Reading wargames magazines over lunch

I was updating some software on my computer today and while it chuntered away I actually did half an hour's painting, as the sun was out.  I have thirteen boxes of figures under way which I would like to complete and one of those contains some Steve Saleh Lucid Eye figures.  Recently, I finished four Neanderthals so decided to do a bit more on the three remaining ones.  Although it was bright today I was struggling a bit and have realised that what is best for painting is bright overcast and not actual direct sunlight (which is why all artist's studios face north not south).  This weekend will be another lost cause as it is the parents-in-law's extended diamond wedding anniversary celebrations. I have been married to the Old Bat for 23 years now and that feels like an ancient geological time period (the Silurian period springs to mind but maybe that is because I am hopeful Warlord Games will come out with some classic Jon Pertwee period figures - seventies Dr Who, featuring U.N.I.T., being the only incarnation that would really work as a wargame, I feel) ) so more patience than we have must be called for to be together sixty years.  Anyway, I was struggling to get the paint on properly today and can't work out whether the problem is my deteriorating eyesight, the strong light or a bad paintbrush.  Whatever, it really matters to me.  If I can't paint to a "reasonable wargames standard" any more I might as well give up and collect model railways. 

I was thinking about the visual look of wargames while out and about in London this week.  I started out with a meeting at London Metropolitan University, where I am trying to help them set up an overseas course for foreign students.  Arriving at Aldgate East underground station I emerged facing the north end of Leman Street.  Now, of course, this was the home of 'H' Division of Ripper Street fame and about nine months ago I had a look at the south end of the street which still has recognisable features from Victorian times.  Nothing left today at the northern end, although that is as likely to be down to the Luftwaffe, as three high explosive bombs fell on the north end of Leman Street.

These musings are all apposite because the theme of this year's Salute is steampunk and as I had a couple of hours between meetings I decided to stop off in WH Smiths in Oxford Street and pick up the latest Wargames magazines to read at lunchtime.  I buy all three of the main wargames magazines still but these are now the only magazines I buy today. I stopped buying the likes of Empire and SFX several years ago and have now given up on the now tragically neutered Playboy, despite owning, basically, every copy ever published (apart from a few of the fabulously expensive early fifties ones and I have those digitally).  Also, the shop where I used to buy it, the excellent Cinema Store in St Martin's Lane, closed in January due to a doubling of its rent.

Anyway, having picked up Miniature Wargames, Wargames Illustrated and Wargames Soldiers and Strategy, I set off for my West End office, the National Cafe at the National Gallery.  This is a very nice, light, airy place very popular with ladies of a certain age and German tourists.  There is a cheaper, self service cafe adjoining it but I prefer this waitress service one and I go often enough that they usually get me a table at the edge of the room from which you can watch everyone else.  

What is it that brings the Legatus back here again and again?  Surely it can't just be the willowy Eastern European waitresses?  Actually, despite an off-puttingly fish-heavy menu, the food can be very good indeed. Currently, to accompany the Delacroix exhibition at the gallery, they have a special Delacroix menu: a main course and a glass of wine for £15. 

So I settled down with my confit duck leg and Toulose sausage cassoulet and a glass of Vin de Pays D'Oc (regionally appropriately) to have a look at Miniature Wargames and, in particular, their Salute guide.  I don't always read Neil Shuck's Forward Observer, partly because I am vaguely irritated by Mr Shuck's Meeples and Miniatures podcasts (I don't like the name for a start - there is no logic to my bigotry - perhaps I should vote UKIP like the Old Bat.  Actually, no, there are limits).  Now, I have listened to a number of these and the content can be quite good but I just cannot listen to his voice and when I read his prose I hear his flat, bored-sounding tones as I read.  Nevertheless, his look at Kickstarters in this issue was very good.  Another piece I hardly ever read (well, never) is a column called Send Three and Fourpence.  This is because it is such an opaque title and the first page is always just type that I never bother to look at it.  I have it in my mind that maybe it is a column about postal wargames, something that sounds about as enticing as postal sex.  But then, when The Big Issue first came out I wondered how on earth they managed to bring out a magazine every week whose only subject matter was homelessness.  Anyway, this month Send Three and Fourpence has a North West Frontier scenario so I will have to read it.  I wonder what all the others were about?

Another wargaming bête noire of mine is John Treadaway (despite his heroic efforts on Salute over the years), partly because I got into something of an argument with him over some nasty pro-Nazi re-enactors at Salute some years ago and everything he said in defence was, to use a phrase du jour, mealy-mouthed, patent nonsense (something along the lines of "oh we knew they were controversial and just wanted to test people's reactions to them, ho ho").  He is a man whose every utterance on TMP I tend to disagree with so it gave me great delight for him to get things horribly wrong in a review of Antediluvian Miniatures superb nineteenth century dinosaurs, where he said that the Crystal Palace Park dinosaurs were about the "only bit that survived the great fire that brought down the eponymous structure in the 1930s".  Or in fact, maybe they survived because the dinosaurs weren't put into Crystal Palace Park until after the Crystal Palace itself was moved to Sydenham Hill in 1852 and it was on that site that it burned to the ground in 1936.  My mother remembers seeing the glow in the sky as a child from her bedroom.

Anyway, lots of steampunky goodness in this issue and a painting guide to the Salute figure which I will actually enjoy painting.  It was nice to see Big Lee's Miniature Adventures and Ray's Don't Throw a 1 becoming  MW's blogs of the month, too.  Very well deserved!

A telephone call over lunch then informed me that my afternoon meeting had been rescheduled for next week and given I had been working away from 6.00am to prepare for both meetings I reckoned that lunch needed to be extended to enable me to look at the other two wargames magazines and order a carafe of wine.  Next up was Wargames Soldiers and Strategy, which I remember from the times it was an idiosyncratically translated Spanish publication full of "random" quotation marks but is now a very good magazine.  For me the only issue I have with it is that it is bimonthly and I invariably end up buying it twice as I can never remember if I have already bought it or not.  This month's theme is modern warfare and editor Guy Bowers seems mystified why some wargamers (myself included) feel uncomfortable about gaming the period. "Our popular culture of movies, TV and computer games is full of action, adventure and death," he says. "People seem to accept this completely without question..." he continues.  Er, actually, we don't.  I am very uncomfortable with the level of casual violence in (largely) American films, TV and computer games.  I am on slightly dodgy ground here, as I have bought Bowers' Black Ops rules but while I might contemplate some Alias-style spy adventures anything historical and post WW2 is not for me. 

One article in WSS which annoyed me (not hard to do) was a rebuttal (although one that demonstrated a failure of nerve part way through) of a previous piece from the preceding issue suggesting that wargamers need to spend as much time on their scenery as their figures.  This month's article essentially said that it was all about the game and people should not worry if there scenery doesn't match railway layout standards.  Again, this in another case of someone assuming that everyone thinks like them.  I am very interested in the whole visual look of wargames and don't really enjoy playing on green baize cloths with stepped hills.  In fact I hate stepped hills more than anything else on a wargames table. If you want to use stepped hills you might as well use wooden blocks for your armies.  The author of the piece said that the sort of ornate scenic boards you get at shows were often impossible to play on.  Again, a ludicrous generalisation, as you can see from this board we used a few years ago for a Romans vs Britons game at Guildford Wargames Club.  A proper hill here!

The ultimate, looks wonderful but practical, scenery is made of course by Eric the Shed and a game there is always a visual  joy.  I don't care if I win or lose so long as I can move my figures around his amazing boards!

Still, the issue contained a good scenario for a game based on Simon Scarrow's The Eagle's Prey, amongst all the ultra modernism.

Time to pause for some cheese and move on to Wargames Illustrated, which was always my favourite magazine (almost entirely because of the visual impact of the games illustrated inside, compared with the blobby painting of Miniature Wargames). Fortunately, the conscious decoupling from Battlefront Miniatures has removed the dozens of pages of bumper to bumper tank battles from it and it covers a wider scope than it has done.  There was an interesting article on using Lion Rampant for Napoleonic skirmishing (not entirely successfully, I gather) but I still have this vague hankering to do some Peninsula skirmishing at some point in the future and this may be the answer.  This variant does not include artillery but I don't like artillery in games anyway and hate painting guns.

Most interesting for me was a look at the new Congo rules for darkest Africa games.  There is a chance I may have to go to Namibia in the next few months, unless I can get out of it.  I prefer to interact with Africa on the tabletop not deal with African airlines.  The Congo rules appear quite gamey and I got lost reading the description of the rules mechanism (not surprisingly) but at least I won't need to buy any figures (or even paint them) as I have several hundred ready to play,

So, the base colours on the Neanderthals are done now and I have started shading.  Maybe I will even finish them in a couple of weeks!

Next time in my blogs I will be looking at corned beef and, in fact, am just off to cook some!