Pudsey Recon

Wakefield and Osset wargamers run a show the first weekend in December, which because of it's proximity (less than 5 miles from my place) is one of the few I actually attend.



Its a small show, but usually well attended. As far as sales, I noticed that 28mm is easily the widest available scale at the show, with 15 & 20mm distant seconds and 10/12mm probably third. Sadly none of the books I'd hoped to find, but many figures, including some ex-Grenadier medieval cavalry at a quid a figure, a nice find!

Although there were a few games downstairs, they were mainly fantasy demos, promoting figure sales as much as anything. Upstairs was where the historicals were.



The guy I'd taught WAB to was there with his schoolkids and a small game of 28mm dark ages. Nicely painted too considering they were done by a bunch of 11-13 year olds. One could see why they were in a wargames club and not on the football team, I think we've all been there at some point! anyway...



A highly attractive game of the desert war in 28mm (1/48th scale) was put on by the Ilkley club. Well, to be fair, I loved the look of the vehicles; especially the Italian tanks and a stunning Matilda. But the wargamery paint style of the figures (Really exaggerated shading and highlights) left the infantry looking like burns victims. A shame as from a distance, and up close for the scenery and vehicles, everything looked great.





An English covil war game, put on by some ECW re-enactors, nice figures in 28mm.



I had to laugh at the pained expressions that came over the faces of these guys when a wargames bore came over and started telling them how wrong their game was - "Too many dragoonss you know, I've been researching this period and most of the units fielded as dragoons were actually dismounted cavalry or never existed..." He was the sort of guy who obviously didn't like to listen nearly so much as he liked to talk, He slowly moved from stand to stand spouting his guff to whoever would stand and take it.



In terms of numbers, the biggest game there was this Napoleonic slugfest, I'd guess a thousand figures. To my mind deployed more like a parade than a battle, but impressive.

Vikings

As promised, some shots of the Warhammer ancients game I ran to show a chap the rules in the week.

2000 points of Danish mainland Vikings worked out as follows:

General and Army standard accompanied by a unit of 30 Hirdmen with mixed weapons and 2 hidden Besirkir

32 Bondi with mixed weapons

32 Bondi with mixed weapons

18 Bondi with Bows

12 Ulfhendhar with Mixed weapons

24 Jomsvikings with Hand weapons

Here you can see their opening dispositions; a solid mass in the centre, with the Hird on the commanders' right, next to the bowmen and the Jomsvikings in the rear.





I neglected to get a shot of my own deployment, not least because the figures for my Frankish army were largely pooled from my selection of old saxon models and rear rank vikings. Figures painted some 20 years ago as a kid (and many homecasts too to boot!) and boy did it show; at least to me. I think the audience (this club always seems to have a good number of spectators, and I'm of the opinion that 28mm is a mysterious new scale to most of them...) must have been being polite when they praised the sombre and realistic colour schemes of my troops. Sounds like a polite way to say 'they're badly painted, aren't they!'

Anyhow, the Ottonian Frankish army was based as the vikings on one of the Shieldwall sublists - in this case the Flemish list:

General and Army standard with a unit of 7 Milite horse

9 Milite horse

9 Milite horse

24 Milites, dismounted Representing the Thuringians, who though armed and armoured as milites, tended to fight on foot.

24 Liberi foot

24 Liberi foot

8 Coloni bowmen

8 Coloni bowmen



At first the Vikings were tied down by the narrow field of deployment they had; Their advance was reduced to a crawl, except for the Ulfhendhar on the left. However I was more concerned with crashing my cavalry into his flanks and, to ensure all the possibilities of the rules were investigated, a frankly insane frontal charge against his massed line.

About the same time his Ulfhendhar tried to smash a unit of Liberi on the hill, but their shieldwall held and the remants of the wolf warriors were caught and wiped out. Although in the centre I delivered a juddering blow to the Vikings they held, and the double handed axes in the line sent horse and man to the ground; the cavalry broke like a wave on the prow of a longship. Worse still on the flank my charge against the Viking bowmen was lost before it even made contact; shot asunder on the way in.



However, with my right flank cleared, I was able to come down from the hill, and got my infantry to the fore. Here the spears sung a song of blood (ooh, getting very warhammer here now aint it!) the Vikings could not raise a voice to. One bondi unit scattered, the other was killed where it stood, but it was a high water mark for me. Momentarily it looked as if the Vikings were lost, but their Jarl ruled his hirdmen with spirit and skill and drove the Thuringians into the ground.

At the end the vikings had their best two units holding the field with their valiant bowmen still peppering my surviving cavalry, and one unit they could at least hope would rally. I could only count on my lords' cavalry, one unit of Liberi and one scattered band of coloni, trying to trade shots with the Danish bows.

For a change I had time to grab a couple of shots of the other games on that night too. There seemed to be a reasonably healthy turnout on the night, 16-20 players and hangers on. Below is some sort of computer moderated napoleonics game, not my personal cup of tea (15mm, needs a laptop to play, didn't see anything move or any dice get thrown) but seemed to support a number of players.



Two other guys were doing Warhammer skirmish, Orcs trying to capture a Brettonian watchtower.



All in all another good evening.

Next time, I think I'll roll out the 28mm WW2 and the Operation Overlord rules, by Alto Zero. I think I've done enough ancients of late.

AK47 Republic

A game at short notice, resulted in AK47 being dug out again at my house. Having amassed a huge collection of models and figures I let my two players select their own armies to any form the rules allowed; the end results being a Dictatorship, and a superpower backed state.

Chris' natural instincts for modern games saw him on the aggressive side with a force of armoured cars, tanks and mechanised infantry at the start. Phil, more at home with ancients and napoleonics, set himself a defensive task, initially equipped with tanks and militia troops holed up in and around a village.



Chris' flanking infantry captured one objective unopposed, but in the centre the armoured battle seemed to swing in the favour of Phil, who destroyed three afv's for the loss of only one of his own.





Reserves began to flood in as time ran out, Chris had well equipped and determined infantry arrive to the south of the village; Phil had truck-borne regulars move to intercept them. However in a tactical blunder the lorries were caught in the open, battered by fire and then obliterated by a close assault, the last defending tank to the north was destroyed, and in the end only the militia held out in the village.



By the terms of the rules it was a crushing victory for the attackers under chris. All in about two hours.



With time on our hands we even managed to fit in a came of cards, Nuclear War that is; a morbidly fun game in which the last man standing is not so much the winner as least defeated. you quickly get into the psyche of trading shots of ICBMs and attacks by stealth bombers with one another. How this hasn't been converted to a Collectible game overthe years I don't know.

Got a 2000 point a side game of WAB coming up on Wednesday; Danish Vikings versus Ottonian Franks; hopefully pictures to follow...

Speed painting challenge

How fast can you produce reasonable figures in bulk?

I often wondered, especially as I'm accused by others of being a ridiculously fast painter. It's certainly an advantage that my painting table is a permantnet feature of the living room, in plain sight of the TV, HIFI, PC and Wife! Hardly an evening goes by without an hour of painting (except Saturdays I guess), so results can appear to come pretty fast to others who paint maybe only on sundays, or that one night a week they're allowed to set the painting table up.

Still, it doesn't mean the result will be any good. The common answer to the question 'how do I get good at painting model soldiers' as asked on any number of forums and in magazines, is always some variation on 'paint 500 bad ones first'.

I'm always learning.

None the less how long does reasonable tabletop quality take. To find out I timed a set of figures from start to finish. The figures in question being 20 goblin archers from the latest Warhammer boxed set.

Clipped from the sprues, the figures were slotted into the bases and painting began. They were not glued into the bases, as I intended to both multibase and randomise the positioning of the figures later. The troops were laid out in the 5x4 block with a variety of poses in each row, then each row had its' robes painted a different shade of grey; starting with the lightest shade, and gradually adding more of a darker grey to the mix for each row until all 20 figures were done. I tend to start figures by painting the largest area of colour first, usually this means the main uniform, on ancients figures it is often the flesh, on moderns the fatigues.



Next for the goblins was the flesh tone. On goblins, I like to vary the flesh tones, and although I've never bothered with doing so on human figures the principle that skintone varies greatly would still stand true. The method is basically the same as for the grey robes, but this time with a mid green base lightened with Yellow and Cream through teh columns rather than the rows; to avoid them all matching the command group were shuffled along ther rows at this stage. I was neat were the edges met the grey, but not anywhere else. To this point the process has taken a total of two hours from out of the box.



Next the bows, belts, straps teeth and other details were despatched. The figures were entirely base coated in under three and a half hours out of the box. Next the figures had to be carefully cut off the slots, which were then reglued back into the bases.



The bases were then glued to squares of 60-thou (2mm) plasticard. 4 pieces for three bases, 2 for two bases and 4 singles. The gaps were filled with quick drying filler (Tetrion of similar) and the figures then glued in position. You'll have noticed that the figures were so far painted in flat colour. That is because this is speed painting! No time for highlights here! Instead I use a combined varnish and wash mix to shade and protect the figures. Some use woodstains for this (the notorious 'DIP' technique) but I prefer to mix my own:

20-30 parts Humbrol Mattcote varnish (well mixed) + 1 part Humbrol matt black paint (or brown/dark green/etc as appropriate) + 3 parts thinners (optional)

It's a bit of an art to get right, and results can vary, I certainly put in more tint than I like on these chaps, but the results are instant and magical. Just slop it on, and the figures are transformed. It can be worth using a clean brush to draw of excess pigment if it is building up in blobs at the bottom of the figure. Lastly in this shot the bases have been given a coat of of sand brown paint.



For finishing, a layer of wood glue was applied to the surfaces of the bases, and they were dipped in fine playpit sand, a second pass was used to add patches of GW/Noch static grass (Noch is a model railroad company; I suspect they supply GW its' scatters, but from source they cost half the price). Last of all the bases get a second coat of sand brown paint; and they're done!



From start to finish the unit has taken just 5 hours, to do everything, that's 300 minutes, which works out at 15 minutes per figure. Bear in mind tough you have to allow for drying time at several points, notably the filler, varnish wash and basing stages; the painting itself allows me at least to work with wet colours, but you have to still take comfort breaks. In all the figures were onto and off of the painting table in 6 days.



As you can see from the command group above, there was still time for some detail in the unit, I was able to do the eyes with highlights, pick out the teeth, give the command group some personal details and spend a little time on the standard. The key to this technique, beyond being fast is simply to be neat and light of touch. Better to ned two strokes of the brush to put a belt in, than to make a messy blob of it in one go.

Of course practice helps, as does having all the right kit available, but it is a perfectly reasonable timescale for producing straightforward wargames figures, whether fantasy or historical, 28mm, 20mm or 15mm!

Time yourself, you may be surprised, maybe try my techniques, see if it's any faster for you...

Bailed out

Airfix & Humbrol have been saved by Hornby you may have seen over the weekend. Of course Hornby itself is hardly on the cutting edge of it's own hobby, though they make enough money to pay the pittance Airfix was up for; £2.4m seems very cheap for all their assets to me.

To be fair to Hornby too my brother, who'se into trains, assures me that recent Hornby product has seen heavy investment to bring it up to it's competitors standards, whilst wisely pitching at the 'Memory lane' market. I think it could be the shot in the arm Airfix need. But on the positive side for me, it means I don't need to start using water based paints just yet. Hoorah!

Armarti - the war against Etruria

OK, so for a bit of variety I took Armarti to the Leeds club this past week. It was another opportunity to 'display my wares' so to speak, and Armarti as a set of rules have the advantage of being very simple to run through in an evening, even with players who've never played the game before.



As makes sense, I'd preselected a couple of matched armies - Early Roman Republicans, and Etruscan Greeks (i.e Greeks with a warband ally for novelty value, a simple tweak of the Armarti Greek list). Once the players had the basics of units explained they deployed based on their map plans.

Armarti is dependant on the map deployment, like historical generals of the time players plan the fight with no idea what the enemy will do for sure; I wish more games used so simple a method, it produces fascinating results. Here the Etruscans deployed wide, whilst the Romans deployed deep and entirely refused their right flank.



Battle commenced and the Romans moved aggressively to try to outflank the Etruscans. Armarti dictates armies have a fixed number of available formations in a game. This limits tactical flexibility. The less flexible Etruscan army had to deploy a huge line, which spent the early game redressing to face the enemy.



The Cavalry battle eventually went the way of the Romans, though the horse were battered, their commander tried in vain to rally them. Eventually chosing to attack the Etruscan psoloi in the rough ground. An error as psoloi fight at their best in difficult ground - each unit has three combat factors, one for fighting in good going, one for difficult ground and one for being hit in a flank; in this case foot troops are better han cavalry in rough going. This as a result allowed the psoloi to hold the Roman flank attack up, whilst the phalanx closed with the Roman centre.



The figures used were from my extensive 20mm ancients collection. A mixture of Zvezda, Hat, Nexus and Revell in this case.



Late in the day the Etruscans clashed with the Princeps in the centre. At the rear the Etruscan general was lost along with the warband, to a cavalry charge in its' flank. In the end the Etruscans crumbled first in the cantre, largely through not being willing to attack the available flank of the Romans. It was a straight 5-0 break point victory to the romans.

Armarti is a good game, hampered mainly by only being suitable for stand-up fights. It is however quick to play once you are familiar with the conventions it uses you can get two games in, in the shortest of evenings.

My figures attracted a fair deal of favourable responses too, which is always nice!

Two in One!

Last week was a good week for games.

Been a very long while since I got two games in within seven days, but I did it this week.

A game at home on sunday first of all; we rolled out the Epic 40k figures. As you can see from the arrayed armies of Orks and Imperial Guard, what they lack in size they more than make up for in numbers. In total the game involved around 250 figures and 120+ vehicles.



An Ork assault developed on the ruins of a regional penal colony on Armageddon. At first only an Ork supply station was occupied, but the fast moving forces of the Kult of Speed and forces of Battlewagons sonn applied some pressure to a defending Company of the 181st defence militia regiment. Although reserves for the 181st were arriving, it appeared it would be too slow to stop the Orkish advance.



A wide advance by the Orks was then backed up by infantry and the slow progress of the Ork Great Gargant. But now the long range firepower of the 181st and their tanks and artillery started to make an impression. Several ork units were pinned down whilst a Tank company made a rapid advance on the left flank:





Whilst some Ork forces advanced, others stalled and the first force was outright destroyed, sent into retreat. The artillery and concentrated fire of the Baneblade and Shadowsword tanks stopping the main attack. On the left, Orks were trying to counter the Tank advance.



As many Ork units broke, the Gargant finally came into play, in doing so attracting a mass of fire from the Reaver titan and Shadowswords. Sorely outnumbered, the Leman Russ tanks broke, but not without inflicting many losses on the Orks. The 181st and its' command company held in the centre. Overall a hard fought,but inconclusive draw; cut short a turn by the start of the final F1 race of the season!
....

The second game was at the Leeds club last night, and as promised I took along my Medievals; but not alas my camera! Two 1600 point armies for WAB - Flemish and French - put about 250 figures ont oa little 4x4 foot table.

A solid line of Flemish Pike were under my command, with a little help from some foot knights, Swordsmen, handgunners, bowmen, a cannon and a troop of mounted seargents. My opponent had a typical French array; two units of knights, some crossbowmen, heavy spearmen, light spearmen and a mass of peasants.

Terrain played a major part, as the French knights got lost behind a wood for the first three turns (moving back and forth in column trying to find a point they could attack without my cannon and handgunners getting them first). on the opposite flank the peasants occupied a farm, whilst my pike line advanced over a low hill, slowly forming an oblique line.

A misjudged manoevre on my part left my seargents - attached to the General - exposed to the smaller unit of French knights, near the farm. He should have pounded me on the charge, but even needing 6's to save, I made 5 throws and escaped unscathed, my horse cut two of his down and they fled. I'd turn his flank through pure good luck! He now had to try to block me with his knights, from charging his fighting line in the rear. He also turned his crossbowmen in fear of my horse.

The rest of his line had come well forward, whilst his general tried to chase down my skirmishers. Some of his spearmen tried to occupy the woods, but handgun fire and a pikeman charge dealt with them. My cannon enfiladed his crossbows, and the fled with heavy losses. Neverthe less a charge in the centre by his heavy spearmen stalled my advance and initially put flight to some of my troops. Only the foot knights held.

His king rode down the handgunners and threatend to do the same to my cannon, but by this point my centre had consolidated, three units outflanked and then destroyed his spearmen, whilste my last unit of pike flushed out the peasants from the farm. My horse failed to charge again, but by this poiunt the game was over. A Flemish victory, Hurrah!

All good fun, and my figures received a favourable response from the other members. Leeds seems to be one of the clubs where they think 28mm is dead; Oh how very wrong they are! still, it means my stuff gets some good attention. Other games on last night were a WW2 skirmish, a Vietnam game in 20mm; and as ever 15mm DBA (the same 2-3 players as always, with the same armies, and so far as I could tell, the exact same terrain) - apparently it's all they ever do.

Ork's'es!

Posted a few shots of my Warhammer 40K Ork armour on Warhammer.org the other day and they seemed to go down well. Granted I am not a great figure painter, but the ingenuity and variety of the models impressed the people there; which was all I was hoping for.

Honestly the quality of their painting knocks my socks off; I'm learning a lot just looking at the pages. But it isn't practical for the purposes of my mass-production painting schedules. You cant knock out 24 figures a week, if you are doing three highlights, a shaded glaze and then three MORE hightlights to finish up, each colour!

My models are a mix of GW's own models heavily converted with plasticard, and the contents of the bits box. And low cost 1:35th scale WW2 tank models with varying degrees of conversion carried out.

They certainly don't lack for imagination!

Leeds Wargames Club

As an alternative to the murderous journey to Harrogate; I've now tried Leeds' best known games night. To be fair there are several in Leeds and its' immediate area. But this one had the advantage of being nearby, and after the DBA tourney - discussed some months back on this blog - I knew how to find it!

Fisrtly with Phil in tow, and then on my own, I've visited their last two regular Wednesday evenings. Compared to harrogate, the set up is not disimilar, but nowhere near as permanent feeling, though a steady arrangement from what I could judge. The club has arrays of scenery available in cabinets, and a few club owned games appear to be stored. The attendance was reasonable on both nights, about 16 players and a couple of hangers on/loiterers. Thankfully there were some games on too.

Over the course of the nights there were games of Flames of War, Blood Bowl, Crimson Skies, Block Wars and DBA played. For myself and Phil it was a game set in the English Civil War, using Peter Pig rules (Regiment of Foote I think). An entertaining little affair. Whilst this week America beckoned, with a refight of part of Antietam, using Fire and Fury.

Observations include a preference for small scales, in figures and games. 15mm on a 3x4 foot table seemed to be the norm, whilst the ACW game stretched to 4 foot square, but was only in 6mm. Additionally despite a pretty extensive scenery selection, presentation of games could best be termed as functional. Maybe I was spoiled by the Grimsby club for all those years, but 20mm and 25/28mm games played on great terrain on big tables is what I really expect at a club!

Still another friendly bunch; and crucially a 15 minute drive from my home, on roads I actually know! I think I shall introduce them to my 28mm medievals, and see how we go from there...

Photo bonanza

Well; I finally scraped together the savings devoted to a camera: £50 from the contract paint job of Russian infantry, and £100 from selling my Flintloque figures. With that I was able to replace my aging digital camera; all the photos on this site to date have been taken on a simple Vivtar 2mp point and click I got from Argos a couple of years ago. Adequate for ebay and generic holiday/celebration photos; it really suffered in delivering quality shots. Now I've upgraded to a Samsung 5mp camera with a decent range of settings, manual override, and a decent macro function (amongst other things). So here are some new shots.

Firstly, here are the 15mm Egyptians I was working on earlier this year in all their glory. About two months work, thanks to the varnish-wash technique, they look pretty respectable!

All figures are by Essex, a mix of their Early and later New Kingdom Egyptians, along with some Sherden allies.

Finally for these, the general gives his orders, beside the entranceway to a regional temple...

Next, to test the range of options, I dug out my WWII 28mm Americans.

M4A3 Sherman (IIRC) by Bandai, figures by Black Tree; and yes they are rather too green!

Some B&W shots to give more atmosphere; more Black Tree Americans support a Solido/Verem M20 utility car.

A general view, someone's got wind of enemy, nearby...

All these shots were taken without modification, on basic settings on a Samsung Digimax V50. Uploaded without scaling or post-production. I'm quite pleased, the results should only improve when I run them through potatoshop.

Lastly, the burden of the wargamer: