Welcome to my blog. I have upwards of 100 projects in various stages of incompletion or total abandonment, so you may well find something of interest if you rummage about a bit. I concentrate on solo air and naval wargaming but other 'skirmishy' things quite often pop up out of nowhere, only to disappear again after something else grabs my attention. I even finish the occasional project now and again!
My wife bought this for me today as an extra if belated Xmas present. It's packed full of colour profiles and camouflage plan views of a wide range of Luftwaffe Fighters including the Fw190, Bf 110, Me210/410, Me262, Komet and He162 Salamander. The artwork is really stunning and indispensable when painting up accurate aircraft camouflage patterns.
A lot of these profiles have been culled from previously published magazine articles but here they've been assembled together into a comprehensive overview, complete with accompanying text to add the historical detail. There's also a first volume in the series covering just the Bf 109 and its variants, so I'll have to track it down for the reference library.
I was particularly pleased to see profiles for Fw190A3's and A4' s of JG in 1941-42, which are very useful for the Bag the Hun Whirlwind scenarios that I've been researching over the year. There's a 25% off sale on in January on the Leading Edge range from Museum Miniatures, so I really should get on with this scenario project at some point in 2015!
I finally got to visit the U Boat bunkers in Lorient yesterday, which is only twenty minutes down the road from the in-laws but has always been put off for various reasons. The three bunkers are now part of a museum complex including a preserved French submarine from the 1960's.
I did take some photos but am unable to upload them at the moment, so will do so once we get back home. It's a very interesting site, if a little sinister and bleak on a rainy December afternoon, so I worth a visit if you are interested in the U Boat war.
I couldn't help thinking about all the U Boat crews who left from the Keromen base but never returned, not to mention the thousands who died in the Battle of the Atlantic. The whole of Lorient was also bombed flat with massive civilian casualties. All a bit disturbing but food for thought nonetheless.
This is the next book on the Lion Rampant reading list and, after the first couple of chapters, it's well worth it. Although the narrative skips around a bit the overall coverage is very good, with some useful details on contemporary tactics. It was interesting to find out that the impact of an 'arrow storm' would be the equivalent of forty tons of arrows in the space of ten to fifteen minutes!
I'm looking forward (?) to a full-on French Christmas blowout tomorrow, with a six course five hour food marathon to negotiate, so I'll be thinking of England as I get fattened up by the mother in law, who doesn't take no for an answer when it comes to second or even third helpings.
It's all a bit too much but, in the interests of the entente cordiale, it has to be done! I hope you have a great Xmas and a very sensible Xmas lunch, with lots of fantastic wargaming presents to play with once you've put the kids Lego / Playmobil / Barbie things together for them!
We took the kids to Quimper yesterday to go ice skating, so while they were whizzing round in circles and falling over, I took a short trip to the local games store. This is an excellent little shop stuffed full of board games, although most are in French, which means some hunting around is required to dig out the ones with English-language rules.
However, they did have some X Wing expansion packs, so I now have a TIE Interceptor, complete with pilot and upgrade cards in French, which isn't a big problem as the rules are easy to translate. We've been playing a bit of X Wing over the last couple of days as the weather has been a bit rubbish, so the kids are excited to have a new Impeial fighter to take for a spin. I really should play more X Wing as there are a couple of enthusiasts at the club and it's a cracking little game!
I'm reading this over the holidays as part of the background research for the Lion Rampant project. It's a very wargame friendly biography which focusses on the military side of Edward IV's rise to power, including the key battles of the Wars of the Roses that led to the Yorkist supremacy. It's very readable and contains some excellent period detail with regard to contemporary military organization, strategy and tactics. Good stuff, especially as I'm a bit of a Yorkist sympathizer!
We're in Brittany for the Xmas holidays again, so I've brought my copy of Lion Rampant with me for some background reading. I've decided to put together two twelve point retinue to start with, one Yorkist and one Lancastrian, with room to expand them to a full twenty four points later.
These will be in 15mm using figures from the Peter Pig range and various bits and Bob's that I have lying around. To help with the research, I've got hold of a second hand copy of this booklet via Ebay, which will give me some ideas when it comes round to painting the refined up.
I found a second hand army pack of GZG UNSC/L figures on Ebay last week and put in a tentative bid, so that I could add some options to the pack that I already have. I ended up winning it for a tenner less than the full price, so I now have plenty of extra figures to play around with as I plan out the orbat for the platoon sized force that I'm going to paint up. I'll have some left over figures but I reckon I'll be using up most of the pack, if only as optional re-inforcements and extra heavy weaposn teams. Excellent!
A couple more sets of sci-fi / near future rules for reading over the Xmas holidays and for some playtesting in the not too distant future, if I get my act together. The first set has just been published and looks really promising, especially as it's designed for exactly what I'm looking for and is from the same stable as No End in Sight, which I'm planning to use for skirmishes in Malaya and Borneo.
The second set is similar in scope and scale, although with a more sci-fi and less near future feel, so will fit in well with my plans for next year. There really is a goldmine of rulesets for this sort of thing out there and with digital downloads, it makes building a library of potential rules really inexpensive. I have another one or two rulesets to consider but I think I have more than enough for the moment!
I'm not going to have as much time for wargaming next year for various work related reasons, so have been putting my mind to the problem of greatly reduced painting time and far fewer trips to the local club. I've been struggling of late to do both and the prospect of free weekends and evenings is looking more remote than ever before. However, I'm not going to let that stop me from doing something in the time that I do have, so I have come up with a Plan B.
This revolves around down-sizing both the scope and the scale of my wargaming projects next year, with fewer overall but at a manageable level of output. This means that 28mm is definately out and that 15mm or smaller scale projects are firmly the way to go. It also means reducing the size of my games to platoon or squad level skirmish sizes, which can be focussed around a handful of figures on a playing area of no more than 2' x 4', with a 2' or 3' square area being my best fit ideal.
So, what to do? One definate project will be Lion Rampant in 15mm, using my Peter Pig War of the Roses figures that I originally intended to use for Impetus. Now, despite having a (very rusty) postgraduate degree in Medieval British Archaeology, I know next to nothing about the aformentioned conflict, which means that I would have a lot of background reading up to do, were it not for this excellent article on the equally excellent Menne of Warre blog:
This opened up all sorts of ideas and has given me some new directions in which to move the project to the first stages of planning. To me, the Wars of the Roses are symbolised by posh plate clad men at arms, tough brigandine armoured retainers and sturdy local yokel longbowmen slogging it out in the mud and snow of Towton, as portrayed in the evocative Peter Dennis cover art on the Perry plastic figure boxes. So, the first thing will be to set the project in the deep mid-winter, with two rival Lancastrian and Yorkist garrisons vying for supplies, taxes and extortion over some random stretch of the deep frozen Midland Shires.
This would be ideal as a solo or two player mini-campaign of linked scenarios, using the system described in the rulebook. In turn, this gave me the idea to develop something along the lines of the slightly 'tongue in cheek' Scruttockshire campaign in the old 1644 ECW rules, with a fictional area of bucolic countryside mapped out as the campaign focus. In a nod to the Peter Pig War of the Roses army packs and AK47 (?), the two rival retinues would be commanded by appropriately titled local magnates, with the forces of Lord Wensleydale being opposed by the Earl of Cheddar (or somesuch). There may even be a cameo appearance by the Black Vegetable himself...
I think you will get the basic drift of my imagi-nations approach to the whole thing, although it still has lots of room for development, especially after I re-watch the box set of the first series of Blackadder again. I'm not taking this too seriously and won't be doimg this as a club game, at least in the first instance, in order not to make any promises that I may not be able to keep. So, it will be a solo project for the moment, although I'm hoping that the middle sprog will be interested in having a go, being a big fan of Cry Havoc. I think this could be a lot of fun...so I'll be doing some more thinking to pull it together over Xmas.
