Transcript
Page 1: Editorial Contents - Wargame Vault · photography and review should contact the Editor. All event notifications for inclusion in our calendar should be sent to Richard Tyndall (Tricks)

Battlegames  3

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Sadly, the news of yet another stalwart of the hobby passing away has

reached the Battlegames studio. Mike Ingham, who previously ran the Wargames Holiday Centre, died on February 4th after a long illness. He was highly thought of by a great many wargamers and of course will be terribly missed by his loved ones. Mark Freeth of

the new Wargames Holiday Centre, now in Basingstoke, posted a very moving tribute online which can be found at www.wargameshc.co.uk/index.php/a-light-goes-out/

On a brighter note, it would seem that our hobby remains in rude health. Never before has such a plethora of products poured forth from publishers, manufacturers, rule-writers, sculptors and others, be their ventures large, small or somewhere in between. What is most encouraging is that our hobby appears to be booming not only in terms of quantity, but qualitatively as well. Whether your preferred medium is plastic or metal, there is just a mind-boggling array of goodies to choose from, and in every scale conceivable.

Let’s dwell on that last thought for a moment. As many of you know, I’ve been designing the packaging for Will Townshend’s Plastic Soldier Company, and every time he releases a product, I know that he’ll need boxes for 28mm, 15mm and 1/72 scale versions of everything he does, virtually simultaneously.

Looking around, just at the Cavalier show in Tonbridge last Sunday, I realised that Will isn’t alone in purveying more than one scale. I found myself next to the Fighting 15s stand, for example, and as their name implies, they are of course well known for selling the beautiful AB 15mm figures – but Ian Marsh was keen to show me the latest 3mm (yes, three millimetre!) offerings from Polish company Oddzial Osmy. A range which started with some micro (no kidding) armour is now moving into horse and musket and thereafter, I presume, other periods too. Borodino in a briefcase? Why not!

By comparison, Peter Berry’s offerings from Baccus seem positively enormous, but at least my eyesight can just about cope with his creations, and the same goes for the GHQ stuff you can see in my article this issue. And of course Magister Militum, who import the GHQ armour I love so much, are also purveyors of their own 10mm and 15mm miniatures.

Editorial Contents

Cover: A Matilda brews up, victim to accurate fire from a Panzer IV, while the German commander looks on with satisfaction. 1/285 micro armour from the Editor’s collection. Photo by the Editor.

Editorial  3

Tiles of a wargames widow part 2  4Diane Sutherland, UK

Forward Observer  8Mike Siggins, UK

At the sharp end  10Richard Clarke, UK

Grand tactical Napoleonics  14Bob Barnetson and Bruce MacFarlane, Canada

1806 in miniature  19Jim Purky, USA

The Battlegames Terry Wise Award  23A new commemorative award

The Battlegames Combat Stress Appeal: update  24Our campaign to help support ex-service personnel continues

Command challenge  25Henry Hyde, UK

A starter for ten  31Conrad Kinch, Ireland

Recce  34New goodies reviewed by our team

The Battlegames shop  44The place to order your subscription and much more

Competition and classified ads  46Another great competition Events March/April  47

Richard Tyndall, UK

But the variety doesn’t stop there, and I have been involved in a couple of games using 10mm Pendraken figures that have really appealed visually, coming close to that ultimate middle ground between the mass effect of oodles of figures on the table, and sufficient detail on the miniatures to appeal to the button-counting enthusiast.

The phenomenon isn’t entirely new, of course, and dear old Minifigs, now in the hands of Dave Ryan at Caliver Books, were pioneers in 15mm, 25mm and even 5mm blocks. And who remembers Hinchliffe with their System 12 back in the 1970s?

The moral? Scale creep can go down as well as up! Nowadays, I can choose precisely the type and size of miniature I want, in the periods I like, to match the type of game I want, big for skirmishes, small for army action.

Until next time, roll ‘em high!

Sam

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4  Battlegames

Tiles of a wargames widow part 2The continuing tales of a wargames widow

by Diane Sutherland

Last issue we saw that my troglodyte existence on the island of Crete was tinged with joy and dread. There was joy that the wargamer was shipping out

more of his toys so I could now see my furniture. Dread that there was another fortnight coming up filled with chocolate paint, wood glue and dust. It was also joyful to think that, using a wargaming term here, reinforcements had appeared on the horizon. They were galloping in to outflank those terrain boards. So far there had been little talk about other “essential” terrain items; hills, rivers, forts, forests and such like. I had hoped I could take a bit of a back seat and work up a tan before the guests arrived. Wrong again, I was as white a sheet when we drove to pick up Joe Dever, the first guest, a fortnight later.

bThe term “designated driver” has all sorts of

connotations, doesn’t it? An over-indulgent wedding reception springs to mind. So too does a party where you are the only one drinking orange juice all night. In the wargamer’s head, it means, “just pop to X please and get me Y”. Now I had two wargamers to cope with, as the reinforcement came in the shape of Tim Hall, the wargamer’s long-standing friend and wargame opponent.

bWe left the terrain boards in May 2010 with a chocolate

undercoat and some very basic dry-brushing tests completed. However, the entire surface area of the vast table was like a rugby pitch in the autumn; mud, mud and more mud. It was also as flat as a pancake. We had decided that all of the hills, mountains and other terrain features would be freestanding. Also to be made were two stretches of river beds, each of which would have to be three tiles long. We opted for dried river beds, again multi-purpose. One would represent the Tavronitis River in the Crete game and the other would be used for the Indian Mutiny game.

Carving out a river bed from a sheet of insulation board

is a thankless task. Having done this in miniature with the roads, we knew how long it would take and how many fingers would be lost in the process. The simple solution is stick a full 60cm square board onto the MDF and then cut all the way down to it. All that’s required then is to texture the river bed and the banks after a little tidying up. The same

Three dried river bed terrain tiles. These have been textured with wall filler. To the left the partially completed lake or pond.

Some of the carved, textured, glued and sanded mountains and hills. These all needed to be dusted down before painting. In the background, for the eagle eyed amongst you, you can see the mass production of range sticks.

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The next stage in hill completion. The hill on the left is 2.5m long and has three levels. The mountain in the background has a track and flat surfaces

for fields and woods.

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Battlegames  5

technique was used to make the lake for the Crete game (later to pose as a stagnant pond for the Mutiny game).

We wanted some really big and impressive back-drop mountains for the Crete game. We sliced along the length of whole 2.5 metre insulation boards at a 45 degree angle, and then used off-cuts to build up the levels. These huge features were going to be a real challenge in terms of finishing. With so much ground to cover with the wood glue, we quickly discovered that by the time you had finished plastering the whole thing the glue was virtually dry due to the hot weather. The only solution was glue and sand in sections; a messy job which involved literally standing in a large box and pouring a bucket of sand over the mountain and yourself. On the upside, it’s actually quite enjoyable peeling off dried wood glue in the evening!

The smaller terrain features were easier to cope with, constructed in the same way with sanded down levels. Making hills and mountains is always going to involve a degree of compromise. You want them to look authentic, but at the same time they need to be practical and you don’t want stands of soldiers slipping down them like contestants in the Cheese Rolling championship in Gloucestershire.

Some of the hills and mountains had tracks and roads added to them to tie them into the road boards. Others would need flat spaces on them with reduced texturing so that fields and woodland bases could be added later. Multi-functional was the idea; all of the freestanding terrain like the fields, walls, trees and so on would radically change the appearance of the hills and mountains. Added to this, the terrain had to deal with

multi-scales too; Crete would be in 20mm and the Indian Mutiny in 28mm. Later we would be adding 15mm to the mix, so the terrain had a lot of hard work ahead of it.

The hills and mountains were textured with wall filler first, a useful stage. Here you can get rid of those irritating gaps and mistakes you might have made in the cutting and sanding. It also means you can pick out the areas that are not going to get the overall covering of glue and sand. The big mountains were also designed to work ‘back to back’ so needed matching ‘mirrored’ features.

The smaller mountains were liberally dosed with the wood glue and covered in sand in the same way. We also decided to make some half-height hills as dense woodland bases. This is seriously not recommended as a way forward. The hand slicing hazard is extremely high and we all have scars to prove it. The sanding alternative is not wonderful either; imagine the heat build-up from dense foam and sand paper being rubbed at high speed. Cue intense pain and friction burns.

Eventually we were at the stage when all of the mountains, hills and woodland bases had been smothered in glue, sand and chocolate paint. With great excitement, we broke out a new colour for the mountains. Alright, it was grey, but after weeks of chocolate, even grey can be special. Tim started adding strategically placed blocks of grey paint to the mountains. At first no one liked it. “Have faith,” he replied.

Half insulation board thickness woodland bases. These were a painful labour of love.

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Tim applying the final dry brush to a terrain board, blending in the highlighting colours.

An unpromising looking mountain, with the grey paint applied in bands or swathes to represent rocky outcrops.

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Tim blending the chocolate and grey on one of the 2.5m mountain backdrops. He is applying two dry brush colours so that the mountains and

hills match the terrain boards.

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6  Battlegames

A small part of the Crete table, showing the twisted Hornby tree armatures, some half height hills now with static grass, one end of a 2.5m mountain

and my vineyard sections enclosed in my dry stone walls

The half height bases for woods and scrubland, showing after dry brushing how they blend in with the baseboards. The low hills will have static grass

and Woodland Scenic clumps added before the trees themselves are pushed into the material.

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Once dry, he set about blending the chocolate and grey with successive layers of dry-brushing. We used the same basic palette as we had used on the terrain tiles. In trepidation, we plonked the first one down on the table and stood back. It had worked and he was right. All thoughts of having to glue real rocks and stones to the mountains faded away.

With the days slipping by and the arrival of the guests imminent, each new construction phase needed additional hands. Tim’s wife Pat and Maria the apartment owner found themselves helping me make wire fencing to surround an airfield, applying glue to hills and dunking them in static grass. Another group activity which brought in the skills of the local plumber and anyone who dared visit in the last few days was tree-twisting. The wargamer had found some Hornby wire armatures in a railway model shop in Lowestoft. I had paid little attention to them and had used the “very nice dear” brush-off technique when he had flashed them under my nose.

I could now see what had attracted him to them. They are designed to be twisted around a large tree skeleton, but used on their own and twisted around one another, they make wonderful scrubby trees. The downside is that each pack has over a hundred of them and you need to carefully twist two or three together to make a little tree.

The wargamer’s other odd purchase was from China.

He had tried to engage me in careful scrutiny of blurred photographs on the Internet a few weeks before. “Olive trees,” he had told me. I smiled and considered the madness of buying from a company that could not spell. They revelled in the name Everydaygoodz, although contact with the proprietor had proved him to be both helpful and friendly. So it was that a big box of “olive trees”, plastic palm trees and other “woodygoodz” items had been shipped direct from China to Crete. Once in place, I had to admit that they were just right and fantastically cheap if you buy them in bulk. You can find them on Ebay (http://stores.ebay.co.uk/everydaygoodz) they are very reliable and recommended. Look at the wholesale lots in particular for larger quantities of trees at madly low prices.

One thing I should add is that not absolutely everything always goes according to plan. A prime example is the lake or pond. It serves as a salutary lesson to us all about being a little too sure about something based on no experience whatsoever. The wargamer wanted the lake to look just right. He had experimented on a small scale before with horse troughs or something. So he knew what he had in mind would work. Having sculpted out the lake, textured and painted it, he proceeded to pour varnish into the depression. I take some responsibility along with Tim having opted to buy the closest to the wargamer’s order, but we had come back with coloured gloss varnish. It was a kind of muddy puddle colour to be honest. The net effect of the humid conditions, thick layers and the solvent in the paint meant that it has failed to harden to this day!

After much soul searching, it was decided that the road network would be painted up to look like a dusty track. It would work well for both games and, as we had recessed the roads in the tiles, there were other options for the future. A recent discovery is the roof felt used for sheds and flat roof extensions. It cuts really easily and you can make sweeping curves and junctions. The weight of it makes it lay flat, even over bumpy terrain boards. The intention is to cut it to size and slot it into the recesses if we want tarmac roads. What remains to be seen is how this potentially sticky material will behave in humid conditions in Crete!

A finishing flourish came in the shape of Woodland Scenic’s clump foliage. This is a bizarre and wonderful product. Essentially it is like a lump of foam that you can simply tear up and stick to bases or terrain boards. We dotted clumps of this all along the roadsides, just to add a little bit of extra colour. It might be a big mistake in the long run, as I’ve seen the wargamer pondering how he is going to lay fences and bocage sections along the roadsides now.

bJune 22 dawned. The vast table was ready and the soldiers

and tanks all laid out for inspection. Little did our guests know that I had already acquired a reputation of being something of a mad woman within the local community. The DIY shop staff simply could not understand why I had needed so many litres of industrial strength wood glue. They could not fathom why I hesitated over their selection of paint brushes, sandpaper, and varnish, or why on earth I had decided to paint my house with what amounted to 20 litres of chocolate brown paint. Elsewhere I had been spotted, plastic bucket in hand, picking up rocks and stones and snapping small twigs. They used to refer to me as ‘The English Woman’ but now I suspect they have put ‘Crazy’ in front of that. But was it all worth it? Absolutely!

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Battlegames  7

A panoramic view of one of the three parts of the table for the Mutiny game. Scaling up to 28mm, mountains have become hills. One of the dried river beds can be seen in the foreground. Also in evidence are the fruits of my search for stones during May. Featured in the picture are Dave Ryan, Jervis Johnson and

The Wargamer holding one of my handcrafted range sticks. Photograph courtesy of Joe Dever.

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8  Battlegames

The pleasure of figuresAnother month, more irresistible figures. The combination of my interests, current output and re-discovering 30mm and gloss varnish really leaves no doubt that this is a personal golden age. I’ll leave others to decide whether they are having one. Apart from the quiet period around Christmas, something tempting pops up literally every week. This does nothing for my project completion rate, or wallet, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sometimes I daydream enviously about a one scale, one period lifestyle and realise very quickly that this is not going to happen. If I settle on Napoleonics I can never have Gripping Beasts. If I do Arthurians I can’t have tanks. If I focus on Western Desert, no Sassanids or Swiss for me. These are my irresistibles for March.

Victrix are, based on the evidence, on a roll. I await their classical Greeks with interest, and the announcement of plastic Napoleonic Austrians has filled me with enthusiasm for that one big army that I have not yet got round to. But more immediate, and even more exciting, is the announcement of early Russians. I have the initial metal officer packs and they are superb. Sculpted by the talented and very busy Paul Hicks, who will soon be ubiquitous, this project will be a pleasure to work on. I intend to mix these, and the other ranks, with some Old Glory early Russians I secured on eBay last year and in time, my Austerlitz period armies will finally march!

As I have said before, if I wait for six months, Eureka will have enough tasty stuff for me to fill out an order. This time I went for the lovely Andreas Hofer set of figures to build a standalone force for Sharp Practice; the 18th century musicians that are popping up around the hobby in ingenious guises and making the imagi-nations guys very happy; and the relatively unknown 40mm figures sculpted by a certain Mr Barton. The latter are top quality, as you might

expect, and as they are wearing few clothes they will be ideal for conversions for my 40mm Feudals. I don’t know how far I can go with them – mail armour is probably beyond me – but I will certainly give it a try. The only negative comment I can make about Eureka is that their 28mm ‘house size’ is closer to 26mm, which is entirely their prerogative, and that the Aussie Dollar/Sterling rate is playing havoc with prices. Hardly their fault. Otherwise these are figures that stand with any being made in the world today.

Ian Marsh at Fighting 15s is one of the nicest guys in the hobby. I am trying not to be swayed by this. As well as stocking Eureka in the UK he also sells some, umm, fringe stuff. That’s a good thing. Ian has sent me samples of two, frankly, exciting releases. The first is the new 3mm ACW range from Oddzial Ozmy. Until now this Polish company has done moderns and WWII in this scale, which I could comfortably ignore. Now, they are going horse and musket. Not as you might imagine in blocks, but as individual figures. Even more annoying is that the prices are reasonable, the figures are identifiable as slouch hats or kepi wearing, and the horses are very good! They are little gems. The deciding factor is that these figures proved unpaintable for me. Even with a magnifier I could do nothing more than poke the brush in the general direction of the face. I resigned myself to jacket, trousers and a wash, which actually doesn’t look too bad. In skilled (younger) hands they look amazing. So the news that they will move on to

Forward observerWheels within wheels

by Mike Siggins

Napoleonics has left me in a quandary. The second package contains

Prussian Fusiliers from Ian’s own Huzzah! range. I thought this range had sadly stalled, but Ian is now back behind it. I have to say that these are lovely castings. The faces are beautifully done, and they take paint very well. As I don’t do Prussians, I decided to paint them as Battenburg Grenadiers who will fight in my FIW army. I offer a picture as proof of quality.

The plastic paradoxFor context, I will remind you that I am a huge fan of plastics, see them as a great development (but not a cure all), love to convert them, and I look forward to every new announcement. For some public spirited reason I even try to champion them, whenever it seems appropriate. But here’s the thing. Travelling back from SELWG (a very good show, as usual) I was chatting about my latest projects. My mate asked me how the plastics were going. I paused. I had to admit, however surprising it was, that I had made, converted and painted only about twenty figures out of the dozen

On Radar CommentsAK Interactive Washes Mig ups his game. Indispensable.Armourfast’s Crusader Mk II I need a few of these.Baccus ‘Kiwer’ Russians The best 6mms I’ve seen. Still resisting.Eureka’s c16th Portuguese Wow. Just wow. Must find a use…Fife & Drum 28mm AWI. Can’t wait for these.First Legion 54mm Just a dream. Really.Les Tercios Espagnol A stunning French book. On order!Minden’s Hainauts I think the best yet from Mr Ansell.Oddzial Ozmy 3mm Naps I can resist the ACW. These? Unlikely.Perry Swiss Pike and Heads No excuses now. Swiss pike columns ho!TAG ‘ECW Suitable’ Pike Very nice indeed.Zvezda Snap Kit Tiger A big step up in ‘wargame quality’ tanks.

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