Lard Magazine 2019

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For those of you who missed all the various notices, this year’s Lard Magazine is now available to buy. An excellent last minute Xmas present for the wargamer in your life!

Nothing from me in this issue, unfortunately (just couldn’t find the time), but don’t let that stop you from purchasing this excellent tome.

Lard Magazine 2019 tops the scales at a whopping 190 pages packed with Lard.  Scenarios, complete campaigns, rules amendments, fresh periods to game, previews of future rule sets, build projects unveiled and a whole host of other wargaming fun, written by wargamers for wargamers.

Here’s a full list of the contents.

A DEKKO AT RECCE:  Nick Skinner takes a look at British Recce for Chain of Command. 

THE BRIDGE AT SAINDOUX:  We send a British Recce Troop on a mission to see if a bridge will take Nick’s weight.

TO SLEEP IS TO DIE:  John Savage tells the story of his award winning scenario for Sharp Practice set  during the retreat from Moscow. Includes scenario.

2019  – A YEAR OF LARD:  12 months is a long time in the world of Lard. Richard Clarke & Nick Skinner have an alibi for all of it.

BLOODY OMAHA:  Mike Whitaker tells the story of an obsession with this scenario for I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum!

BAHAMAS BROADSIDE:  Chris Stoesen sails the seven seas and offers this small ship scenario for Kiss Me Hardy.

TOTENSONNTAG:  Marc Renouf presents a pint-sized campaign  set against the background of Operation Crusader, 1941.

A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS:  David Hunter, Lardy event organiser par excellence, shares his reflections and learnings on Lardy Games Days.  

ASSAULT ON PELELIU:  Hit the beach with this scenario for I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum from the pen of Tim Whitworth.

THE FRENCH CAVALRY CHARGES AT WATERLOO:  Wargaming superstar and housewife’s favourite David C R Brown peeks out from behind his cuirass to share the ultimate cavalry scenario for General D’Armee

THE CANNONBALL RUN:  Richard Clarke’s cupola runneth over with this break out game for What a Tanker!

BATTLE OF KARNSTEIN:  Tom McKinnell takes us to the Eastern Front for a Chain of Command Scenario with a difference.

THE LONGEST YOMP:  Rising talent Ioan Davis John takes us to the South Atlantic for this adaptation of Chain of Command for the Falklands War.

I AIN’T BEEN COC’D YET, MUM!:  Whilst working in the lab, late one night Desmondo Darkin created something… you need to see this.

CRUNCH AT KURSK:  Nick Skinner presents a Bag the Hun dogfight scenario for the skies above Kursk. 

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE:  Nothing is ever big enough for Simon Walker. Here he shares his thoughts on extending Sharp Practice into the Victorian Wars of the late 1890s and beyond. 

IT’S THE RIEL THING:  Simon Walker rises again and takes us to the depths of Canada for this Sharp Practice expansion.

GET CARTER!:  Richard Clarke teases us with a scenario for the Riel Rebellion.

RETREAT TO THE BEREZINA:  John Savage walks on frozen water with another 1812 scenario for  Sharp Practice.

WHAT A WHIZZ OF A WIZ…:  Richard Clarke and Nick Skinner finally complete Sidney’s Battlefield Challenge with the creation of this Chain of Command scenario for the 1944 fighting in the woods near Best, Holland.

INFAMY, INFAMY:  Richard Clarke offers an exclusive peek into an exciting new rule set headed your way in 2020. Blimus!

Painting Challenge: Big Pre-Christmas Update

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Lots of work from lots of people as they frantically finish off their projects before Christmas, presumably in the expectation that Santa will add to their lead mountain!

In no particular order, we have:

  • Chris Kay with some Portacabins (yes, really)

  • The usual big and beautifully painted entry from Travis: a spot of barbarian horse and quite a few dwarves

  • Some medievals and more Napoleonic re-basing from Mervyn

  • Loads from Joe McGinn: US Airborne and AWI and Napoleonics

  • A mix of 28mm WW2 figures and vehicles from Jason Ralls

  • Mark Luther sends in some 15mm WW2 vehicles, guns and, er, sheep. And an awful lot of trees.

  • David Scott is up in the Blue with some 15mm WW2 Brits for the Western Desert

  • The Condotterie himself from Carole, with some Swiss Handgunners

  • More Aztecs from the Hat

  • And last, but not least, more SYW and more ACW in 15mm from Andrew Helliwell

As always, clicking on the names of the people in the list above will take you straight to their galleries. Still plenty of time to get your last entries in for the year!

Here are today’s pics:

IABSM AAR: Valle della Marie

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Here’s another great I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum! after action report from the pen of Tim Whitworth and picked up from the IABSM Facebook Group.

This time, Tim and friends play one of the scenarios from the pen of Mike Whitaker that can be found in the various Lardy Specials. I can’t remember which one it is, so you’ll have to get them all to find out!

This encounter is set around the Gothic line in 1944. A British company attack supported by Sherman tanks and artillery against Germans dug in and determined to fight for the last inch of their territory. Click on the picture below to see all:

And why not compare the action here to Mike’s original report, which can be found by clicking here.

Sumerians Finally Hit The Tabletop!

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A great start to my Xmas holiday with an afternoon of gaming To The Strongest, so also a chance to get the Sumerians that I have been so assiduously painting over the last few months onto the tabletop.

First off was an encounter with the Ancient Britons. Weird how I would never think of playing a non-contemporaneous battle when playing WW2, but accept it as normal for the Ancient period. Doubtless the Brits were on holiday, and when asked where they wanted to go, just replied “Errr…”

Moving swiftly onwards, I had to deploy first, so it was chariots on the left, militia in the middle, and good troops on the right. Opposite me, the Brits had adopted a very traditional deployment: chariots and light horse on the wings, infantry in the middle.

In a nutshell, the battle went as follows. The Britons opened the game by moving forward really quickly. I responded by sending my chariots forward on the left, but they spent just about the whole game dealing with his light chariots and horse, who just wouldn’t stay still long enough to be properly mullered. On the right, the same thing happened with my Royal Guard axemen. I tied his chariots up, but that was all. That left the infantry in the middle to win or lose the battle. My troops were largely militia raw troops, his were screaming barbarians: I lost!

So on to a second battle, where although the Ancient Brits were unchanged, I switched my Dynastic Sumerians into the slightly more advanced Akkadians. With no raw militia, I was slightly more confident of success but my opponent, Bevan, was very clever and tactically astute: all his light chariots and horse went on one flank, whilst his infantry advanced in echelon towards me.

Those of you who are equally tactically astute will of course know exactly what happened next. His light chariots swarmed all over my ponderous battlecarts: if I chased one, it evaded, and then the others attacked my flanks and so on! Meanwhile my infantry just couldn’t get a grip on his foot and found themselves always facing two units or a threat from a flank. I lost again, and lost badly!

Our final game saw me using the Akkadians again, but this time facing another geo-anachronistic foe: a Pyrrhic army composed mostly of Hoplites. This was more my type of opponent: no hordes of light chariots to annoy me.

I deployed with my battle carts facing his cavalry on my right, my Household Axemen and Bowmen facing his elephants on the left, and a straight up infantry face off in the middle.

My battle carts literally smashed his cavalry from the field (apart from a nasty charge from his lancers), and then proceeded to take his left hand camp, with the other only a turn away from falling as well. On the other wing, my bowmen saw off his elephants without too much difficulty, which left an infantry clash in the middle. This was more even, with the fortunes of war swinging backwards and forwards. My successes on the wings, however, meant that although we each lost the same amount of infantry units in the centre, his army lost its morale first.

So two losses and one win for the first Sumerian outing: not a bad performance. Here are some more pictures of the day’s gaming:

IABSM AAR: The Gap

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Here’s a battle report from a game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum played last weekend against John and Dave.

Unusually for us, the scenario was late war, eastern front: with the Soviets rushing forwards to secure a gap in a ridge that the Germans were also seeking to block.

It was a very close run thing, with a fair degree of carnage on both sides. Click on the picture below to see all…

TFL Painting Challenge: mid-December Update

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Loads of entries flooding in as we come to the end of this year’s challenge. There’s still plenty of time to get those last minute entries in, and no holding back to try to be the first entrant of next year’s event!

So, in no particular order, we have:

  • Travis Hiatt with an assortment of beautifully painted 28mm figures. I do heartily recommend a visit to Travis’ gallery: inspirational.

  • Some terrain from Mr Hodge

  • Another inspirational painter: John Emmett with a garage full of 28mm vehicles

  • Carole pops in some more Frostgrave-y type miniatures

  • Nice to see Chris Stoesen back in the fray: Yamassee Indians and some Romans and some Celts

  • Mervyn is still re-basing

  • Sapper has some nice SYW cavalry for us to admire

  • Chris Kay must try harder: just one half-track, even if it is a good one

  • It really is the week for 28mm vehicles: four more from Doug Melville

  • Mr Helliwell scores with some 15mm Confederates and an excellent 10mm-for-15mm village

  • And last, but by no means least, Chris Cornwell has some Burgundians and Swiss joining his ranks

As always, clicking on the names of the people in the list above will take you straight to their galleries. Do please take the time to have a browse: some excellent and, as I said, inspirational work on show.

Here are today’s pictures:

A New Project

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Regular visitors will know that I enjoy gaming the Ancients period with To The Strongest.

That rule set has a companion set covering the English Civil War (1642 - 1651) called For King & Parliament. A month or so ago, I invested in a copy and started thinking how I would create forces for both the Royalists and Parliamentarians.

To match my grid-ed gaming mat, I need units that are about 12cms wide, which means that a double-ranked unit would be about 24 foot strong, assuming 1cm frontage for each figure. This worked with the numbers given in the rulebook, so 24 men per regiment it was.

In FK&P, foot regiments are of different types: standard (2 musketeers for every 1 pikeman); pike-heavy; shot-heavy; all pike; all shot and smaller units for Forlorn Hopes, dismounted dragoons etc.

What I initially thought of doing was to have separately based blocks of musketeers and blocks of pikemen, a combination of which would allow me to build the different types of regiment that I needed for a game. After a lot of experimenting with paper and pen, however, I realised that this wouldn’t work: it would be fine for a standard, all pike or all shot units, but wouldn’t work for the -heavy units and their 3:1 ratios.

Good luck against the tank in the background, lads!

After a lot more thought, and more pen and paper, I realised that the easiest thing to do would be just to mount an entire regiment of up to 24 figures (plus 3 command, so 27) on a single big base. In effect, I was doing what many 6mm gamers do, but in 15mm.

A quick trip to the Warbases website to discover that they actually do a suitable base as a standard product. It’s called a Vehicle Base, and is 12cms wide by about 5cms deep. It’s the one marked as 110x40mm, which is the rectangular area in the centre of the base, surrounded by curvy bits that give it its 12cms width.

Okay, so it’s all feasible…but rather than cough up huge amounts of cash for a whole army that might not work, let’s try one unit first. Easiest place to buy figures so specifically is Peter Pig, so a quick trip to their website to discover a very nice and comprehensive ECW range. I bought four packets only: one pike, two muskets (one firing, one reloading) and a command pack.

The results you see in the pictures, above. I rather like them, and I really like the big base effect. I did have a little problem with warping, which surprised me given this was a 3mm deep “hard” base, but I could use the lip to flatten the base for a couple of hours and problem solved.

So that’s one unit done and more ordered!

The Last of the Gauls

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I really should have painted these myself, but I’m very busy with the last of the Sumerians at the moment, so when friend John offered to paint them up for a very reasonable rate, I jumped at the chance.

This is a Gallic, or general Celtic, warband in 15mm. Figures from Forged in Battle’s excellent Empire range.

IABSM AAR: Operation Martlet Day 2 (2)

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A largely photographic battle report created from a mash-up of posts from Desmondo Darkin and Iain Fuller on the IABSM Facebook Group. The game is adapted from the Chain of Command “Operation Martlet” pint-sized camapign book.

They are playing a version of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum that uses dice, not cards, to control initiative: a mash-up, if you like, of CoC and IABSM. Seems to have given them a great game.

Click on the pic below to see all:

300,000 Page Views!

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If my calculations are correct, some time yesterday this website hit 300,000 page views since its launch in October 2014 i.e. just about five years to the month!

That’s not bad going for a hobby site that concentrates so specifically on the company-sized rules from the TooFatLardies (even if yesterday’s post was about To The Strongest!).

So thank-you all for your support and visitations over the last five years, and thank you especially to those who have kindly given permission for me to use their content on here.

If nothing else, and along with its Facebook page, I reckon we’ve kept I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum from going out of print, a worthy achievement by any calculation.

A few facts to amuse:

  • Most visitors come from the UK (42%), followed by the US (26%) and then Australia (7%) and Canada (4%). Quite surprised that the US number isn’t higher…

  • The most popular content is After Action Reports (so keep them coming) followed by the Army Galleries.

  • There are 956 individual battle reports on the site. I think I’m probably the biggest contributor, but honorable mentions have to go to many, many more people

More Sumerians

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Closing in on the last few units of my 15mm Sumerian army for To The Strongest.

Today’s offering is firstly a fifth spear block of 48 spearmen: a rather daunting prospect when you see them all ready to be undercoated, but fine once you get into the rhythm of painting them.

Next we have some of the marker pieces I’ll need. These are the Heroes: allowing you a one-off re-try of a round of melee i.e. draw the wrong card, use our hero, draw another card, discard hero.

As you can see, each of my heroes comes complete with their own scribe (to record their valiant actions) and their own parasol holder (to keep the hero cool until he is needed).

Once again, lovely 15mm figures from Museum Miniatures.

IABSM AAR: South of Cherbourg

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It’s always nice when you hear about someone returning to I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum after a bit of a break and having a thoroughly good game…so here’s a quick AAR from Rob Goodfellow of the Tamworth Games Club.

Here Rob and friends play through the second sample scenario from the IABSM v3 rulebook: South of Cherbourg. Click on the picture below to see all.

Even better, Rob tells me that they are now thinking of playing through the Blenneville or Bust! scenario pack: so I’m sure we can expect plenty more AARs in the near future!

TFL Painting Challenge: Huge Update

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Well you all seemed to respond to my request to get those last few entries of the year in…especially as we’re now in the final month of this year’s competition, and last year’s scores won’t beat themselves!

Just one of Doug’s 28mm Hetzers

Today’s entries are:

  • Doug Melville with an incredible amount of WW2 28mm kit on show. So huge an entry was this that I almost considered giving Doug his own update!

  • Some casualty figures and sabot bases from Chris Stoesen

  • More beautiful Aztecs from The Hat

  • Travis pops in three LVTs and some more winter Americans

  • Five houses and, most important of all, a pub from Mervyn

  • A massive re-base from Jason Ralls…but hasn’t made the classic “cardboard base” error in the past?

  • I scoff at Steve Burt’s claim to have sent in the last of his Crusades figures: it’s never the last!

  • Carole returns to Games Workshop, spiky bits and all (the figures, not Carole)

  • Bits and Bobs from Fred Bloggs

  • And last, but by no means least, Andrew Helliwell with his usual plethora of figures

As usual, clicking on the name of the person above will take you straight to their gallery (opens in a new window) and I do recommend doing so: there are some magnificent paint jobs and collections on show.

Keep them coming: the end of the year beckons…

Here are today’s pictures:

IABSM AAR: On the Northern Shoulder of Kursk, Fight 4: Karpunevka

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Here is another stupendous After Action Report from Just Jack, taken (with permission) from his excellent BlackHawkHet blog.

I say “stupendous” because not only is it a really good read, but it’s huge as well: 144 photos, all individually captioned with an account of the action that’s shown. It’s so huge that it actually broke my attempt to get a post every day in November: I managed one every day right up to Monday 25th and then ran into this monster!

It also didn’t help that Squarespace was playing up: I had to type out about one caption in every five as the cut-and-paste just wasn’t working. Thanks for the bleeding finger tips, Squarespace!

Anyhow, enough of my moaning. It’s a great read: click on the picture below to do so…

Praesentia Hyperion Drones

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Remember the Praesentia? Excellent 15mm sci-fi figures from what was Critical Mass Games, but is now Ral Partha.

Well I started painting all the figures I bought in CMG’s “closing down” sale but never quite got around to finally finishing them off. The half-painted remainder have been sitting on my painting table, occasionally shuffling their feet and giving a polite cough to remind me that they are there.

As I’m a bit sick of painting Sumerians (yes, I know I’m supposed to be on the final push to finish them, but I’ve painted hundreds of the little blighters!) I thought I’d just clear a bit of space by finishing the Praesentia off.

So here’s the first of the three lots of Praesentia: a platoon of Hyperion drone AFVs.

These are actually quite large. The bases are a good three inches long, so you can see the drones come in at about 5 or 6 inches in length.

Unfortunately I believe that they are out of production at the moment (they are certainly not listed on the Ral Partha website) so I’m quite glad I bought them when I did. Just goes to show what I always say: never hesitate to buy figures, as they might not be available when you finally do decide you want them!