarth the Butler, Inspector Grey and Sooty the black labrador

In keeping with the season I painted up this Biggles
 type Santa that I purchased at Britcon. Not sure
who produced him but he looks the business

     Lastly, for this post anyway, I received amongst my Chrimbo presents a gift voucher for Static Games, here in Glasgow. Despite it burning a hole in my pocket I kept my cool as I wasn't sure what I wanted to buy. In due course I popped in to have a look at their stock with my mind set on buying a box of Warlords German Infantry (Winter) when I recalled one of the chaps from the Falkirk and District Wargames Club mention on their Facebook page that he had received Dungeon Saga; The Dwarf Kings Quest for his Christmas. I had toyed with the idea of getting this before as I am keen to get my poor, woe begone family playing games so, to cut a long story short...just for a change, I left Static Games eagerly clutching this...


     ...and inside it was all this....With only a few days to go before we set off too Northumberland to usher in the New Year it was nose to the grindstone and thank my lucky stars I had a man cave in which to rub my grubby nose against the grindstone....


     and after burning copious amounts of midnight oil, to my credit, I managed to get these done

The Heros

Skeleton Warriors
Zombie Warriors and plain, old Zombies
...and that was my rush to the finishing tape for 2018. Needless tp say thre's plenty more to come in 2019 including finishing my FIW British force and taking them to A Most Despicable Place in January; too whit Bristol and B.I.G. that's Bristol Independent Gamers to you, which I am looking forward to very much. As well as that, we're looking at another big game of Black Powder in March and I want to create enough terrain for a timber framed village and add plenty of English Civil War non-player characters to it and, last but not least, I have treat myself to an ocean mat from Deep Cut Games so all my Kiss Me Hardy Napoleonic naval stuff has moved up the to do list by several notches. Lots and lots to be getting on with and to be blogging about; that's nearly a year now...you would think I would be getting the hang of it by now...

     Look forward to engaging wih more of you in 2019, thanks to all of you who have taken time out to read my blog and especially those of you good enough to follow it.

All the best for 2019,

pip pip,
The General

Tuesday, 11 December 2018

Trial By Donnybrook

Donnybrook; Fighting With Myself



     I have had the Donnybrook rules by The League Of Augsburg for a couple of years now but have never played them as it is up against some tough competition in my gaming calendar such Bolt Action, Sharp Practice etc and gaming time is a finite thing. Beside that, I didn't have troops for the period the rules cover, Donnybrook being set in the late 17th to mid 18th century; a period I am finding myself more and more interested in and I would love to buy and paint more figures for the period, there being a wealth of fantastic 28mm figures available for that period from the likes of Front Rank, Foundry and Warfare Miniatures which Barry Hilton of the League of Augsburg produces (A wee aside; I have been to Augsburg... I say have been, I got dropped off there whilst I was visiting an ex-girlfriend...she wasn't my ex at the time, and got a lift to Dresden to visit some friends, and never realised the significance of Augsburg. Similarly with Muenster, Paderborn, Dresden, The Hague, Salzburg and many other European towns I have been in in my time in the army and later when I fancied myself as a mountaineer...boy do I kick myself now for my fecklessness; if only I had known...ah well, enough regrets, back to the blog post..where was I? Oh yes....Donnybrook)

     Fortunately, like a lot of rules games producers, the chaps who produced Donnybrook are contactable on social media, Facebook in this case, and I had asked them if the rules would cope with or need much changing to allow them to be played in the era of the Thirty Years and English Civil Wars and Clarence Harrison, the author, replied to my question in the affirmative; in fact he admitted to having used ECW era figures when creating the rules, I'm not sure why, I think that's what he was into at the time. Anyway, the reason I asked this was that I had an ECW New Model Army force languishing in a box in the man-cave, left over from my planned Deep Fried Lard project; Sharply Buffed, an ECW adaptation of Sharp Practice.  I had had to bandon this for personal reasons and had decided to sell the figures on. However, for some reason they, the New Model Army figures hadn't been as tempting a purchase on eBay as my Covenanter force had been and I was stuck with them, like an unloved red haired child.

     So I had decided to try and get some mileage out of them by playing Donnybrook with them. Looking at the unit sizes in Donnybrook it was quickly apparent, even to me, that I had plenty of troops....but they were all painted in similar uniform colours; red!

Doh!! I am such a..ahem..base fellow

     And, more crucially (and this is why they had been languishing in a box)!! I had rebased them all from pennies onto 20mm bases to make them more alluring to buyers on eBay. So now I had to remove them all from the 20mm bases and put them back onto pennies, something I wasn't looking forward to doing. I finally got around to doing that this at the weekend in an effort to avoid the elephant in the room in my man-cave, too whit my FIW British infantry (the force that I should really be focusing on now as my next Sharp Practice event is coming closer!!). In the end it was actually not that difficult to remove the figures from the 20mm bases, I didn't lose any digits nor indeed chop pieces of them which was remarkable. It did take me two whole evenings though....and much cursing, naturally, as these things go better if you swear a lot....

     Once they were firmly glued back onto pennies I then had to repaint some of them to differentiate the forces one from the other. As I was keen on setting my Donnybrook gaming in the Europe of the Thirty Years War period ( I had just recently listened once more to C.V. Wedgewoods fantastic The Thirty Years War on Audible for the second time and am re-listening to The Three Musketeers so I was well up for some Thirty Years War action, let me tell you!!) I tried my TYW Google-fu to get some ideas for unit uniforms but my results were mostly unhelpful.
     Even Warlord Games' Pike and Shotte rulebook and the TYW supplement, the Devils Playground, whilst chock full of eye candy photos of miniatures weren't particularly great for giving ideas on specific units. Truth was I didn't have much of an idea as to which faction I really liked. I just knew I wanted to set my games in the TYW. So I painted one lot in green jackets and left it at that for the moment. I figured once I get some games under my belt I will have a bit better of an idea of who my units and characters are.

...and in the red corner....figures rebased..allow me to let
slip a small yippee
     And so, with the day off from work and The Breakout From The Neerpelt Bridgehead Bolt Action game postponed for the time being I put together two 4-point forces, made up some cards for each force(Donnybrook is a card driven system) using a card deck and some white labels, created some characters for each side...well made up son=me continental sounding names, put together a nice looking 4'x4' table and played the Encounter scenario from the rule book as a means of getting the game system into my rather thick head.

For my own benefit, as I like narrative, here is the small
hamlet of  Coosfeld.... I'll need to work on these foreign
names won't I

Lorenzo's Pikemen. Already I imagining these guys to be hired
soldiers with commanders from various parts of Europe

Verdt's Dragoons. Verdt is the chap with the swiord

The Red Team. Nagel's musketeers, Kapitan Grunehaus, Otto's
musketeers and Schimpf's Pikemen

Alfredo's musketeers, Kapitan Kraus and behind him,
Hubble's dragoons

Battle begins in earnest







end of the line for Kapitan Krauss
     I really enjoyed that, the rules are really straight forward and playing through a game helped me understand them a lot better. Besides being a good rule set it's given my Pike and Shotte era chaps a new lease of life; result!!
     All I need to do now is play a few more games with different units; cavalry, mounted dragoons etc and build up some background for my chaps; who they are fighting for and which side then, who knows, I might even get a game locally against somebody else. 
     And, naturally enough, I will need to get more figures; civilian mobs for a start and some more non player characters; Colonel Bill's do some nice sets including an inn set, a recruiting party etc.
    So with my head full of 17th century Doonybrook gaming froth, I had best pop on my night shirt and night cap, light up a candle, make my way to bed and try and get some sleep, it's terribly late here,

pip pip,
GJ


 

Monday, 10 December 2018

Bolt Action Campaign Market-Garden; The Airlanding Brigade Arrive

"Where The Hell Are We?"

     Apologies for the delay in publishing these batreps; the muse had deserted me for a while (what do you mean you didn't know she ever popped  by?)

      So where the hell are we? Back in Arnhem, that's where the hell we are and we're with the chaps from the Airlanding Brigade this time. The scenario is set around a glider landing away from the designated Landing Zone (LZ) and the platoon on board have to disembark and make their way towards friendly troops. As they attempt to do this, German security patrols are arriving and attempting to stop them.

     Forces. The British Horsa Glider carries a platoon of infantry consisting of platoon HQ; 1st Lieutenant plus one, three 8 man sections and a medic making 5 command dice in all. These all start the game on board the landed glider
     The Germans have six 5 man patrols, each armed with an SMG and four rifles; two squads start the game on the table. On turn 2, another two arrive and then the final two arrive on turn 4. They all arrive on the table at the same point, midway down one or the other of the two long table edges.

     The Objective is simple. The British must get off their designated short table edge by the end of the game. They can only afford to lose one unit whilst doing this. The Germans must stop them. If they do then the British all go into the bag, those that aren't dead.
     The game lasts 4 turns. However, if by the end of turn 4 the British have not got off the table and haven't lost more than one unit then on a dice roll of 1 or 2 the game carries on for two more turns. If not, the British are captured........you can see where this is going, can't you 

      So, with the table quickly rearranged to our mutual satisfaction we played Scenario 18: Where The Hell Are We?

      As the glider bumped and bounced to a halt, 3 Platoon, it's passengers, were thrown forward. Above the cursing and swearing, Lt Amhurst's voice bellowed out "OUT! OUT! All out!" The side door of the glider was thrust open and the platoon, in fairly good order, started disembarking. As it did so, the first enemy shots struck the glider. Bugger, thought Amhurst, as he disembarked and took cover whilst his men started returning fire. He looked around for the other gliders from the battalion and saw none, only trees and figures dashing about beneath them. To no one in particular he said "Where the hell are we?"   
3 Platoon's glider makes a nice , smooth landing....in the wrong place

     Spreading his four rifle men out either side of him, Feldwebel Muller, ordered them to open a rapid fire on the glider. The thing was to hit the enemy within the glider before they had the chance to get out. He swore at his men as the glider's door opened and the Tommies spilled out, returning fire as they did, none of their return fire coming close enough to cause concern. 
     He knelt up and fired a long burst with his MP40 before quickly getting back down into cover. "When I said rapid fire, I meant at the enemy, you idiots!!" His men's response was a fusillade of shots at the enemy soldiers.

The Germans were quickly on the scene
3 Platoon disembark and start fighting back....
...as bullets zip across the field, the platoon medic, Pte
 Pat Fermlie, draws unwarranted attention from the Germans
     Overhead, more gliders passed at height. "We must have come down short of the LZ, sergeant!" shouted Amhurst to his platoon sergeant, Sgt Tate. "We'll need to extract ourselves from this...this pickle and rejoin the battalion" Sgt Tate nodded "We best get a move on then, sir! There's more Jerries joining them lot in the woods".
     Amhurst considered for a few moments then shouted to his platoon "3 Platoon, we will withdraw to the treeline to our left; 2 Section you will give covering fire then join us when we start to fire on the enemy; understood" The section commanders replied in the affirmative then, as 2 Section increased it's rate of fire the remainder peeled off toward the treeline, bullets flying all around... 

2 Section give covering fire...
..whilst the rest of the platoon move
       As a fresh burst of shooting passed worryingly close by, Amhurst threw himself the ground. Bloody hell, that was from the treeline they were heading for. Looking towards the tree he could just make out more Germans firing whilst behind them a couple of trucks had pulled up and more German were disgorged from the backs of these trucks. Bugger, bugger and double bloody bugger! They were trapped "Cease firing, men....CEASE FIRING!!" The men around him stopped shooting, quizzical looks on their faces. A sense of anger and bitterness rose in Amhurst  as he shouted to his men "Lads, I'm sorry but we're surrounded. No point getting ourselves killed for nothing. Cease firing!!........"

     Post Script

     And that, as they say, was that. A simple scenario but difficult but not impossible to achieve for the British as you will need to a) run a lot and b) have some fiendish luck if you need those extra two turns to get your chaps off the table edge which, needless to say, I didn't have (I should have pretended to the Dice Gods that I was rolling to hit with my dice; I would have definitely rolled a 1 or 2 then) as it was my chaps were rounded up and chucked into the chokey in no uncertain terms.

     That aside, it was a good game; a bit different and very thematic. Next up is a patrol mission 


Fighting Patrol 

     Scenario 24 is entitled Fighting Patrols and pitches two basic platoons of equal points value against one another. The squads within the platoon can be broken down into Fire Teams, the British section having a Gun Group consisting of an LMG, loader and three other soldiers, the remainder making the other group. The Germans can have two LMGs per squad and, similarly their squads can be split into two, one LMG per fire team. So, each "standard" platoon has seven dice; one for the platoon command group and six for the three subdivided sections/squads. And that's it No armour, no supports, nuffink!!

     The scenario specifies no specific terrain set up as these patrols can be carried out anywhere. It does recommend that the terrain is placed in such a way that there is no part of the table with an area with more that 18" of visibility.

      Normal victory conditions apply however any unit that loses over half it's figures must go Down immediately and may not move for the rest of the game. However they can still be given Fire, Rally or Ambush orders so they can still lend their weight to the battle. 

     With some time to spare before Richie's parental duties kicked in we decided to give it a bash. We each sent out a patrol to seize  the ruined hamlet that straddled one of the local roads near the LZ. 


      Not for the first time Private Knobby Clarke cursed the cumbersome Bren he was carrying. It wasn't that he hated the gun, it just happened to be bloody heavy to carry in the ready position. At least he was getting a rest at the moment. Lying in the undergrowth that bordered a dirt track, he and his gun group were covering the rest of the platoon as they made their stealthy way towards the ruins along the track. Although it wasn't particularly warm, perspiration dripped down Knobby's face and his Dennison smock stuck to his back and waist from the effort of patrolling silently, his pockets and web pouches bulged with ammo and equipment, adding to the effort.
    A drop of sweat fell from his helmet liner onto the rear sight of the Bren and as he reached up to wipe it off, a machine gun tore into life up ahead "That wasn't a Bren" muttered Knobby to the LMG group commander, Lance Corporal Alexander "Sandy" Beech next to him. Down the track by the ruins, the remainder of the patrol had taken cover. Knobby heard some orders shouted and some of the troops began returning fire. 
     "Let's get forward, lads, we can't do anything here" said Sandy "Keep to the left of the track; follow me" so saying he got up and, crouching low, he lumbered forward followed closely by the rest of his men.....

British airborne troops advance warily towards the ruined
hamlet


...as do the Germans, though with a bit less caution
The Germans spot the British troops and open fire..
     Untersturmfuhrer Scharfe was tempted to swing a kick at the LMG gunner. The gunner poured another burst toward the enemy troops at the far end of the ruins, all surprise gone. "Scharfuhrer Lebandowitz, take your team and work your way round the left of the buildings. Get yourself in a position where you can cut them off on that side!"  "Jawohl, Untersturmfuhrer" replied the tall, lanky SS NCO who laid by a nearby tree, a piece of grass protruding from between his teeth. The NCO gathered his men and their equipment together and they disappeared into the bushes beneath the trees only to reappear moments later angling away from Scharfe's position towards the ruined house, laden with ammo boxes and weapons. Good man, thought Scharfe and turned back to the firefight that had now erupted around him

..whilst others attempt to outflank the British patrol

The British make use of the cover of the ruins to mask their
advance

Veteran SS troops move forward

The British push out a fire team to the flank
...as they dominate the right flank

....whilst others take up defensive positions in the ruins

More outflanking from the canny Hun
     Firing a short burst at the doorway in the ruined terrace, Lt Ottway hoped he had hit the German who had poked his head through the empty door frame. Shots cracked overhead from the ruin and Ottway ducked involuntarily. This is getting serious he thought, time to clear the Hun out of there. Shouting at the paratroopers in the nearby half of the ruin, Ottway caught their attention. "Sgt Neilson!! There are Huns the other side of the wall from you! We'll cover you as you go in!" In the ruins a figure in a maroon beret looked at him for a long moment, muttered something to the men beside him and gave Ottway the thumbs up. 
      Ottway shouted at the men next to him "Men, we'll pour fire into the doorway there then on my order we switch fire right to the window; understood!?" The men responded and as they did so, Pte Freeman, Ottway's radio operator, gave a cry and pitched forward. "Rapid Fire!!" cried Ottway. Bullets tore into the ruins as the four British troops in the ruin, edged their way along the wall towards the doorway where the bullets were impacting on the brickwork....... 
The ruined terrace becomes hotly contested ground


The British move in for the kill

    And then we ran out of time!! Dang and blast it. That was an excellent little battle. Not many casualties to that point; honours being about even. But just as the British where getting into position for what would have been a decisive assault either way Rich had to collect his nippers from school. Oh well, at least we had made a start on the campaign.

     The scenario itself is really good and is easily transferable to other battlefields and I'm sure we'll be revisiting this scenario again.
     It was really refreshing to not have armour and all the other supports that normally accompany a Bolt Action platoon onto the battlefield and, instead, rely on your troops and their small arms. We did ponder how we could introduce grenades into this battle as it cried out for them. I think we might employ the rules for hand grenades that are found in Chain Of Command....though that might be opening a can of worms I think the rules cry out for them, as they were a regular feature of modern warfare at this level.

  
















Empirical Army update #1 plus a little bit extra

So I have made some progress on my Empire Army repaint; in this case six Great Swords who were originally part of a larger twelve man unit. ...