First Plastic Steps

My usual method of ordering an army is to work it out in full, prepare an order, then place it in one bulk order (broken into 2 or 3 if it's a large project.) I always end up using a single manufacturer, rarely mix in other odds & ends, and generally keep the whole business as quick & clean as possible. The new 'Plastic Waterloo' project has broken new ground already, as I'm not doing this at all.

Instead of buying the lot from one place I'm picking up odd boxes here and there, wherever I can find them. I'm actually discovering the "collectors' side" of the hobby, which I've never bothered with before now - the challenge of hunting down the desired models and picking them up from obscure online shops, internet ebay auctions, and so on. The whole thing feels like a breath of fresh air - a mad hunt high and low to obtain that crucial last box of Zvezda French Napoleonic Line Artillery, where online listings need to be prowled every day. Strangely exciting, in an admittedly very nerdy way.

The master-plan is in place, at least. I've become best friends with the website Plasticsoldierreview.com for it's (splendid) catalogue of online photos & reviews about what each box contains. Frequently they're better than the manufacturers' own website!

The first steps have already been taken, and frankly I've already been convinced of the financial sense of the move. My first purchase was the Airfix Waterloo Diorama Box Set, which seems to contain four-hundred-odd figures of great use, plus a model farm-house - all a spectacular bag for just £20! I had spotted it in the Glasgow branch of Hamleys, but it is also available at this sale price from the Airfix website direct (oddly, other sites such as Amazon are still selling it at the full £35 price, so searching around has already paid benefits.)

Next up, I had a look on ebay and discovered that as well as individual boxes, folk also put up collections of several boxes at once. One I found a day or two ago which was coming to a halt for a pile of twelve Revell boxes, all Waterloo-relevant figures like British/Prussian/French Foot, Cavalry, Artillery, etc. I reasoned that this would be cheaper than buying individually, so plonked in a bid. While wandering around in the supermarket in my lunch-break yesterday, I got the email on my phone telling me I had won the lot! Although the exact number of figures is a little vague (do you count Artillery guns as one model? several? None?) but there's no denying the fact I seem to have gotten a real bargain. From my initial calculations, I believe I have gotten practically all my British Infantry for the price of roughly 10p per figure! Try that in lead at the closest scale (20mm to 25mm?) and you're probably talking ten times that price.

Once these packages are delivered, the next big challenge will be to track down some of the more awkward customers - things like Artillery, and some of the more obscure infantry. Once the Airfix Waterloo box arrives, I'll also be able to finalise my 'Target List' of what's required.

Plastic Fantastic

My last post brought two nice comments from Ray and Jim, so I thought I'd start by saying a big "Thanks!" to them both. Normally I just add a comment of my own to say ta, but I'm in such a positive mood I thought I'd start by just saying hi in the next post. More WotR stuff is coming shortly, including the next stage of my refight of the Wars (yes, I finally have enough figures painted to launch into that again!) For now though, something totally different...

Further progress from the usual chin-stroking about what big project to pick up next, and an unexpected one has turned up (isn't it always the way?) I had been pondering an attempt to make the Waterloo Campaign in miniature, largely inspired from reading over the old 'Horse Foot & Guns' rules (by Richard Bodley Scott) that I used to use, based on the DBA system but extending them into the horse & Musket period. The Army lists he produced are actually very precise for the 100-days' campaign, listing the entirety of the French, Prussian and Anglo-Allied armies. As ever with some project with a definite 'maximum size' feature, I found myself drawn to it.

Next up was the purchase off Amazon at knock-down price of the massive hardback book 'The Waterloo Companion' by Mark Adkin. This proved to have even more interest and info (although just of the titular battle, not the entire 4-day campaign) which worsened things. I began to plan out how I could buy the miniatures.

They're not small armies, and quite varied & eclectic in the case of Wellington's lot. As the only thing more involving than painting an army is organising your purchases to start painting an army, I found myself sinking into an ever-increasingly complicated pile of spreadsheets, price lists, packaging systems, manufacturers, and scales.

Ah, scales. What a headache that is in itself! I could do it in 2mm, and be super-realistic. I could do it in 6mm and get scale and detail, or I could go into 15mm and get a bit more abstracted, going for the DBA 4-figures-representing-a-brigade style of basing. I pondered. A lot.

I don't know if other gamers out there have the same experience, but if I spend ages examining and planning something, there can come a point where you hit a wall. Then, if some new idea occurs, it can blow the whole thing up into the air again and make you look at the whole thing afresh. I was very nearly settled on 6mm as the scale of choice, giving the best balance between visually pleasing end-results and not bankrupting myself along the way. Then, another dark-horse option turned up. In my case, it turned out to be plastic figures.

I remember these 1:72 cheap, flexible plastic figures with some personal nostalgia, as they were my very first wargame models. From the local toy shop I would get boxes of figures (Italieri/Esci/ERTL as I recall) and I bought pretty much one of each, as back then I saw no point in wasting pocket money buying two of the same thing, and balanced force-composition wasn't my thing. I had various mixes of them, such as a box of Romans and a box of barbarians (lots of red paint on the axe-blades, I believe!); Colonial British and the Zulus , who I recall also had spears & shields which were maddeningly easy to knock off (gluing them never occurred, surprisingly!) Centre of the whole collection however were the Napoleonic figures, probably mostly through availability. Like no other set, I could get an entire all-arms army as they sold Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery.

My first proper 'Army' for wargames was Waterloo British infantry who would form square to face off against the French Grenadiers in Column (no, I didn't understand the tactical formations either) and probably amounted in total to:

British Infantry, which was about 2/3rds English and 1/3rd Highlander dress

Cavalry - Scots Greys, all of it. (The shop never stocked another type, so I thought the cavalry was 100% uniformed like this)

Artillery - All Royal Horse Artillery, with the natty little Tarleton helmet. No Foot Artillery, of course.

French Grenadiers - No common 'Line' troops here, which probably meant Napoleon had to annihilate the bear-population of Europe to equip his armies with headgear.

Cavalry - roughly 50% Cuirassiers and 50% Lancers. In a rare example of branching out, I bought two boxes of French Cavalry, probably because I judged Lancers as sufficiently 'different' to matter.

Artillery - All Old Guard bearskins yet again, and annoyingly through a packaging decision two guns were 12lb 'proper' cannons while the other two were 'broken' cannon with short howitzer barrels (I had no idea what they were.)

From this in auspicious and long-gone beginning, can I build something like a decent army to take to the wargames field? There's no arguing with the beast in question as all the pros and cons have been rehearsed at great length elsewhere. They're soft plastic, paint flakes off, they mould poorly, the poses are all over the shop (and sometimes ludicrously weird), etc. etc. etc. However, there's no arguing with the fact that you get 50 a box, and a box can cost around a fiver. There's just no arguing with that! The only question is where the hell to buy them so I am currently searching in to the weirder corners of the web on Ebay and so on, trying to track down anywhere that deals in them these days. A far cry from my normal one-stop shop method where the list is definitively worked out before I place the order!

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!