A week of 'Chalk and Cheese'

Gaming this week had something of a 'chalk and cheese' feel about it, as the saying goes. It began with a 3000 point ACW game, fought using my 15mm armies. The town sectors use buildings that I scratch built with card, whilke the smaller 'village' sectors used 15mm buildings from the Hovels cata   logue. The Confederate army was outmanoeuvred by the Union forces who managed to slip around their left flank, dislodging them from their position. The game was devised using the Volley and Bayonet Road to Glory scenario system. Just a few 'in game' photos.

A CSA brigade having fallen back disordered from a melee finds itself in front of two still mounted Union cavalry brigades.. ouch

This was followed with three spiffing good games of WW2 Wings of Glory. Two dogfights P51s vs FW190s were followed by a bombing mission with tw B17s escorted by by a P51, taking it to four Fw190s.

A great week of games played in damned fine company.

Volley and Bayonet action for the week ...

 Two Volley and Bayonet games this week, both set in the mid nineteenth century, one during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 (also known as the Seven Weeks' War), the other during the American Civil War (specifically 1862 in this case), and both played using 15mm armies.

This first is the Austro-Prussian War featuring Adrain's 15mm armies.

This second using the Volley and Bayonet Road To Glory scenario system (3000 point armies), fought using my own 15mm civil war armies.

 

It's always nice to get the armies out on the table, and it;'s been a while since these ACW armies saw action. I have in the meantime painted up some extra units. 

Both games were the usual VnB 'goodness'.

Pirates and Dwarves.... emerging from the darkness

We hadn't played ant DBF in a while, so last  night we played a small 80 point game, my Pirates vs Murray's Dwarfs, out from the darkness of their boxes after many months.  As is my habit these days, this is not so much an AAR as it is simply a selection of photos from start to finish.

Dwarven 'light mounted' in the midst of three Pirate Great Beasts.

Pirate Great Flyer (an air galleon of course, what were you expecting?)

Dwarven artillery

Pirate artillery

Dwarven hero on the left, supported by blades

A part of the Pirate deployment, 'bow' (probably should have been 'handguns'), warband and hero

The Pirate Great Beasts tackling the Dwarven behemoth

The game was interesting, but the victim of some of the most one sided die rolling I have seen .. almost all of my combat dice were 5s and 6s, unlike my PIP dice which were a uchg. more mixed bag, explaining why the Great Flyer barely got into action. The Dwarven army was devastated while the Pirates took no casualties at all....  

Our rules knowledge was rusty, meaning we took far longer than we ought to for a game of this size, so we only managed the one game.

Pushing the boundary out a little

Some years ago I experimented with the idea of 'Cold war gone hot', the idea of an armed conflict between the Soviet Union in the years immediately following the end of World War 2. The only real attraction was to get more use out of the WW2 armies while adding in a little of the more modern vehicles and options, largely for the aesthetics. For that purpose I'd bought a box of the Plastic Soldier Company 1/72nd T55s, to be used as look alikes for the earlier T54. 

While I have plenty of other figures up for painting (a DBA Theban army sits on the painting table undercoated and ready for some attention) I just felt like assembling the T55s. It's rare these days for me to get that old school plastic kitset urge.

The PSC kits are quick assembly, with track units supplied complete, which is something of a relief as I dislike that sort of work. A few years ago I had an operation on one hand, resulting in the surgeon nicking a nerve leaving my right thumb with no feeling down the outside. This can make tasks requiring finer motor skills somewhat more challenging.

Anyway.. here are the three T55 models. The rules will of course be Spearhead, with the combat factors for the T54s suitably imported and adapted from the Modern Spearhead set.

Will they ever see service on the table top? We'll see....

Late 19th Century games

 The week's gaming explored the amazing flexibility of the Volley and Bayonet rules. Having recently reviewed the latest scenario book featuring battles from the Nine Years War, this week we began by fighting the battle across the Modder River in the Boer War, the extreme opposite of the Nine Years war affrays. Adrian created some rules modifications that allowed the skirmish style Boers to stand against the British formed units.

The battle was fought using figures from Adrian's collections.

This was followed by a battle set in the Franco Prussian War, using Keith's 6mm armies.

A fascinating week's gaming.

Franco-Dutch and Nine Years Wars

What is the measure of a good set of wargames rules? Ask 100 'gamers and you'll likely get 100 different answers, although I suspect 'fun' might feature highly on their lists. For me, it's a set of rules that gives largely historical results from historical scenarios, is adaptable to my interests, is playable in an evening without cognitive overload (remember those '80's rules sets with 93 pages of tables?).

In my wargaming universe. that's Volley and Bayonet. A regular conversation to be heard amongst my 'gaming friends is the incredible ease with which VnB adapts to a wide range of sub-periods with the smallest of rules tweaks. For example, the transition from linear to massed bases, and the change away from early firelock drill, completely changes the game dynamic, and effectively models the transitions in warfare, without overloading the player with a whole new set of rules. In doing so the rules allow players to fight battles anywhere from 1700-1900 with ease (and we have).

So it is no surprise that Jon Harding and Adrian Powell should follow up their first VnB scenario book with this their latest offering covering the Franco-Dutch and Nine Years Wars from 1672-1697.

The book follows the pattern set with their first volume, offering a brief historical overview of the period, including comment on the technological transitions that are such a mark of warfare in this period when infantry, for example, transition from pike to bayonet. They offer some suggestions for scenario and period  specific modifications (for example, allowing an army commander to be replaced if killed in action), and a comprehensive guide to their layout and nomenclature in each scenario.

The body of the book offers 18 well researched scenarios across the period, each with a copyable roster sheet for each army, a beautiful scenario map, and any specific instructions for each player that ought to be kept secret from their opponent. The authors do acknowledge that often sources are vague, contradictory, and even misleading, and that they have therefore in some cases made their 'best guesses' as to how things unfolded. In one case in particular, (Killiecrankie 1689) they go so far as to offer maps for an 'alternative narrative' based up their own interpretations of the available sources. What matters most here is that they do not set themselves up as 'the experts', but rather as contributors to a possible debate in which they are open and honest about where they have attempted to make evidence based deductions. I value this honesty.

The scenarios begin with the battle of Sinsheim in 1674 and conclude with Torrorella in 1694, and range from small affairs that players could fight in an hour and a half through to others that would more likely take four players the best part of a day to fight to a conclusion.

As the saying goes, fact is often stranger than fiction. So it is that one of the many other attractions of these scenarios is their adaptability to other periods, if you don't happen to have suitable miniature armies, simply because the specifics of the battle are so bizarre that it would take quite the creative brain to conceive of such tactical challenges. One of the other beauties of these books is that the detail on offer is such that, if on the off chance Volley and Bayonet is not your thing, then the scenarios could most probably be adapted to other rules sets.

One thing I can say for certain is that every scenario has been playtested, and almost all of them at least twice. I know because I was privileged to participate in many of those games. This means that as one-sided as many of them seem, victory conditions have been constructed so that both players 'have a chance'. In my experience with other periods and rules systems, neither of these two things is necessarily the case.

The book is well illustrated with 'creative commons' images of paintings and drawings from the period, as well as photographs of their own beautifully painted miniatures.

For Volley and Bayonet players, the book is a 'must', and for players of Horse and Musket games more generally it is a very valuable reference. The book can be purchased from Lulu here. I highly recommend it.