Reading Wargames Magazines over lunch...and English Civil War at the Shed

The view from the conference venue

I had something of a frantic day yesterday.  I had to be at Kennington Oval early in the morning for a conference.  Now, this is a historic sporting venue and the place where the Ashes legend was born.  However, I have no interest in cricket whatsoever which is tedious to watch and, rather incongruously,  dangerous to play. I had to play it at school once and got hit by a cricket ball (on account of having no hand to eye co-ordination whatsoever) so passed on it thereafter in favour of athletics, which I was quite good at.  On Wednedsay afternoon games period all the sporty teachers and pupils were involved in cricket matches while the athletics people could sit in the long jump pit and watch the girls at the school next door playing netball.

The Royal Excahnge

Anyway, I had to leave Kennington (not a part of London I would visit voluntarily) and head to the City for a quick meeting in the Royal Exchange.  This is when I discovered how hot it had become during the morning. A late breakfast at the Grand Cafe set me up for getting back to the Oval but then I had a call from someone who wanted to meet me in West End, so I set off on the Central Line (the hottest Underground line in London) and felt resentful towards all the under-dressed ladies.  As I was early, I got off at Chancery Lane to go into the large WH Smiths newsagents. to get the May Wargames Illustrated.  I quite often get wargames magazines here as it is one of the bigger Smiths.  However, there were no sign of any wargames magazines. Instead, several of the usual magazine shelves were now selling those useless 'bookazines' which are books for people who are too stupid to be able to read anything without pictures or articles no longer than 3 pages. 

Forum Smiths

So back on the tube to go to Tottenham Court Road station (normally I would have walked two stations but it was far too hot). I got lost coming out of the station as it has all changed because of the imminent new Crossrail line station so had to walk even further in the sweltering heat. Just as I reached Oxford Street my phone went again and my contact asked whethe it would be alright to meet at 4.30 at Embankment instead.  Grrr!  I booked a very much needed haircut (as anyone who met me at Salute will testify) back in the City and headed off to another branch of WH Smiths in the Forum shopping centre on Oxford Street.  Here I managed to get WI and also Wargames Soldiers and Strategy.  But, then I found out that the Smiths there is closing down in June.  In fact it looks like the whole place is closing, as nearly all the shops were empty.  Games Workshop moved some months ago. So this is bad news as finding places to get wargames magazines is getting more and more difficult.

So, I now had a couple of hours to kill, I was wilting in the heat and desperate for a cold drink.  Fortunately, I was only about two hundred yards from my favourite Italian restaurant in London, Latium.  Slightly worryingly, I didn't recognise any of the people there and it had been redecorated.  I hadn't been there for over a year.  It turns out that the owner is the same but they have a new chef, Stefano Motta, who had actually been a sous Chef at Latium 12 years ago.  More recently he ran the restaurant at Vinopolis. So after ordering a large bottle of mineral water I sat down in the lovely air conditioning to have a look at my two magazines.  I was looking forward to this issue because it features the new The Men who would be King rules by Danial Mersea and other colonial articles.  These rules come out in August and, having enjoyed his Lion Rampant rules I will certainly be getting these,  Interestingly, there is a whole chapter in the new book on how you can use the rules to play solo.  Other Victorian Colonial articles featured The Second Opium Wars, 1853 NW Frontier action and uniforms of the period.  I was also interested to see a piece on the new Sharp Practice rules which I have heard good things about but have never played.  If I ever did Napoleonics it would be with these rules.

One thing which was nice to see, from a nostalgic point of view, was a full page Foundry advertisement for Darkest Africa figures, no doubt anticipating the new Congo rules which are due out shortly. In fact I have read that Foundry are planning starter sets to go with the game.  Along with Gripping Beast Vikings, Foundry Darkest Africa were the first metal figures I painted seriously, back in 1999 when I started painting wargames figures again.  I think I have nearly all the Darkest Africa figures except the pygmies.  I hate pygmies.  They're like Hobbits in Lord of the Rings. Unlike most of my armies, I have actually painted enough figures to field an explorers force, a British force, a Belgian force, an Arab force and Azande tribesmen so I will be able to do something with Congo from the beginning or, if playing solo, it sounds like The Men who would be King will work too. Fortunately my Nigeria trip was postponed but it now looks like I will have to go to Liberia in June.  Honestly, no one goes to Liberia!

Crema Di Piselli, Cetriolo, Pesto Al Basilico, Uovo Di Anatra in Camicia E Pecorino 

Time for my first course, which was pea soup with poached duck egg and even though I was driving in the evening I had a small glass of Pinot Grigio with it, which was more than diluted by the two bottles of Ferrarelle mineral water I got through. I always drank Ferrarelle when in Rome,which is far superior to San Pellegrino and is one of the few genuine naturally sparkling mineral waters in the world.  My Roman lady friends always claimed it was a diuretic, due to its particular mineral content.  Or, at least, that was the excuse that they gave when I had to keep watch in the Roman Forum one summer afternoon when the two princesses I had just had lunch with had to relieve themselves of several bottles worth (plus a lot of Gavi di Gavi).  In fact, I didn't really need to keep watch as it was August, over a hundred degrees and there was no one about anyway.  Also I suspect they didn't care if anyone caught them or not and they were just showing off!  A distance contest across the sand was not what I was expecting from two such elegantly dressed ladies.

Tagliatelle con ragu di agnello, Ricotta salata Siciliana e Timo

Princess I and Princess MF would no doubt have been very dismissive of my having pasta for a main course and I told me that on her first tip to England, as a student, she was served pasta at a friend's house and didn't eat much as she was expecting a proper main course to be served afterwards.  However, having had a large breakfast in the City I decided to just have the tagliatelle with lamb and Ricotta.

I've got two thirds of a unit of Byzantine archers already!

Wargames Soldiers and Strategy features the Normans in their May issue.  I have painted some Normans and there was a good article on the Normans in Sicily (appropriately, as that was where Princess MF came from).  This was designed for Lion Rampant so I wouldn't need to paint many more Normans and then could just add some Byzantines and Sicilian Muslim forces.  All quite achievable, I think.

Anyway, I thought about small Dark Ages forces on the way home after my haircut ("this is a men's hair dressers", said Tracey, my hairdresser, before taking two and a half inches off my hair) and my meeting on Polish railways at the Royal Society of Arts near Embankment. I didn't have much time at home (no time for dinner so I could justify the big breakfast and lunch out to myself) before setting off for my second trip to the Shed this year.  Now Eric the Shed and Mark, another regular shedizen had started English Civil War armies at Christmas.  Amazingly, they had each painted around five hundred figures since then and last night saw most (not all!) of them getting their first outing. I painted 25 figures last year and I would have to go back to about the middle of 2010 to get a total of 500. So they painted the same number of figures in four months as I painted in five and a half years!  I really must be doing something wrong!   The full length board looked spectacular with the armies arrayed between two villages.

The King, the King!

I won't do a blow by blow description of the game as Eric the Shed will be doing that soon although he will do well to recall the action because the board was so big I had no idea what was going on further down the board. We had six players and three commands on each side.  I was on the right flank of the Royalist side with Mark, whose beautiful army we were using, taking the role of Charles I in the centre.

Some of Eric's Parliamentarians

Nearly all the figures were the Warlords plastics which really is, I think, very much their best range. I started my ECW forces with the then new Renegade figures but these are so big compared with the Warlord ones they really wouldn't work together, although the Perry figures would as would the Empress ones, I think.  I sort of don't know what to do about ECW now.  I have only three painted units; two infantry and one of cuirassiers, and realistically I cannot paint a huge army like this but I love the period and the uniforms. If I was starting now I would go with the Warlord range although I do have some Empress figures. I am quite tempted to get some Warlord plastics and do something I have always wanted to do and build a small New Model Army force, although I prefer my pikemen to hold vertical pikes.  Something to think about.

My own game fell into three distinct parts.  On the far right my two units of commanded shot traded volleys with Eric's two units of shot and one of dragoons.  Although I eventually lost one of my units they battered and held up my opponents.

 The Royalist cavalry crash into Cromwell's Ironsides

In the centre I launched a massive cavalry charge only to have Cromwell's very tough Ironsides counter charge. Both sides took a battering but my cavalry were forced to retreat and took no further part in the battle.  Fortunately, with my foot and artillery popping away at the Ironsides, Cromwell was unable to rally them for the rest of the game.

 Over on the right My two foot units stood firm for much of the game and just held on in place long enough for losses elsewhere on the table to see Parliament defeated.  We used the Pike and Shotte rules which I haven't used before and although they gave a fluid and quick game I didn't feel that they had the period feel of the 1644 rules, which is what we used at Guildford, along with Warhammer ECW, which is a direct descendant of 1644.

Having had a rather trying day I struggled even more than usual with the rules and couldn't for the life of me work out what the different counters all meant so I am grateful, as ever, to Eric's patience.  It was really helpful of him to have produced little cards for each unit with their statistics on. So, it was a really enjoyable game but at a time when I am trying to get rid of figures it does mean I have to make some decisions about ECW.  At Guildford most people had Redoubt figures which the Renegade ones matched well with but I think I will put my remaining unpainted Renegade figures on eBay and get some of the Empress ones, perhaps.

Thanks, as ever, to Eric for a fabulous game.

Some more British for the North West Frontier, workbench plans, ECW, retro dinosaurs, medieavals and some Philip Glass

Well, I finished another four British infantry for the Second Afghan War today.  They are going to look good en masse I think (given my idea of en masse is about twenty figures!).  I have eleven more to do before I get on with some of the Indian figures.  Although I enjoyed painting them, I have some issues with these Artizan figures, which I expand upon in my Sub-Continent blog.

Elsewhere on the workbench, I have some Lucid Eye Neanderthals I want to finish, which I may have a go at over the weekend.  Work also continues on the Carolingians for Lion Rampant, with the first eight archers being based and ready for undercoating.  I am going to see if I can get some more of these at Salute, which is not far off now.  For the first time ever, given the tedious wait I experienced last year, I have pre-ordered a ticket, although I usually get there at about eleven, when there is no queue. I really don't want to significantly add to the lead pile this year so will confine myself to Carolingians and North West Frontier (if they have them).  The only thing I might get, if available, will be some of the new Footsore Franco-Prussian War figures.

Empress Oxford Army pikemen

A couple of pieces on the Wargames News and Terrain site caught my eye this week.  Firstly, Empress Miniatures have released some new figures for their early English Civil War range.  I bought some of the initial release, even though I have a lot of the excellent Renegade figures, because I am more interested in the early years of the war than the New Model Army period. I though the range had died and hadn't realised that Empress had been steadily releasing a lot more packs in this range.  I must dig out the ones I started. The new ones are for the King's Oxford Army of 1643 which were quite effectively uniformed in red or blue with montero caps.  

Antediluvian Megalosaurus

The other interesting post featured a new company to me, Antediluvian Miniatures, who have produced a couple of large (15cm) dinosaur models based on the reconstructions put up under the supervision of Richard Owen at Crystal Palace in 1851.  Of course, these reconstructions are nothing like what we now know Iguanodon and Megalosaurus looked like but as Lost World or centre of the earth type creatures they are very effective and, indeed, rather charming.

I read an enjoyable novel by Greg Bear, a few years ago, called Dinosaur Summer, which is about a world where Professor Challenger and his successors bring dinosaurs back from the Lost World plateau for dinosaur circuses.  Set in the thirties the book features an expedition to take one of the last surviving circus dinosaurs back to the plateau.  What was interesting about it, from this point of view, is that it contemplates the fact that the dinosaurs on the plateau have continued to evolve so do not necessarily all resemble those in the fossil record.  I like the idea of these Antediluvian creatures having evolved from their original therapod ancestors into these lumbering quadrupeds.

It says something for the buzz around Lion Rampant that Crusader Miniatures have come out with some more packs for their 7th Crusade, mid thirteenth century, range in order to provide all the troop types for the rules.  These days I find Crusader's figures a bit too chunky for my tastes but they are certainly easy to paint and I have got quite a few of their Dark Ages figures.

Today's music is from my quite large collection of minimalist music; which consists largely of Glass, Adams (or is he a post-minimalist?), Reich and Nyman. The Legatus is something of a completist and for many years one of my favourite minimalist CDs was Philip Glass' Dancepieces, which featured five pieces from his ballet music In the Upper Room.  This week I was browsing through iTunes, looking for something else, and I found the complete suite so I was able to download the four tracks I was missing from the piece.  It is always rather satisfying to discover extra pieces of a well loved work and this particular piece is powerfully nostalgic.

I discovered this piece when I was living in my first flat, in Wimbledon, so it is forever aurally reminiscent of my girlfriends at the time.  I had moved in to the flat in May and, rather disgracefully, I was running five ladies at the same time during that memorable summer in 1988.  Although one of these, A, the girl in the flat downstairs, who was a nurse, soon cottoned on to the other young ladies coming to stay over, so she soon went off in a huff.  "I don't want to be part of a harem!" she said acidly, after I had cooked her a rather good paella, complete with a lobster on top, and she had drunk most of a bottle of CVNE Imperial Rioja Gran Reserva 1976.  If she had told me this before lunch I could have invited K around instead and she would have been a lot more appreciative.  Two of the other girls knew about the existence of each other and while not happy about it they didn't go off in a huff (reader, I married one of them).  Two of them had known each other at university (they were in the nature of lingering ex-girlfriends) and we had rather 'elastic' relationships, which meant, essentially that we 'went out' with each other if we didn't have anyone else serious on the go.  I think the modern term is 'f*** buddy'.

Anyway, one of these girls (I have written about her before in relation to running in Richmond Park) really liked the Philip Glass piece so it reminds me of her and my decadent summer of juggling (and what lovely juggles she had too).  

Incidentally, what is it with people called Philip (in this case)?  Why on earth can't they all agree on how to spell their name? If I am emailing someone called Philip I always have to double check the spelling and if I haven't got my glasses on all the 'l's and 'i's merge into one, zebra-striped blur anyway.  Are they Phillip, Philipp or even Phillipp.? Sort yourselves out, Phils!  

2015 Plans: Skirmish vs Big battles? Time for a sort out!

The work bench really, really needs a sort out!

Well, the process of writing my Wargaming review has actually got me picking up a paintbrush for the first time since mid-October.  Not for very long but it broke a psychological barrier.  I also did a bit of basing and did some work on the helmets of my Afghan Wars British to make them look more suitable for 1879.  The key problem now is the really bad light.  I have two daylight lamps on my desk but can't really paint shading without good daylight.

One of the things I discovered last year is that, thanks mainly to the work I did on IHMN figures, I really enjoy painting individual character figures and don't enjoy painting units.  Now given this, and given the fact that I am totally unable to focus on even as little as a few dozen periods, is it not now time to just admit that I am never going to be able to finish enough figures to field an army for a big battle?  People with the focus of Giles and Big Red Bat are much to be admired as they don't stray too far from their core interests.  I am sitting here looking at a based and undercoated Great War Miniatures British Crimean War infantry man. Am I really ever going to paint enough units for the Battle of the Alma?  No, is the brutal answer.  I have played in a few large games at Guildford (Republican and Early Imperial Roman, ECW and Wars of the Roses) where I could contribute my hundred figures or so to other people's larger collections.  In reality, I think, this is the only way I will be able to do big battles using my own figures.  So time to forget building armies that require several hundred figures, I think.

Wars of the Roses at Guildford Wargames Club.  Not much scenery required

However, there is a problem with skirmish games for me.  If you have two big armies facing each other in your typical ancients or medieaval game you really don't need much in the way of scenery.  A green cloth, a few trees, some lichen for scrub and maybe a hill.  All the effort and cost goes into the armies.  However, with most skirmish games lots of scenery is usually necessary; almost always to provide cover.  This is because, in many of the sets of rules I have played a hit (or two) means you lose the character and if you are looking at forces of six to 12 figures this can make the game very short indeed (as I have witnessed on one or two occasions).  With big unit battles the units are more resilient and don't get destroyed on first contact.  They can slug it out and maybe even regroup if they are forced back.  So being in the open and getting hit by a flight of arrows is unlikely to lead to your unit being taken off the table instantly.  You don't need to keep them skulking under cover so don't need cover for them to hide behind.  Skirmish games tend to require a lot of scenery and getting suitable scenery done is a problem for me given that I have no craft skills whatsoever, unlike Scott and Eric the Shed who turn out miniature wonders.  So its a trade off between lots of figures and less scenery and less figures and more scenery.  Time and cost wise, I suspect they balance out.

The mini Bosworth game I produced for my son's school project. 

I was talking to my new friend A about the problems of not painting enough figures for an army but she pointed out that, basically, if a unit fights as one whole then why do you need 24 figures when six or one serve the same purpose (I did not then start to describe DBA to her).  When I produced a model of Bosworth for a presentation my son did at school we represented all the major units using just 38 figures.  It is of course, certainly for me, all about the look of the thing (which is why I think DBS armies look ridiculous). Big units look better (as the writers of Warlord Games various rules acknowledge with what was, at the time, an unfashionable focus on large armies).  They are a figure manufacturer, of course, so like their Games Workshop former employers want to shift quantity but it has, to a certain extent, seen a return to Charles Grant sized (well, nearly) units.  

My 48 figure Blue regiment of foot

The first proper set of wargames rules I owned where Charles Grant's Napoleonic ones based on his articles in Military Modelling in the seventies.  These posited 48 man units.   I do actually have two units this size; the only two ECW units I have painted.  The size was dictated by having what looked like a reasonable block of pikemen.  Sixteen figures was as small as I thought looked good and then that dictated the sizes of the sleeves of shot.  I tried a nine man pike unit and it looked odd.  The next size up to keep a square pike block would have been 25 figures leading to 75 man units.  Too much!  For my armies I now work to a 24 man standard size but this would mean that, at most, I could only paint four units a year and that would be if I could focus on one period!

Five colour shading really isn't necessary on 18mm figures, perhaps

The big battle people would say that the obvious solution would be to move down to 15mm or less.  My problem with this is that figures of 12mm or less have ludicrous looking anatomy.  I did too much anatomy while studying art to get over this.  There are a few, a very few, manufacturers who make reasonable looking 15mm figures, which is why I have bought into the War and Empire Kickstarter.  15mm really is sensible for ancients.  The problem is that with the few 15mm (really 18mm, of course, these days) figures I have painted I paint them as if they were 28mm so I don't paint them appreciably faster.  When I was choosing which armies to select for my War and Empire forces I eliminated all those where I had some 28 figures painted, which meant I eliminated nearly everything. This is why I have ended up with Spartacus revolt.  I wanted to go for the Punic Wars but I have quite a lot of 28mm figures painted for this so just couldn't, even though I know that I will never finish an army for either side in this scale.

Muskets & Tomahawks at the Shed

This last year, however, I think I have solved the problem with the appearance of rules like Lion Rampant and the fact that I played my first game of Muskets & Tomahawks.  My force for the latter was three units of six. Admittedly, there were two other players on my side with the same number of figures but that is nine units in total for not many more figures than in my ECW units.  These are both what I would call semi-skirmish games, using around 6o figures a side maximum.  This is an achievable target for me. 

My only painted figures for El Cid

So what does this mean going forward?  I will keep working on IHMN companies and I will jump forward in time with the rules, slightly, to cover The Lost World (I just picked up the lady explorer I had been looking for to finish my characters for this) and the twenties in Egypt and, possibly, the twenties/thirties in Asia.  I will get going on more pirates and Jason and the Argonauts figures too.  I am seeing the Afghan War as a semi-skirmish project so will carry on with that.  I want to do a Lion Rampant force and the logical one would be the Wars of the Roses as I have already got most of the figures but I am also tempted to go back in time and do Crusades or El Cid for this.  There is more to be done on Darkest Africa which is another semi-skirmish project but one where I have painted a lot of figures.  Add to this some Hobbit,  Mars Attacks, WW1 and Texan War of Independence figures and I think I have more than enough to be going on with.  See, even my focus is already losing focus!  Lots of stuff to put on eBay, even so, I think!

Battle of Farnham Castle 1643

Parliament marches onto the field

Although I have been to one or two small (like an episode of Sharpe) Napoleonic re-enactments at the local Painshill Park I haven't been to a big one so when I saw a note about The Sealed Knot being at Loseley Park this weekend (on The Wars of Louis Quatorze site-see link on the right) I decided to take my little boy Guy along.

Drummerettes!

In the morning there was a skirmish between a small Royalist and Parliamentarian force. They used the oportunity to demonstrate (rather well I thought) the roles of the different troops and weapons. One of the things that struck me straight away was how many women were in the different units. Not just wandering around in the background in 17th century frocks (although there were plenty of those) but with muskets and even pikes.

I was delighted to see that one of the units there represented The Tower Hamlets trained band with their distinctive colour bearing their motto 'Jehova Providebit' (God Will Provide). This is one of the two units of Civil War infantry I have painted so far and although they only saw action at Cropredy Bridge they can be used to represent any of the London trained bands, such as the three regiments which were present with Sir William Waller's force at Farnham Castle.

A royalist force representing Lord Hopton's army then marched down the hill (the field used for the re-enactment was a very good choice, giving good visibility).

An American reader commented on the Louis XIV site that some American Civil War re-enactors had been banned from using gunpowder as it scared the "gentle-folk", or some such politically correct nonsense. No shortage of gunpowder today, however, and Guy's grandmother didn't seem at all phased ("I lived through the Blitz this is just fireworks!").

In the afternoon, after a drill demonstation by The First Foot Guards from the Monmouth rebellion period and an enjoyable large skirmish from the Medieval Seige Society (more of which tomorrow) we had the "big battle".

By this time we were enjoying our hottest day of the year and it reached 25 degrees, meaning a lot of hard work for those members of the forces that had to supply on-field water. It started with a Royalist force marching down the hill to approach what were supposed to be the walls of Farnham Castle, Wallers HQ in 1643.

Waller's forces march out of the castle to meet the Royalists

The view from "Farnham Castle" up the hill where the Royalist army assembles

It wasn't long before there were hundreds of re-enactors on the field. Well over a thousand, I believe. Battle commenced and went on for over an hour.

A good push of pike

The man with the tabard with a cross on is one of The Sealed Knot's trained medics.

There were over a dozen artillery pieces in action

All in all a very enjoyable day although I feel a bit over-cooked tonight and feel I might need some cool Chardonnay! Guy loved it and I had to forcibly restrain him from joining the Blew Regiment of Foot there and then.

The Tower Hamlets Trained Band

This is my largest wargames unit: the Tower Hamlets Trained Band. Sixteen pikemen and thirty-two musketeers. I modelled this unit some years ago and chose the THTB for my first ECW unit as my first job in the City was actually in an office in Tower Hamlets (just!). The flags are from Body's Banners and the figures are all Renegade Miniatures.

I've actually used them in four games now but it is only as of this weekend, when I painted seven more, that they got up to their full strength of 48 figures; very old school!

Frankly, I think a pike block looks a bit weedy with less than 16 figures: the front rank still have tassets. There is a set of THTB pikeman's armour (with tassets) in the Royal Armouries.

Now there is a fundamental flaw with my unit and that is that they are armed with normal matchlock muskets, whereas the THTB had firelocks. These they used to great effect at Cropredy Bridge (their only action) when they put lit matches on poles on the bridge for the Royalists to shoot at at night whilst they shot back from below the bridge with their firelocks. At the time I painted most of the unit you couldn't get figures with firelocks but now Bicorne do them so at some point I will replace all the musketeers with firelock men and use the musketeers as the basis of a new unit.

The Earl of Essex

This is my Bicorne Miniatures model of Robert Devereaux, The Third Earl of Essex, (January 11, 1591 – 14 September 1646) who acts as General of my rather small ECW Army of two units of foot and one of cuirassiers.

The Earl of Essex's father, also named Robert, had been executed for treason in 1604 and his mother, Frances Walsingham, was the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I's head of intelligence.

Following the accession of King Charles I, Essex became a Parliamentarian and led the Roundhead army at the beginning of the English Civil War in 1642, notably at Edgehill. He then commanded the forces at Turnham Green, which blocked the far smaller Royalist army from entering London; the Earl's forces having been boosted by the presence of the London Trained Bands and the Royalist's not being prepared at this stage, to force battle on a large group of, essentially, civilian Londoners.

His campaign in Cornwall was largely disastrous and his forces were pummelled at Lostwithiel, much to Cromwell's annoyance. He resigned his position in 1646 and died the same year. So why do I have him as my army general? Firstly, because we share a birthday and secondly his colours were orange, which was my favourite colour when I was little!