Yorkist Army, Impetus

Something of a mini-milestone today, as I have finally completed enough of my Wars of the Roses figures to build a 300-point army for Impetus! This is the recommended size in the Impetus rulebook for the dining-room table I have, so I thought I'd whip them out for a photoshoot.

The full host of 12 bases, or roughly a third of the eventual total.

The Vanguard leader, Lord Fauconberg. When I searched for pics of him, lots of people seem to prefer his livery coat with the white cross on a red background, but I decided I liked the simple 'blue & white' colours. (The arrows base next to him will be used in Impetus as a disorder marker.)

Edward IV leading the Main, along with his personal standard-bearer. The standard was made from scanning the Freezywater book, duplicating & flipping the image, then painting up the printed-out version to replace back-to-front text. No masterpiece perhaps, but it works quite well!

The Earl of Warwick again, with his livery. He, like all the figures here, has had a powdering of Citadel grass glued to his base. It's the first time I've tried that, and despite my crude learning-curve efforts it seems to have added a lot. I've usually under-appreciated basing on my models in the past, so this is a real increase in effort for me.

The battle line in full array for a fight - enough to give any Lancastrian (or even just some poor unfortunate with red roses in his garden) pause for thought.

The King, in close-up. And no, it's not the "Blue Suede Shoes" King either, but the "Slaughter all those who oppose me" King... (The first one sounds nicer, doesn't he?)

A little close-up on Fauconberg, who I even gave a bit of face-detailing to, with eyes and mouth giving a bit of 'pop' to the figure, plus the neat black edge of the base making it a bit more hey-look-at-me! appeal.

Next up, a Lancastrian Impetus army!

First Battle near Tobruk, 1941

News at last of the first battle with my 'Desert War' figures. With surprising speed, I was able to bash out the painting and prepping of the Afrika Korps. Here's a picture of the completed 21st Panzer Division:

3 Tanks, 4 Infantry, 1 Artillery, 1 88mm, 2 Recon, 1 HQ (and a half-track just for the hell of it!)

Time to get the first battle onto the tabletop, and the marked-up pic below gives you an idea of the deployments.

The Axis plan is for a big, bold strike hooking around the open south flank. Consequently the Italians are left holding the north in a thin-stretched line, the more infantry-heavy 90th Light will act as the hinge on which the two panzer divisions turn to complete their move northwards and roll up the Brits.

British Army plans are slightly more cautious, given the Axis draw of so many Panzer unit cards. The two infantry divisions are deployed along the line of all those minefields, with the South Africans in the north and the Indians in the south. The 7th Armoured division stays back away to the south in open desert, lurking where it can do some damage to flanks. The Free-French brigade is left on the southern end of the main line for a bit more protection, while the tanks of the 8th Armoured brigade are kept in reserve behind the 4th Indian Division.

"Cup of tea, anyone?"

The battle started with the Germans roaring forward at full pelt, and 90th Light Division struck the Free French brigade full-on, aided by the efforts of the Luftwaffe who blew up it's artillery and HQ, meaning most of it's losses were permanently lost for this battle.

"Sacre Bleu! Voila les Boches!"

Thankfully the 4th Indian division quickly weighed into the struggle, and before long the battered French were pulling back to safety and it was the 90th Light who looked the more beleaguered. Southwards, the two Panzer divisions swept on and the 7th Armoured Division soon found that rather than picking on a flank it was being hit head-on by the 21st Panzer.

The fighting between these two divisions see-sawed back and forth for a while, with an attempt by the Luftwaffe to intervene brought spectacularly to grief by the Anti-Aircraft guns of the Desert Rats.

"Crikey, that was a close one!"

With the other units to its north and south engaged, 15th Panzer found itself advancing into a gap - would it turn north as planned, or south to outnumber the isolated 7th Armoured? It's grizzled lead-figure commander stood his full 10mm tall, and ordered his staff to keep moving northwards. However, he wasn't about to entirely leave 7th Armoured alone, and he ordered a recon battalion to go south and spot for his 8.8Flak guns, which he also detailed off south to form a little mini-detachment.

it wasn't long before the 88s proved a spectacular success, and 7th Armoured began to struggle against a foe they couldn't even hit back at!

"Krak!......Boom!"

The battle began to hot up, and as the scale of the Axis swing south became obvious, the British General ordered the South Africans in the north to attack out and hit the Italians, hoping to force a German unit to break off and rush to their aid. The Ariete Armoured division, far smaller in size and badly overstretched, soon found itself fighting a desperate retreat against the rampaging South Africans. Elsewhere on the field, the 90th Light and 15th Panzer attacked north together and slowly forced the 4th Indian to give up ground. It got a lot of good support from the armoured brigade and the remaining Frenchmen, but the numbers were definitely turning against it. Worst of all, the 7th Armoured division was nearly destroyed and retreated off-table, now freeing the 21st Panzer to join the fray!

It was all coming down to the supply depots in each army's rear - would the South Africans' raid blow them up first as the Italians collapsed, or would the heavy swing of the Germans land first? The Germans seemed to be doing better, as the British line weakened, the supply dumps came into range and the Panzers blew them up one after the other

Ka-Boom! "No more of ze bully beef for you tonight, Tommy!"

The South Africans similarly rampaged through the Axis rear, driving the Axis tanks back onto their last dump and forcing Rommel to rush the 21st Panzer back to try and hold them off!

Finally, neither side managed it (although the Brits did fail only because the Axis rolled a 6 on a saving throw!) Night fell on the desert, and both sides had to back off, realising they'd scored a draw - but with the Axis ahead by 1 point, thus claiming a technical win.

"Bad show, Timpkins!"

"Wunderbar!"

List of Projects

Disaster strikes in the wargames world! After ages with no dedicated space to play a game, I have finally managed to clear out an area of the loft for myself - only for the damn light to stop working the moment I try to play the first Desert War battle!

Pictured: the loft.

Most annoying, and also a real problem - what do I do in my evenings now? The WW2 Desert figures are all done; the Wars of the Roses figures are still there, but must be done in small doses to prevent madness. So, what else? I wound up buying a copy of Wargames Illustrated for some inspiration, and it turns out their issue (#283) is themed largely around the Gallipoli campaign.

Interesting stuff, and something which - despite knowing about it and being interested by it for a long time, I'd never considered it as a wargames project. Still, I'm wary about throwing myself into a new project after only about 2 seconds' thought! I decided to make a list of possible things I could do to fill the evenings until I could get the loft light fixed.

• Gallipoli campaign. Possibly in 10mm Pendraken figures? The magazine is naturally filled with the highly expensive 28mm figs, which look great but would be a hell of a thing to take on. Maybe a fair bit of terrain to make, too. Also, the old classic: how do you model trenches being dug and destroyed?!
• Medieval Campaign for DBA. Classic DBA campaign for a roughly Hundred Years' War, Burgundian Wars, late-medieval-esque thing. Time to use the 6mm Baccus figures I have, although a bit of awkward rebasing might be required? Armies would be English, French, Free Companies, Burgundians, Flemish, Swiss, etc. Does have the definite advantage that I own most of the figures - I'm just not that keen on chiselling a bunch of them off the bases I first glued them to!
• Play and record a full game of 'Barbarossa to Berlin', the GMT boardgame I own covering WW2 in Europe. It's a good game, but actually playing it through and recording it could give me a nice narrative to post on the blog by the end.
• Seven Years' War - not so much a painting exercise but more of a paper one. Use Tony Bath's 'Setting up a Wargames Campaign' to create a large fictional continent of countries to then fight out wars with my Austrian & Prussian 15mm armies.
• Do the Great Italian Wars for Impetus in 28mm. Expensive, but for Basic Impetus at least manageable, and also a period I've wanted to do for a while.
• Sudan Campaign, as inspired by reading 'The River War' and the 'Fire and Sword in the Sudan' website. They supply a full campaign, which is something I'm always a sucker for.
• The Boer War. Yet another period I've always had a quirky interest in, and I see that 'Too Fat Lardies' are currently developing a set of rules for it (their 'Lard Island News' blog has a few articles & photos.)
• Buy a boardgame, so I can play something straight away and not muck about with all that painting nonsense!

Too many options, not enough time & money! What to do? Ah, the dilemmas of the hobby...

Desert War Top Trumps

The desert war is set to begin shortly, as my second army for it goes into the final stages of painting and basing. In the meantime, I've turned my attention to cards for selecting the sides. For those who have been following this blog but perhaps haven't looked up the 'KISS Rommel' rules I'm using, I should explain - each side has a hand of eight cards and they draw five for each battle, which is a nice way of adding a bit of 'randomness' to it all. Most cards equate to a division for whatever country you're playing, possibly armoured, or motorised, or infantry. Some are only smaller Brigades which can be attached to other divisions, or may even just be a 'blank' with nothing at all!

I decided to make up some proper cards for this, properly printed out from a Word doc with nicely printed text and a symbol thrown in for a bit of colour. Here's an example of what I made up with a little bit of bashing around:

I found most divisions' symbols with a simple dig around on Wikipedia and typing the name into Google Images. Then, for easy reference, I listed the bases that each division consisted of on the card as well. With that, I printed them off, glued them to some thin card, then laminated them. Job done!

Here's the full British/Commonwealth/Multinational hand for the Eighth Army:

The Brits get 2 Armoured Divisions, 3 Infantry Divisions, a Free French Infantry Brigade, an Armoured Brigade, and one Blank Card (troops diverted to Greece or Malaya!)

Here's the German/Italian line-up:

There's actually nine here, as I wound up including an extra card for the optional Tiger Tank battalion I might use at some stage in the future. The basic hand of cards is 2 Panzer Divisions, 1 Motorized Infantry Division (the 90th Light,) An Italian Armoured Division, an Italian Motorized Infantry Division, 2 Infantry Divisions and 1 Blank Card (Planes from Malta sink a convoy!)

So, not long until the off! The Campaign begins at Tobruk, which is the midpoint on a track running from Tripoli to Cairo - victories move you up it, defeats move you back down, until one side loses their 'HQ Space' for total defeat. No timescale is given, but I'm taking things as set around the time of Operation Battleaxe, just after Rommel has arrived and when he and Wavell were first battling around the besieged Tobruk. In fact, with the cards ready, I couldn't resist at least drawing a hand for each side to see who'll fight in the first game. One card can be chosen, but the rest are randomly drawn. The results:

EIGHTH ARMY

7th Armoured Division (the Desert Rats)

4th (Indian) British Infantry Division

1st (South African) British Infantry Division

(Free French) British Infantry Brigade

Two British Armoured Brigades

AFRIKA KORPS

German 21st Panzer Division

Italian 132nd 'Ariete' Tank Division

German 90th Light Division

German 15th Panzer Division

Blank! - Planes From Malta Sink Convoy!

Well, quite the decent force for the British - Infantry & Armour divisions, although two cards are smaller brigades. The Axis are really looking for trouble, however - every German card turns up, plus the only Italian unit to show is an armoured one! Shame the other card was a blank, but it does mean that the Axis side, although small, is made up of highly mobile & armoured units. Now I really need to finish the painting and get them onto a tabletop - which I also don't quite have sorted, yet. One light-brown throw-rug or bed-sheet, coming up!

Afrika Korps Underway

Good gaming news arrives from the Tripoli dockside of 1941 - the Afrika Korps miniatures have arrived! One good piece of news from having previously done the British Eighth Army is that I knew what to expect in terms of model sizes, basing, etc. As such, I had the bases ready-cut from plastic 2mm sheets and glued the models down in super-fast time. Below is an overhead shot of the storage box:

The whole thing is about 83 or 84 bases' worth of German and Italian troops, who will soon be contesting the Western Desert of Egypt against the international Commonwealth troops of the British Empire and its allies.

Here's a close-up to try and show a bit more of some of the units. When ordering models, I didn't want to get drawn into large amounts of research about what models & variants of tank were available over the historical campaign period in question - the whole idea is to play a very impressionistic, simplified game of the WW2 desert. As such, I did most of my 'research' by reading up Wikipedia articles and mainly using Google Images to search for pictures of the vehicles. If they turned up in a picture in desert camouflage, that was good enough for me! Shown above are a Panzer Division's tank units. I plumped for two Panzer III models and a single Panzer IV with the little 'stubby' short-barrelled gun.

Above shows some of the rear-echelon support units for the Afrika veterans. Pendraken don't seem to do Italian field guns, so I used the German artillery for them too. (Incredibly fiddly to assemble, I have to admit!) There is also that famous feature of the Desert War, the 88mm gun in its anti-tank role. In the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) Rommel rules I'm going to use, even Italian divisions get an 88. This represents mostly German guns attached to them temporarily, or possibly their own equivalent of the 88mm gun (The 90mm, also lacking in Pendraken's lists - although to be fair I would've probably preferred the famous 88 models.)

I have even got a single Tiger tank model, to give me the option of putting the earliest prototype of that tank into the game (the rules suggest that it can be finally granted in defending Tunis, mainly because Hitler seemed to like only reinforcing disasters, thankfully!) Also in the background, you can see bags containing the one part where I have bought models that also link to the Allied side - air power! I have bought a model Bf109 and a Stuka, to give the Axis a pair of models to show airstrikes (not strictly necessary, but I liked the notion of adding them) and correspondingly I got a Spitfire and a Hurricane for the Desert Air Force (two fighters, I know, but I thought a Blenheim would be bigger and cost more!)

A Speedy paint-job is underway, then 'dipping' and spraying, then finally a bit of sand on the base. Then: next stop Cairo!

Down at the Workbench

A brief interlude to mention what I'm up to at the moment on my workbench - not that I actually have a permanent place like a 'workbench' or anything, but well, you get the idea.

The first thing driving me to madness is the ongoing painting epic with the Perry Wars of the Roses figures. I decided that painting en masse was the only way to avoid a complete nervous breakdown, so what you see snapped above is a full half (yes, just half - I need to do this all over again!) of the miniatures. Specifically, this is my 'Retinue' box, where all figures contained are getting a liveried coat. I am painting the figures step by step, and uniformly bringing them up to the same condition. First it was shoes, for about 80 figures (160 bloody boots!) and then it was skin-tone on the face & hands; then steel on helmets, mail & blades; now livery colours, as per the plan I had worked out. Hard going, for the time being at least, but there is undeniable progress to compensate for the present tedium. Once this is done, it's legs, then belts & equipment, then grass highlights on the bases.

So, what else? Well, the state of the other army at the moment is:

Well, let's be honest about it: it's awful. This is the embryonic stage of the army coming up shortly. It's the other half of my WW2 Desert Army pair: the Afrika Korps! The models are on order from Pendraken, but I have made a start by cutting the plastic bases for them all in advance. Here they are, stacked up, and pretty much all I have to look at until the postman does his thing!

"A Warwick!"

Painting progress with my Wars of the Roses figures, so I thought I'd supply an update.

I have completed one box-load of miniatures, and produced what is effectively a little 'Affinity' for the Earl of Warwick. 40 figures are done in total, partially previously painted ones and rounded out with newly sprayed & painted additions.

The force is split between two bases of Retinue (one each of Longbows and Billmen) and two other bases of Arrayed Levy troops (also one each of Longbows and Bills.) The Retinue troops are wearing Red livery coats, and although my red-liveried figures have to stand in for the Earl of Oxford as well as Warwick's boys, I have added quite a few of Warwick's 'ragged staff' badges. This is mainly because I expect to use them for Warwick far more than Oxford, basically, but from a distance you can't even really tell!

The painting itself was a bit different, as I base-coated the figures with the Army Painter 'Bleached Bone' spray-effect, which works for linen materials nicely but is far lighter than the black basecoat I used on my first batch. Also, I have discovered the Games Workshop wash 'Devlan Mud' after hearing it recommended on the 'Meeples & Miniatures' podcast and found myself very impressed. For those who don't know, it's effectively like a thinner version of the Army Painter 'Dip' in that it makes a basically painted model look shadowed, weathered, etc. For me it has the advantage of not requiring trips up to the loft to set up dipping batches and leaving them to dry with the weird smell of the dip, plus white spirits for the brushes, etc. Much more convenient, and it also ensures a much more bright & colourful medieval army for me - the first batch had black basecoats and were liberally dipped, so they came out a little murky & gloomy by the end. Perhaps realistic, but not quite as pleasant on the tabletop! The only thing remaining now is to varnish the new-paints, then give them a Matt-Finish Spray to kill the shine (even Humbrol's Matt-Varnish has a bit of a sheen to it, I've learned.) The final touch will be some grass-flocking on the bases.

Finally the man himself - Kingmaker Warwick, proud setter-up and puller-down of kings. By way of comparison, Warwick here was done with Devlan Mud and some varnish, while the standard-bearer behind him was (badly, I'll confess) 'dipped' and varnished - quite the difference! No banners yet I must report, mainly because I have ordered the guide from Freezywater on livery colours & banners, so until it arrives our noble standard-bearer is just some lunatic running around the battlefield with a stick.

Painting continues, and I shall try to update you more regularly with my flailing efforts!