A Back of Beyond Wargame

In a particularly green part of Central Asia the Warlord sends his White Russian lancers forward to recce

Thanks to Alastair for setting up a very rare game for me at Guildford last night. The first I had played on a regular club night for two and a half years, I think!  It was a Back of Beyond game with his Bolsheviks against my Warlord Chinese using the Triumph and Tragedy rules, which neither of us had played before.  His take on it is here

Getting me to explain how a set of wargames rules works is like asking Kelly Brook to explain the workings of the Large Hadron Collider (does it collide large Hadrons or is it just a large machine for colliding normal sized Hadrons?  I suppose I could ask my daughter but she is upstairs with next door's cat asleep on her bed again).  

The right teacher is so important to proper comprehension

Basically, each unit has a card and you can chose which order to activate your units and what they are going to do (move, shoot, recover, charge etc).  Each player lays down one card per unit in whatever order they chose to activate all the units until they are all done. This made the choice of which units to activate in which order quite tactical and I was nearly getting the hang of it by the end.  Small units of about ten figures gave a nice manageable game with throws to hit (on a D10) and throws to save (in a D6).  All in all I thought they were good rules and, initially at least, there were far less casualties than in the Chris Peers Contemptible Little Armies set which I used in the only other Back of Beyond game I have had.  It does require markers to indicate the status of units which I am not a big fan of but Alastair had some funny Litko skull markers which were better than most I have seen.

What Russian sailors are doing in the middle of Central Asia I am not quite sure.  You can tell it's the Back of Beyond because there are Yaks!

The scenario had a group of Russian Navy sailors holding a railway station with the Chinese attempting to blow up the railway.  There was also something about the Russians telegraphing for an (invisible) armoured train.  Given its invisibility I don't know whether it arrived or not.  

Somewhere I have an armoured train model for the period which I bought from Mark Copplestone.  It all reminds me of the Anthony Conway Caspasian novel The General's Envoy which featured a Chinese armoured train and a warlord army.  I must read it again!

I didn't have a lot of cover on my side of the board so just advanced in lines.  Obviously my army had been trained by a German officer who had gone to China before the Great War.  I was worried about the close proximity of my troops faced with a machine gun but the rules don't penalise this; it is just a score against the unit - how closely packed they are doesn't matter (unlike grenades).

Although advancing into a machine gun is not usually a good idea I was lucky and my own machine gun soon put paid to it.

I had attacked Alastair's weak flank but he soon had some troops racing to plug the gap which they did quite well but eventually I ground them down.

My general makes a break for the abandoned station while my elite unit prepares to engage yet another wave of Bolsheviks.

At first I had no idea what I was doing (as usual) but by the end of the game I had a plan and was using the threat of my cavalry to pin down a couple of units while (I hoped) my force on the left could turn Alastair's flank.   All was going well until my cavalry charge came up short (it's a set distance plus the best of two D6) and my lovely newly painted lancers were sent off.  Still, they did better than most newly painted units.

Meanwhile my general had dismounted inside the station and was soon involved in a vicious hand to hand fight where he put his sword to good use.  Things were looking bad for the general but some more of my troops piled in and he survived (admittedly by running away).

One more move failed to resolve things.  I had lost my machine gun and my lancers but still had three viable units, one of whom was still at full strength.   Alastair had four units left (I think) but they were down to a handful each.  I could still have gone either way which is why we decided to leave it there (and it was late and he had to walk the dog!).

I am very grateful to Alastair for the game as there was a fair bit of paperwork he had to prepare in advance for it.  He even made me a unit card for my cavalry which had a picture of my actual figures on it!

Now, hopefully, it won't be two and a half years until my next game at Guildford!

Getting ready for Salute...and three more Romans

Lucius Verus and friend.

I don't know why I am so excited about Salute this year.  Perhaps its due to the prospect of picking up my In Her Majesty's Name figures, although how I will explain such a lot of new metal to my wife is tricky.  However, I feel she should cut me some slack as she is prizing the tiles of the kitchen floor in readiness for a new one and we have a man coming to install our new cooker hood this afternoon, which was my Christmas present to her (she did ask for it).  It must be worth it to stop all of her moaning about my cooking staining the ceiling and filling the house with mould-inducing water vapour (according to her anyway).  She doesn't really cook (she went to Winkfield Place finishing school (as did Princess Diana) and that bit of the curriculum must have completely passed her by...she does arrange flowers nicely, though) and my cooking is often of the Italian variety which does, admittedly, seem to lead to a large circle of sauce around the pan and up the wall.  How a cooker hood is going to cure this I'm not sure.  I think she has visions of stray droplets being sucked heavenwards by this hideously expensive piece of German technology, which will have to contain the equivalent of an Me 262 engine to generate the expected suction.

I keep telling her that it is a kitchen and not an Ideal Home Exhibition display home.  Not that I have anything against the Ideal Home Exhibition (which also seems to be at ExCeL these days) as when I was small our holiday house in the South of France was paid for on the back of an Ideal Home Exhibition house my father designed.  Still, kitchens are supposed to get messy.  All in all, therefore, I am reasoning that given how much I am forking out for the kitchen she might ignore my Salute stash.

Anyway, a bit more progress on the Romans this weekend with the Praetorians all now based and undercoated..  All of the Caesarian plastics are assembled and based but I seem to have lost one of them.  I cannot think where he has gone at all but I have the new metal command so his absence won't be felt. 

This morning I finished my second Emperor for the 2nd Century force I am building, Lucius Verus.  Rather than an officer I have giving him a nice Syrian slave girl to accompany him.  Verus had fair hair, we know, but I resisted the urge to replicate the gold dust he used to sprinkle in his hair.  I have taken a less than historical approach to his armour and have dressed him up in a version of that worn by Richard Burton as Mark Anthony in Cleopatra.  The original was owned by Debbie Reynolds and it was put up for sale in 2011 with a  starting price of $20,000.   I wonder if anyone bought it?

Sadly, no one makes a figure that approximates the ne plus ultra of Roman cinematic costume as worn by Burton in the same film.  

I also painted the first figure for my Caesarian army, a veteran centurion.  This is a Copplestone-sculpted Foundry figure and he looks suitably stolid.

Thanks to Scott I also bought into the other Victorian steampunk range, Empire of the Dead and had to choose which figures I wanted for that this week.  Much to my surprise I have gone for some of the more vampire-like ones and so watched Van Helsing again this week for inspiration.  I really liked the completely inauthentic Transylvanian village in that film but reproducing that would be well beyond my modelling skills!  Still, it has got me thinking about an Eastern European rather than a Victorian London setting.  A few houses and some woods seems more achievable!

One thing I am going to try and get at Salute is some more CDs of Miniature Wargames so I can get rid of some of my bound copies off my shelves.  Space is everything at present!  I need to check which ones I have already got before I go, though!  I am wondering about picking up some of the Empress miniatures Jazz Age tribesmen too for Waziristan.   Other than that I don't have a big list this year.  Let's see what happens!

60 Years of James Bond

We couldn't possibly let the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of the first James Bond novel pass without mention.  Casino Royale was published by Jonathan Cape on April 13th 1953 with this very uninspiring cover which was, nevertheless, designed by Ian Fleming himself.  Originally priced at 10s 6d only 4,728 copies were published and first editions in good condition can now fetch up to £50,000 each.

The first copy which the Legatus owned was the 1977 re-issue by Panther books which had striking covers featuring a specially commissioned giant 9mm automatic and were photographed by Beverley Le Barrow, who shot a lot of book covers in the seventies.  As a seventeen year old we were very choosy about which girls we liked but on these covers, I am afarid to say, that Casino Royale's big haired blonde never did anything for me.  I preferred, at the time, the slutty obviousness of the Diamonds are Forever girl.

In 1955 the first paperback version of the book was published by Pan Macmillan and it featured the first pictorial representation of James Bond which is, incidentally, nothing like his description in the novel!

When the book was first published in the US in 1958 they changed the title to You Asked For It; probably because Casino Royale sounded too foreign.

The 1960 edition of the paperback has a Bond looking much more like Fleming's description of him in the book, particularly down to the errant quiff of hair over his forehead.  This is an illustration by top London illustrator Sam Peffer (or Peff as he signed his work).  The model for Vesper was his wife Kit.

Here we have (above) the 1963 paperback cover which is almost identical to the 1961 (top) cover with the exception of the removal of a small portrait of Bond from the bottom left corner, presumably done because by this time Sean Connery had been cast in Doctor No. 

This is the very dull 1965 version which is sadly totally lacking in any artistic interpretation of Vesper Lynd.

This is the film tie-in version for the entertainingly strange film version from 1967.  The illustration is by Robert McGinnis who did so many of the classic posters for the Salzman-Broccoli film series.

Only a small glimpse of Vesper in the 1974 edition but lots of props mentioned in the book are included in this one.  

The next UK edition would be the one with the golden gun pictured above. This is the Dutch version which uses the same prop and girl but in a different pose.

By 1988 the girls had gone and we had these rather tedious covers instead.

Eight years later and it's back to the casino theme.

After the 1978 golden gun covers (and sadly the Casino Royale one is one of the less appealing ones) my favourites are the retro ones from 2002.  This one features a particularly seductive Vesper.  

Here is the 2006 film tie-in version featuring Daniel Craig with Vesper just appearing as a silhouette, which is a tragic waste of Eva Green.

This is the 2009 reissue with cover illustration by Michael Gillette.  They are sixties rather than fifties retro in style, going back to the birth of the cinematic rather than the literary Bond. My friend Bill gave me complete set of these for Christmas a few years ago.

I have never wanted to wargame James Bond, despite the rather good figures available, largely because the elements of Bond I respond to are the drinks, the women and the glossy hotels (I can't think why).  The actual action sequences are less interesting; its the brand name fluff, which Fleming essentially created, that is more appealing.

Anyway, happy birthday James Bond!  

A few more Argonauts...but painting is slow.

As I recently mentioned on my Romans blog I am having trouble motivating myself to paint at present, despite the sunnier weather of late.  This is odd considering I have lots of new toys to do in the shape of Caesarian and 2nd century AD Romans.  The essence of the problem is that I have just finished quite a lot (for me, anyway) of figures so I have nothing close to completion.  Everything on the workbench is figuratively uphill still.  Now I can't face the Prussians or ACW figures yet as they are each only about half done and there are over twenty of each to do.  To sit down and do some painting and find that all you will have achieved is to shade blanket rolls and backpacks (the next stage on my Prussians) is a not very inspiring thought.  I don't even have any characters well on the way who I could have a go at.  As for my new Romans they are still very much at the preparation stage; with base texturing and undercoating needed on  half the Aventine figures and a lot more assembly on the plastics.  Still, at least I can do these stages in the evening when the light has gone.

I may have another wargame next Monday so really should be getting on with my warlord Chinese cavalry but they are nowhere near finished.  I did do some work on a couple of horses today.

I have finished a few more Argonauts today at least.  These don't photograph very well because of the contrast between the black and the bronze but I am moving along with them anyway.  Maybe some opponents next and starting work on the Argo.  More about them all on my Argonauts blog in due course. 

The next character I have decided to move along is Emperor Lucius Verus who is now based and undercoated.  I am going to get his basic skin colour down in a minute.  I have decided to take an unusually non-historic approach to the figure and paint him in the style of a famous cinematic Roman.  

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L to R: Aventine Praetorian, Warlord plastic legionary, Warlord metal slave girl and Aventine Emperor

I depicted Marcus Aurelius with a centurion but Lucius Verus is going to get the Warlord slave girls as his entourage, as this suits his (allegedly) debauched character.  The ladies are far too tall for the Warlord Romans (who are actually a completely different scale to the Aventine figures) but work very well with the much more strapping Aventine figures.  If the prospect of painting slave girls won't get me started again nothing will!

More useful colour reference from Spartacus

Warlord Games Caesar's Legions and other shopping

I headed down to Orc's Nest this morning, after my morning meeting near Euston, only to find it didn't open until 11.00am.  Given it was 10.30 and absolutely freezing again I went around the corner to Foyles bookshop, which was a mistake.  Three rapid purchases followed in their very good military history section.  

The first, at least, I had intended to buy, which was the Bolt Action British supplement.  Some useful lists although an almost total lack of mention of either Norway or Crete in their focus on the different theatres the British Army saw action in.  Warlord have re-issued the old Mike Owen sculpted BEF early war British with interchangeable heads so I might have to get some more of these.  Much of the book focuses on stats for various vehicles and some theatre specific army lists.  I would really like a 1/56 Matilda!   I need the German one, which they also had in stock, but feel a bit odd buying WW2 German military books.  People might think I was one of those ghastly Nazi apologists they had at Salute a few years back.   Best to order anonymously off the web for delivery in a plain paper cover.

I also picked up a book of American Civil War paintings by Keith Rocco.  I hadn't heard of him before but there are some very nice illustrations in this and they will get me to finish my ACW unit I hope!

Finally, I bought another Peter Hopkirk Back of Beyond book Foreign Devils on the Silk Road which is so fascinatingly readable that I am already well into it.  Some definite scenarios spring to mind around competing treasure hunters from different countries.  I would then have an excuse to buy some Copplestone Castings pack camels!

So, eventually, back to Orc's Nest, and, sadly, no sign of the new Black Powder Hundred Days supplement yet but I did pick up the Rome's Dacian Wars supplement for Hail Caesar.  Since my trip to Romania last year I have had a hankering to do some Dacians and this may well tip me over the edge.  Apart from the usual army lists there are a few tweaks to the rules (allowing Roman archers to shoot over the heads of an infantry unit in front of them, for example) plus new (basic) rules for ship movement and rather more in depth rules for sieges.  There are new skirmish rules included but these are really very small scale as they envisage just six figures a side.  Excellent news for me!  Essentially for one unit in the main rules read one figure.  I might have to try these out.  There are five short skirmish scenarios (lost patrol, the scouts, working party, the lost eagle, the prisoners) all designed for a 2' x 2' board.  Most of the book is made up of nine scenarios for big battles (siege, river crossing, hold the pass etc).  They are big too, with the first one requiring over twenty units of Romans and the same for the Dacians/Samaratians.  They would all equally work as well for any barbarian opponent and I will be using some for my Marcomannic Wars forces (eventually).  Altogether a worthwhile purchase and full of pretty pictures, as ever.

Most satisfying buy of the day was, rather to my surprise, the new Warlord Games Caesarian Romans.  I saw the three-ups of these at last year's Salute.  I have got quite a lot of the Foundry Copplestone sculpted ones which was making me hesitate about buying these but, blow me down, they work perfectly together.  You could put them in the same unit with no problem at all.  

Warlord (L) and Foundry (R)

I wasn't convinced by them in photographs as I thought that the chainmail rings were too large and crude but they look fine in reality and are the same size as those on the Foundry figures.  In fact, I think they are actually nicer than the Copplestone figures but it means I can use all the Foundry character and command figures with the Warlord plastics.  The Warlord figure looks bigger but it has a much thicker base.  If I mix in metal Foundry command (although Warlord have released a nice metal command set today) I might put something under the base of the Foundry figures. Unlike some Warlord Romans they don't come with shield transfers but you can get them separately.  The only bad thing is that now I am going to be building Roman units from three separate periods at the same time.  I'm turning into Big Red Bat!  They should be quick to paint too!  The most exciting plastics since Pamela Anderson in the opening of Barb Wire!  Simple but effective (just like Pammy!).  

Anyway I know exactly what to drink while putting them together (separate heads and right arms) as last year I bought a few bottles of a delicious Spanish wine called Legio from the Bierzo region which actually has a Roman shield (albeit a standard bearer's, by the look of it) on the label.  I Have a bottle already to go!

I also managed to pick up last month's Playboy which, again, demonstrates a marked improvement in cover design over the frantically busy and uninspiring covers of the last few years.  There have been just over 700 issues and I have about 580 of them.  They take up a lot more room than model soldiers though, bearing in mind that, as an example, for the seventies (for which I have all 120 copies) they take up 20 box files ( I only have 56 box files full of soldiers).  I only need six more from the sixties to complete that decade too. I need a bigger study!  I must stop putting half dressed women in my posts or someone will label it an objectionable blog. 

Speaking of which, following all this retail activity (I did work pretty much all day Easter Monday) I then had a long lunch at the National Gallery with the lovely D who, disappointingly was not wearing one of her usual low cut tops.  Curse this weather!  D is, rather dubiously, the friend of one of an ex colleague's daughter so is less than half my age.  Never mind, she keeps me young and we had a lively debate about tablets (not the sort I need to take, as she cruelly pointed out), social media and the Cloud.  "We should be in the Natural History Museum, you'd be much more at home there!" she said in exasperation at one point.  How rude!

Well I have just put together a short Roman playlist on iTunes (Respighi's I pini della Via Appia, the Triumphal March from Quo Vadis and quite a lot of bits of Ben Hur) so I need to start clipping Romans off the sprue (although I gather that the sprue is only the thickest parts off the whole thing).  

New quarter, new figures.

So, I have completed a few more figures to get the second quarter of the year off to a good start. A strange mixture of Argonauts, Romans and a Back of Beyond Russian.  All of these I class as characters rather than rank and file and so, in theory, I should spend more time on them. I'm now aiming to get as many figures done in the first six months of this year as I did in the whole of 2012.  Next up I want to finish my unit of Chinese warlord cavalry.  At the same time I want to base and undercoat my Aventine Praetorians; the next shipment is already en route from Northern Ireland!  Then I really must finish either the Prussians or the ACW Federal troops.

Copplestone castings Bolshevik girly

The warlord cavalry are a bit dull, colour-wise, so I need something bright to paint at the same time so am going to do Marcus Aurelius' co-emperor, Lucius Verus.  He liked a good time (unlike the philosophising Marcus Aurelius) so maybe that is the excuse I need to paint the Warlord slave girls who are far too tall for the Warlord soldiers but would look OK with the Aventine figures.

Accurate colour reference is so important, even for slave girls.

They are more Spartacus the TV series than anything remotely historic so I will paint them as such.    In fact, this serves to highlight the greatest enemy of historical accuracy in films.  It's not the director, it's the costume designer.  I seem to remember the costume designer for Spartacus said that they made the crowd in the arena's clothes very colourful as plain old white and natural linens were too dull.  The producers of the recent (and not very good -except for Jenna Louise Coleman who was just gorgeous) TV Titanic mini-series explained how she chose a particular palette for the costumes so they looked harmonious.  Grrr!  Stop being arty!  I know it makes your job more interesting but how about just trying to recreate costumes as they were in the period?  Don't design the clothes so as they make the sets look good or, worse, reflect the characters personalities.  

One thing I am struggling with at present is finding a good metallic gold paint.  The Citadel acrylics I have been using are horrible and don't dry brush at all well (the "grey" metallics, oddly, are fine)  The Vallejo bronze I use for my ancients is a bit better but maybe it's time to look at the good old Humbrol range as in days of yore.  Anyone else know of any good gold metallic paints?

Off to London tomorrow so maybe a trip to the banana coloured bunker that is Orc's Nest is called for.  On my list is the Hail Caesar Dacian Wars supplement, the new Albion Triumphant 2 - The Hundred Days Black Powder supplement and the plastic Caesarian Romans. 

Medea

I have had a pretty successful long weekend's painting, having finished the Darkest Africa askaris on Saturday. I got back to it yesterday afternoon and today and have a few more figures close to completion. Today, however, I completed the Wargames Foundry Medea for my Argonauts project which I hadn't even undercoated until Friday. 

I had got a rare pot of acrylic (how do people paint with this stuff? It's awful!) out to paint Marcus Aurelius' cloak so decided to give Medea a purple cloak too. She doesn't appear to be wearing anything else except some jewellery but then she is the world's first femme fatale I suppose.  The flash photos don't really do the nice Citadel purple justice but maybe I'll have another go at a photograph in the daylight tomorrow.  

I have another lady nearly finished for the Back of Beyond, five more Argonauts and the first two figures for  my new second century Roman army.  I've already ordered another  load of these from Aventine as they are so nice.  Hopefully, I can get all these done tomorrow which gives me a good start for April.  I got 27 figures done in March which means that in the first quarter of the year I have painted more than half the number I did in the whole of 2012!