As we are away in France for the Christmas festivities, we save our family presents until New Years Day. This year, aside from smellies, socks, underpants and a pair of new walking boots, I received these wargame specific gifts. Not all miniature wargaming in focus but jolly good and very generous. Happy New Year!
On the work bench for this month is a 2mm scale English Civil War Cornish Royalist army for the 1643 campaign in the South West. This is made up from figure blocks from the Irregular Miniatures range including specific pike and shot regiments, cavalry, dragoons and artillery, based on 50mm x 25mm bases. The plan is to use these with the Portable Pike and Shot rules and the One Hour Wargames rules for a solo campaign.
My daughter didn't want her office chair any more, so I now have a swanky, evil genius style swivel chair in the garage to replace the knackered old one that I was donated by the middle sprog. That's a nice way to end the year and, hopefully, I'll be more enthused to sit in a freezing garage in the depths of January, now that my backside will be luxuriating in padded fake leatherette PVC comfort.
I spent the morning basing up the last units for my 2mm English Civil War Parliamentarian army. I've added a couple more bases of artillery, three more pike and shot regiments, a unit of dragoons and a regiment of curassiers, representing Sir Arthur Heselrig's infamous 'Lobsters'. I've also based up a commander and his officers. This lot will now go back into storage while I focus on the Cornish Royalist army, for which I need to texture the bases then start painting.
I pushed the button on the 6mm Winter War project this morning, ordering two opposing armies from Heroics and Ros, one Soviet and the other Finnish. This will be my land project for the start of 2025, once the figures arrive in a week or two, so the 2mm English Civil War project is going to be postponed until later in the year, although I will crack on with it in the meantime.
In Winter Hammer each stand represents a platoon, with heavy weapons and tanks based individually representing two or three actual guns or vehicles. In most scenarios there are no more than half a dozen units per side, although you can scale up for larger battles.
I have ordered a variety of infantry, heavy weapons, guns, vehicles and tanks, including ski troops for the Finns. I now need to think about terrain, especially fir trees to build some forest templates, but also a few rural buildings, bunkers and trenches, not to mention wire entanglements and minefields.
I have a new project plan for 2025, going back to an approach I used to take before I decided to make a 'list of things to do' each year in advance. This worked at first, but in recent years I've found myself editing the 'to list' as I went along and as new 'ooh, shiny!' things popped up to grab my attention. Instead, I'm now going to have a 'What's on the Workbench? tab on the home page of the blog, from which anyone desperate enough to want to find out what I'm up to can punch through to a list of my current projects.
I am going to limit myself to a maximum of one air, one naval and one land themed project at a time, the idea being to switch from one to another as I go along. It may well be that only one of these will be running at any time and I'm deliberately going to prioritse land based projects for a change this year, rather than air or naval things.
Each of these projects will be small enough to be completed in a few weeks, rather than months (or even years!), and will be self-contained but part of a larger, on-going effort. The aim will be to knock off parts of a project as I go blundering along, rather than attempting to complete the whole damn thing in a drawn out slog.
It may not result in many games being played but at least I will be able to get some stuff shifted in the right direction, while hopefully keeping my hand in rather than throwing in the towel half way through. As always, the emphasis will be on stuff I can play solo rather than club gaming, so it's very much up to me whether or not I get some games on the table.
I ordered some more of the excellent Brigade Models Small Scale Scenery fortifications before the holidays, this time focusing on medieval town defences for potential siege assaults, or just as scenery in the background of set piece battles. The idea is to use the various components to construct lengths of curtain walls including both square and round towers, gatehouse and destroyed sections, alongside siege works and other defensive features, inspired by the siege of Plymouth.
I have been looking for a set of simple rules for land based wargaming focussed on the Winter War, to complement my recent air wargaming projects. I was thinking of Five Core Company Command for this but while browsing Nordic Weasel's rules in the Wargame Vault Winter Sale, I bumped into Winter Hammer. I assumed this was a 'skirmish' style set of rules for 20-28mm figures but I was very interested to discover that it works with 6mm figures on multiple bases.
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| H&R Finnish Reindeer Teams! |
This is great as I have also been looking at the excellent Heroics and Ros Finnish and Soviet 1/300th scale ranges which feature lots of options including ski troops, reindeer teams and very funky early war Soviet multi-turret tanks like the T-28. I have given the rules a quick read through and I'm enthused by the scope and content of the system, which in usual Nordic Weasel style, seems to cover just about everything you could possibly want. It's looking like a very strong prospect for 2025 at some point!
