Over a few days earlier this month, fellow-Lardy Alex Sotheran played a solo game of IABSM set in Stalingrad, where the 6th Army are attempting to batter their way to the Volga but the Soviet defence line is proving tenacious.
Alex has posted both a YouTube video of the game and some absolutely cracking pictures.
To watch on YouTube, click the video link below. It’s 2.5 hours long, but well worth a watch.
To see the pictorial report, click on the picture below:
We’re still in coronavirus lockdown in the UK: banned from leaving the house except for essential trips. For most people, that means no gaming or, at best, some kind of online get together. I, however, am lucky enough to have daughter number one’s boyfriend staying with us for the duration: lucky because (1) he likes to cook and (2) he has discovered that he enjoys wargaming.
Our second game was To The Strongest again: it’s grid-based tabletop and simple-yet-subtle mechanics make it ideal for a new gamer to pick up quickly.
This time, I would take a Gallic army consisting of large amounts of hairy-arsed Celtic warriors and face off against an Athenian Greek Hoplite army consisting of large amounts of, well, hoplites.
Gauls
Greeks
The Greeks set up first: heavily weighting their right flank. At this point I realised that perhaps I should have mentioned to my novice opponent that hoplites can’t move diagonally to the left, but decided to just ignore that rule for the moment.
My Gauls were fairly evenly spaced out, but my noble cavalry were on the left i.e. facing two unit of hoplites with very sharp pointy spears! This was no good, so I decided to try a switcheroo gambit and move my cavalry right over to the other side of the field, leaving behind the warband that accompanied them.
The Switcheroo Begins
This would hopefully isolate his two units of hoplites on the far side of the table.
Meanwhile, both battle lines lurched towards each other, the Greeks behind a protective screen of light infantry.
The game then developed into three different battles.
On my left flank, the single warband faced off against the two hoplite units who had actually managed to advance forward much faster than I had expected. Although my warband did achieve one flank attack, this was largely unsuccessful, and I was soon under a lot of pressure as the Greeks got themselves sorted out and threatened to overwhelm me with the two-on-one advantage that they had.
In the centre, meanwhile, the main bodies of the two armies came together in a series of thumping clashes: deep unit versus deep unit. The Greeks took full advantage of their light infantry: using them either to soften the Celts up before contact, or to retreat behind if they suffered a disorder. The advantage would swing backwards and forwards between the two sides throughout the rest of the battle.
On my right flank, my light infantry had managed to see off his horse archers, but a warband was having real difficulty dispatching the rubbish Greek cavalry. Fortunately, my cavalry arrived after their pell-mell gallop across the back of the battlefield, and prepared to sweep all before them as they rounded the corner of some rocks and lined up on the Greek battle line’s flanks.
All that stood between them and certain victory was the lone unit of Greek peltasts that, so far, had hung back and stayed out of trouble.
Cavalry, bottom right, lined up to roll up the Greek line. Only the peltasts are in the way.
Could I get through the peltasts? Not in a month of Sundays! My grand plan blocked by a unit of men who only thought they weren’t light infantry!
Anyhow, that meant that although I had won the right flank, I was losing the left flank, and honours were just about even in the centre. A Greek hoplite unit finally broke through my line and captured my camp, one of my warbands threatened to do the same to the Athenian camp. Units were breaking on either side until we both had just two coins left: the next unit to break would decide the game.
It was the Greeks who had the initiative. I was in real trouble on my left flank, with a couple of double-disordered warbands who would go with one more hit. My opponent reached for his pack of cards: all he needed to do was to send his men in diagonally to hit me: 2+ to activate becomes 3+ for a difficult move becomes 4+ because your hoplite units are deep.
So that was the end of the Greek offensive and, on my subsequent turn, I managed to finally kill the peltasts and win the game!
Another great game of TTS, with the daughter’s boyfriend coming within Ames Ace of beating me.
Here’s a complete gallery of the game:
Robert Avery
My ECW collection is coming along nicely: today’s addition is a third battalia of pike-heavy foot.
As usual, these are 15mm Peter Pig figures painted with GW Contrast Paints and mounted as one element on a Warbases’ Vehicle Base. The flowers are from Boontown.
I’m intending to use these for For King & Parliament, the ECW version of To The Strongest, hence why they will work well as a single base of figures.
What I need to do now is to swap my efforts onto the units of Dutch-style horse that my collection requires.
The main difficulty is that I would like to make the Dutch horse even more distinctively different to the Swedish-style horse I already have, so have been looking around for a different manufacturer to try.
I did try Blue Moon, who have some very nice figures, but they are distinctly bigger than the Peter Pig ones, especially the horses, so don’t really fit. I’m usually pretty tolerant about different figures sizes (after all, you do get a variety of sizes in real life), but these are really very much bigger. So if anyone wants a few packs of unpainted, untouched Blue Moon ECW horse, I’m happy to look at swapping them for something. E-mail me at the usual address (right hand column gives it).
Off to the Internet to see what I can find…
Mark Luther set himself a real challenge when he decided to run a COVID-19 lockdown game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum remotely.
This game was played over two days using photographs of the table and texts: a great effort from all concerned. It’s a cracking battle report as well, so click on the picture below to see all…
Ed.’s Note: I expect you all to read this as it took me absolutely ages to load and caption all the pictures in the right order. Amazing set up, but the terrain does make everything blur into one when viewed in thumbnail size!
Not commuting does seem to have freed up extra time for painting, although this is countered by all the extra work I’m having to do to cope with keeping the business I work for going during the crisis.
Up to now, however, I haven’t really dug into the lead mountain: I’ve just cleared some of the scree from the lower slopes!
Yesterday, however, I finally finished a unit that has been sitting on my painting table for literally a couple of years. Put it this way, before I could start work on them, I had to get all the dust off the models first!
Khurasan Miniatures are a firm that produce a huge range of 15mm sci-fi and historical figures. Usually the sci-fi ranges are grouped into races or empires, each with a background and a story that gives a bit of life to the lead. On top of these collective ranges, however, Khurasan sometimes produce a stand alone individual unit, and one of these were the Brunt Herd Mercenaries.
(R to L) Big Men, a Nutter with a staff, and a spare heavy weapon
If I recall correctly, these are based on a prehistoric rhino-type with a soft, bifurcated snout. They are large, designed to stand well above your average 15mm human, with the models ending up 20-25mm tall.
As you'd expect from Khurasan, the Brunt are full of life, with some really nice poses that provide a fair amount of variety. I will use these to augment a lesser force, or just to provide some bad guys for the good guys to fight!
1st Squad (to give an idea of scale, the figures are mounted on UK 2p pieces)
All the figures that I had previously painted (or started) are undercoated in white, then painted with a two-step shade-then-light method. For example, the tool belts are a base dark brown and then a light leather colour on top.
The figures that I painted now from scratch - effectively just the three command figures - are painted with GW Contrast Paints: so much easier to use than the method above.
2nd Squad
I’m not generally a fan of outsize 15mm figures, hence the reason it took so long for me to finish the unit, but the Brunt aren’t too bad. They are, however and as far as I know, so old - and didn’t take off as Khurasan hoped - that they are OOP…so apologies to anyone who got excited by the above and wanted to buy some of their own!
3rd Squad
So here we all are stuck under lockdown and unable to go out. No wargaming clubs are open, no wargaming friends can come round: what on earth is one to do.
Well I have had a right result.
Daughter number one came back from university just before lockdown and brought her boyfriend with him as a house guest for a couple of months (he lives abroad normally, but can’t get home at the moment). This is not a bad thing: we have plenty of room and he, unlike me, likes cooking. Even better, the kids were so desperate for entertainment yesterday that they agreed to have a battle: daughter number one and boyfriend on one side; daughter number two and I on the other.
I chose the To The Strongest rules for Ancients as it’s probably the easiest introduction to wargaming for beginners: no measuring, no dice, simple grid-based movement and combat rules etc. D2 and I took the Neo-Sumerians, D1 and BF took the Assyrians.
Neo-Sumerian Battle Line
This was an interesting clash: lots of slow-moving, poor quality Sumerians versus small numbers of deadly, fast-moving Assyrians.
Each side chose to put their heavy chariots on the right flank, so we rapidly got to a situation where the centre was a tie and each side’s right flank was winning and left flank was losing.
The advantage then swung back and forth with both sides ending up with only two coins each i.e. one more unit lost would mean an overall loss. As it happens, one of the Sumerian heavy onager units managed to knock out an Assyrian cavalry unit and the game was ours!
And the right result?
Not the win, funnily enough, but the fact that D1’s boyfriend really enjoyed himself and declared an interest in playing more battles. Well, if we’re stuck together for another ten weeks, his wishes are going to be more than fulfilled! A convert!
Here are some more pictures of the game:
Good to see that the entries are still coming n for this year’s Painting Challenge despite the problems of lockdown: hard to replenish your painting supplies when you’re not allowed out!
Here’s a selection of today’s entries: make sure you visit everyone’s galleries as there’s a lot to see:
I’m a great fan of the Zvezda 15mm plastic vehicle kits. Not only are they very nicely made and very easy to put together, but they produce some quite rare vehicles at very cheap prices.
My latest purchase was a platoon of three Wurfrahmen 40 “Stuka zu Fuss” rocket launchers built onto SdKfz 251 half-tracks.
I say my latest purchase, but i actually bought these before Christmas and have only just now got around to building and painting them.
These, as I said, are 15mm and plastic: the kits snap together without really any need for glue…although I tend to glue some of the major parts just in case. The half-tracks go together in about 90 seconds, but the individual rocket-launchers (six per vehicle!) are a bit fiddly, especially with clumsy hands like mine. Not difficult: just fitting three small parts together when you have to line up pegs and holes. I’m sure there’s an easy way of doing it involving tweezers or small children or something, but I couldn’t find it.
Obviously a completely impractical kit for I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum! as any such weapons would have been way behind the front lines: in wargaming terms, in the next room or even next house away! They do, however, allow me to field a rather nice objective and (let’s face it, the real reason) complete my collection so that I can now field the alternative third platoon structure of a company of engineers.
Recommended.
All this spare time at home has given Mark Luther a chance to write up an AAR that has previously just been a collection of pictures.
So here’s the Operation Express battle report again, but this time with the pictures correctly labelled and ordered.
Click on the picture below to see all. This is a magnificent report of a great looking game, so recommended!
I think that Cuirassiers in the full plate sense might have been dying out by the time of the English Civil War, but the book assures me that I might need a smallish unit for some scenarios, so it was off to the Internet to buy some figures and then to paint them.
These are 15mm Peter Pig figures painted using GW Contrast Paints. The horses are Cygor Brown thinned down 50/50 with the Contrast Thinner. The armour is Templar Black very lightly dry-brushed with Leadbelcher, except for the commander at the far end, who has a light dry brush of a dark gold colour.
The unit is shown as a Dutch- rather than the more modern Swedish-style formation i.e. two ranks deep relying on brute force rather than one rank deep relying on firepower. It’s still a smallish unit: being only four figures wide rather than the usual nine (which is going to make the larger Dutch-style units very heavy indeed at 18 cavalry figures to a base!).
The bases are Warbases vehicle bases flocked all over. The flowers are from Boontown, and are absolutely excellent.
Fantastic battle report from Tim Whitworth on a game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum played just before we all went into lockdown.
Tim and his friends have been playing through a Blenneville or Bust! campaign taken from the scenario pack of the same name. This was the final game in the series, and a chance for the Germans to achieve maximum victory points.
Find out what happened by clicking on the link below. Highly recommended: this is a serious after action report!
A bit of a change from ECW and WW2 today: giant 15mm mutants from Nuclear Shrimp Games.
These are plastic figures painted with GW Contrast Paints. Quite fun really: but the paints did all the work.
I’m a little concerned that the chap top left is blurred as if moving!
Hello All
Yes, I am still alive!
It’s just that the coronavirus situation now has me working from home and, this week at any rate, I have been busier than ever with no time to post anything.
That, however, is if there was anything to post. The fairly regular flow of AARs has now dried up: presumably either because of the closure of most of the places where people meet to play, or people avoiding playing in case they get a case of CORVIDs across the tabletop.
So a huge annoyance really: no commute, so technically plenty of extra time…but that extra time taken up with extra work to get the business done remotely…so no painting done…and no gaming either because of social contact restrictions.
But let us not despair: there’s still the Painting Challenge to enter.
Here’s a sample of the latest batch to hit my inbox, and a very impressive latest batch it is too. Check out the individual galleries too.
All this Working From Home (WFH) has given me time to finish off a couple of pike and shot units that have been sitting on the painting table for a bit. It’s all down to no commuting time: gives me an extra 2½ hours a day.
Anyhow, here’s another battalia of pike-heavy infantry:
And a small unit of Swedish Horse to represent Lifeguards or some such:
Both units are 15mm Peter Pig, and all painted with GW Contrast Paints. The pikes were from North Star Figures.
Some nice pictures from a game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum run by Julian Whippy and friends, and taken from the IABSM Facebook page.
British Paras hold a bridge waiting for their relieving armour to arrive. Click on the pic below to see all:
George Anderson reports on his second game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum, taken from his excellent blog Musing on Wargames and Life.
George still isn’t sold on the game, but let’s hope he gives it a few more tries. Click on the picture below to see what he thinks.
Lovely After Action Report from the pen of Tim Whitworth, taken from the IABSM Facebook page and his own blog Eagles & Lions Wargaming.
As the Germans had halted the American attack at Pierrecourt they were back on the counter offensive again, this time with a combined force of 30th Panther and 30th Panzer Grenadier regiments.
Click on the picture below to see all…
Another great week for the Painting Challenge, with loads of submissions coming in, including one from long-time participant, Stumpy.
Stumpy has taken the Challenge every year since it first started, meaning that this is his seventh year of entries, and with an average annual points score of just over 2,000. Impressive.
Here’s his first entry of the year: an LRDG Jeep and an M8 Armoured Car:
Lots of other entries as well. Here’s a little pictorial summary, but I do recommend that you visit people’s individual galleries as well:
Scorecard will be updated in due course.
Keep ‘em coming!
Regular visitors will know that I picked up a handful of 3D printed 15mm vehicles when I went to the Overlord show in Abingdon the other day. Time to get a bit of paint on the models to see how they turn out:
Front to back they are the US GMC CCKW 353 tanker, the British/Commonwealth CMP tanker, and the Soviet Zis 5 tanker.
As you can see, the 3D printing is pretty obvious at this close range, but is actually far less noticeable at usual wargames table 3ft distance. I also think the effect is magnified by seeing the three vehicles together.
On the whole I’m pretty happy: each vehicle was only £4 or £5, and as these are the only tankers I’ve come across in the marketplace…
Time to break out the I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum again with a scenario taken from the second September War scenario book: #60 Szack.
Szack was a small village in what was south-eastern Poland (it’s now just inside Ukraine) that was the site of a backwards-and-forwards series of actions between the Poles and the Soviets in very late September 1939. The scenario covers the first Soviet attack:
Soviet troops consisting of the 112th Infantry Regiment, some 13,000 soldiers supported by fifteen T-26 tanks and fifteen guns, arrived at the village of Szack on September 28th.
The Polish force near the village numbered 4,000 men of the Border Protection Corp, including General Wilhelm Orlik-Rückermann, and sixteen anti-tank guns.
Having taken the village, the Soviets then charged the Polish positions with infantry supported by the T-26 tanks. The Poles waited until the Soviets were right on top of them before opening fire with their anti-tank guns, destroying eight tanks.
Click on the picture below to see the action:
Vis Lardica is a website devoted to wargaming and military history, with a special emphasis on the company-sized rulesets produced by the TooFatLardies: I Ain't Been Shot Mum (WW2); Charlie Don't Surf (Vietnam); and Quadrant 13 (science fiction)
Welcome to Vis Lardica, a not-for-profit website mostly dedicated to the company-sized wargaming rules produced by the TooFatLardies, but encompassing my other gaming interests as well.
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