The 2012 Display Game Project

Thoughts turned to my games for next year over the weekend, Last year saw a big push on Napoleonics, and This year has been a mix of Fantasy and Ancients.  When I moved for the second time in six months however I became aware of the number of miniatures I had yet to use for anything at all, or at least not in many a year.

One such set is my Yugoslavian Civil Wars models in 20mm.  A result of the war being on the TV every day when I was getting back into wargaming, but also beginning to take world politics rather more seriously.  There were, and for me remain of course, issues with gaming ongoing conflicts (as it was at that time) but with well over a decade passed since the end of this particular conflict; I feel as comfortable as I can with resurrecting the models from their long sabbatical.

This has not always been the case mind, I sold my Iran Iraq war models, mainly to avoid being expected to use them to play Gulf War, or War on Terror-esque games, and because it felt like a game with staggeringly few features to elevate it above glorifying slaughter.  To be fair our harsher critics may say that of the whole hobby, but I feel there is a line in the sand that can be drawn, for me WWI, anything to do with the SS, The various Gulf Wars and anything within the last 20 years have to be approached very carefully indeed.

I don't want any part of my gaming to glorify the horrors of war, but I don't want to ignore them either; my display game will allow me to get regular games out of my collection again of course, but it should also allow me to a tiny bit of education?

My Guardian reading, leftist guilt assuaged then, I'm still wanting to put the last European war on, so the very first step was to take an audit of the models I had in my collection.

Surprisingly there was an awful lot of it, well over 30 fighting vehicles and another 20 or so civilian ones, and over 225 infantry.  Many of the latter though need a degree of freshening up, and reflect a quite inventive collection of modern plastic and metal 20mm soldiers.  A handful of the models from my JNA (Yugoslav National Army - the Serbian Regulars) forces are shown below:

The infantry are the ultra rare late period set of Airfix Modern Russians, which are staggeringly boring, workmanlike models.  I got hold of thirty of these eons ago, and they served with minor repaints in a variety of armies.  As part of the box contents review I decided to add some texture to the bases.

The vehicles are suggestive of a second line unit.  On the left is a M36 Jackson; the USA briefly supplied Yugoslavia with military equipment in the 1950's when the country isolated itself from the Warsaw Pact.  Photographs of this vehicle still in service in the 1990's are commonplace,though properly it should be a B2 variant with a raised roof for the turret.  In the centre is a BTR152-K command variant, made by ACE models of Ukraine if I recall correctly.  The last one may test you though; any guesses?

It is a Yugoslav M60p personnel carrier, an indigenous design that utilised parts copied from a mix of Soviet and American equipment. This is a near virtual scratchbuild, based on the running gear from the old Airfix ready-to-roll FV434 carrier.  Some might say I committed heresy converting it in such a way, but this unique model is worth far more to me.  The M60p was a good design of it's type in the 60's and 70's, but looked dated with the widespread distribution of Infantry fighting vehicles in the 80's, and was replaced by the M80a.

I hope to make another and will maybe do a step by step if people are curious enough.

So, to begin, I've considered the game to be socially acceptable, with certain caveats, and I consider I have enough models to restrain shopping.  Now I should begin to refresh tired pieces, give thought to a set of rules, and decide on a scenario...