IABSM AAR: Lockdown Game

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Here’s a quick series of pictures from Rick Staple taken from the IABSM Facebook page.

It’s lockdown: so a quick joint/solo game of IABSM:

Here there be Dragoons!

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More for my ECW armies: a unit of Dragoons.

In For King & Parliament, my chosen ruleset for the period, Dragoons are small unit compared to a standard infantry battalia: effectively a cavalry unit dismounted less a few chaps to hold the horses. I’ve already decided a Forlorn Hope as being eight figures strong, so given your standard battalia is 24 figures strong, the Dragoons are somewhere in the middle at 12 figures strong.

I’m not actually going to paint up mounted versions or horse-holders because, as I understand it, there was only one encounter where Dragoons fought mounted, so best to avoid ahistorical fielding by not having any on horseback. That’s my excuse anyway!

These are 15mm Peter Pig figures painted (quickly) with GW Contrast Paints. Note the chap next to the purple flower in the picture above. He’s a good example of something you have to watch out for with Contrast Paints: missing a bit! Because the paints flow like a wash, it’s often easy to forget to use a proper brush (i.e. not a wash brush) and work the paint into the relief (the creases) in a figure. If you just dab the paint on like a wash, sometimes it will run away from where you’ve dabbed it a few seconds after you’ve done the dabbing, which if you’re painting multiple figures on a lolly-stick can mean that you miss what’s happened because you’ve moved on to the next figure. I shall have to re-open the box and fix him!

Incidentally, I had started thinking that I’ll never finish this English Civil War project, but then I realised that the reason it was taking me so long to complete, the reason why I had painted so many figures compared to other armies, was that I was painting enough of the same sort of figure (as the sides are relatively homogeneous) for to field both sides in a game…so painting two armies or one double-sized army. Doh!

Finally, today, regular visitors will know that I’ve set myself a task of interspersing my new project painting with clearing some of my rather sizable lead mountain. Here’s what I did - to do my duty! - just before painting the Dragoons:

It’s one of those objective markers the size of a Battlefront large base. Don’t know why I had it, or what I’ll use it for, but that (tiny) corner of the lead mountain is now flattened!

IABSM AAR: Border Clash with Borduria

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Here’s another battle report from James Manto’s excellent blog Rabbits in my Basement.

For this game, James has expanded his Medieval and 18th Century Imaginations concept to the post-WW2 period, with an epic clash across the fictional border between Mantovia (huzzah!) and Borduria (boo, hiss!) set in 1949.

Click on the link above or the image below to see James’ picture-heavy write-up:

TTS AAR: A Very Narrow Victory

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Time for the weekly battle with Daughter #1’s boyfriend K, trapped with us for the duration of lockdown.

We’d left it a bit late in the day to start (family quiz evening!) so elected to play To The Strongest. I would take the Neo-Sumerians, K would play the Athenian Hoplite Greeks. This is one of our favourite combinations: both sides consisting mostly of deep spear-armed blocks of infantry.

In TTS, there are several variants of the basic Sumerian army. In chronological order, they are Dynastic Sumerian, Akkadian and Neo-Sumerian. I had chosen the Neo-Sumerians because although their spear blocks are almost all raw citizen militia , they do have the ability to field a sizeable Royal Guard of archers and axemen.

My plan, therefore, was to keep my spearmen away from the mincing-machine of his Hoplites whilst the Royal Guard knocked out as much of the rest of his army as possible. I could then surround the Hoplites and polish them off.

Here’s what actually happened in the form of a pictorial report…

And that was the battle won, with only one of my coins remaining!

Aftermath

Well that was a very close run thing!

The Royal Guard performed appallingly, and it was really only the fact that K kept getting his generals killed that allowed me to win the day. K lost three officers, take two away and he would have had four coins remaining as his Hoplites made mincemeat out of my militia. As it was, I scraped home with only one coin to spare.

Another great game!

Another Lockdown Painting Challenge Update

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Everyone is painting so fast that I have switched to doing a weekly update: keeps the time spent updating down to an hour or two!

Some terrific entries this week, and I recommend visiting all the galleries. Here’s a selection of what’s been sent in:

More for the ECW Collection

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Lockdown does definitely mean more time for painting, and I’m adding units to the 15mm ECW collection almost as fast as I can buy the raw lead!

Today’s offering consists of two parts.

First up is a standard infantry battalia but, for the first time, with the figures from Hallmark rather than Peter Pig:

These were actually easier to paint than Peter Pig: they are very un-fussy figures, with everything that needs to be painted clearly defined. As per usual, I used GW Contrast Paints, apart from the metalwork, painting eight figures of the same type at the same time.

I like to swap between ranges, provided the sizes match: a change is as good as a rest, as they say.

I like the way the Contrast red has left all the buttons a much lighter shade than the surrounding cloth: I can’t imagine what it would be like to hand-finish every one. Well, I can actually: very tedious!

Next up is a few of the offs and ends that you need to play the game itself: two Light Gun markers and one officer (a Colonel). I haven’t positioned the officer figure very well in the photograph: you can only see half his profile!

The gun markers are Peter Pig; the officer himself is from Hallmark, with his mounted flag bearer from Essex.

Raug from Khurasan

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As the last bit of painting was a “main project” piece (ECW cavalry) it was time to delve into the lead mountain again and see what I could find. Somewhere on the lower slopes, I discovered a plastic box with about a platoon’s worth of werewolf-like sci-fi infantry.

I couldn’t remember where they came from, and was about to hit the ‘net to see if I could search them down, when I happened to turn one over and notice that the manufacturer had kindly stamped their name into the bases!

It was Khurasan Miniatures, and a quick scan of their site revealed that what I had in my hand was a platoon of Raug, a subject race of the Soriog.

From the Khurasan site:

The Soriogs rule over a vast interstellar empire, ruling many alien species, some of whom provide soldiers for the empire – in fact, the most commonly encountered Imperial soldier is not a Soriog at all, but rather the Raug Ceepay (soldier) who serve in their tens of millions. These are brave and tenacious, and come from a warlike predatory culture that makes them pefect rank and file soldiers. A section of Raug is made up of four triads, each of three Raug (two with an autogun and one with a heavy support weapon). Two such sections typically make up a platoon, commanded by two Soriogs, and usually accompanies by a Windhowler (a Raug mystic with healing powers) and between two and four Soriog Gundogs, which provide the platoon heavier organic fire support.

“I am 15mm, I am!”

These looked ideal candidates for GW Contrast Paints, and so it proved. Painting them was a matter of three colours only: the green, the brown, the black (for the guns). I did the whole platoon in a couple of hours: in fact, the basing took longer than the actual painting.

My only gripe, and it is a common gripe with Khurasan, is the matter of scale creep. These are lovely figures, no doubt about that, but they aren’t really 15mm at all: they are easily 20mm from base to eyeline, and more like 25mm tall to the top of the heads.

Now I have no objection in theory to large-ish 15mm sci-fi figures, but to look at a lot of the Khurasan ranges (especially the Thrainite space dwarves) you’d think that humans were the shortest race in the entire galaxy!

That may indeed be the case (who knows!) but I do think that 15mm figures should at least try and be 15mm in size.

Anyway, nice figures, and another unit cleared from the lead mountain.

IABSM AAR: 3RTR at Hames Boucres

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Time for another lockdown game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum against K, Daughter #1’s boyfriend, trapped with us for the duration.

I used scenario #3 from the Defence of Calais scenario pack: 3RTR at Hames-Boucres. I would take the Brits, K would play the Germans.

The game begins as a squadron of British tanks (a Squadron HQ of an A9 and an A10; two troops of three A13s each; a troop of three MkVIb light tanks; and a couple of recon Dingos) headed in column along a sunken road towards the village of Hames-Boucres (a few miles from Calais) with orders to deal with a few "rogue enemy tanks" that had apparently been spotted roaming around the countryside…

Click on the picture below to see what they encountered:

Dun Coloured Dutch Horse

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As regular visitors will know, I’m trying to take advantage of the extra painting time available during lockdown by interspersing my main projects with clearing a bit of the lead mountain.

After having completed the platoon of Hawkmen from The Scene, who had been perched on the lead mountain’s upper slopes for some time (see post last Friday), it was time to get back to my English Civil War armies with another unit of Dutch-style horse.

Like the last unit painted, these are 15mm Hallmark figures from Magister Militum: a close match in size to the Peter Pig figures which, so far, have formed the bulk of the collection.

I decided to try and paint dun-coloured horses this time: using the GW Contrast Aggaros Dunes colour straight from the bottle and then blacking the legs, manes and tails. It seems to have worked quite well, turning out a bay dun or buckskin dun colour.

As an experiment, I also undercoated in the ‘official’ grey undercoat as opposed to the usual white. That worked quite well, as the grey doesn’t show through so much if you miss a bit. Didn’t really notice much difference to the colours though.

One thing I did notice, however, was that the Contrast Black colour is quite fragile i.e. the least scrape across the tails would take some of it off, leaving said undercoat showing through on the most raised bits. In the end I gave each horse a quick stroke of normal black paint straight down the tail which solved the problem. A pity, though, as the hair on dun coloured horses is rarely pure black: it tends to have medium dark brown strands as well, and the pure Contrast black simulated a non-block-black quite well.

The rest of the figures were also painted with Contrast Paints, except for the sleeves in white. I had to use normal acrylic white over the grey undercoat as the Contrast white didn’t really do anything: just came out a bit dingy. Contrast white over Warithbone white in future, I think.

Right, with another “main project” unit done, off to the lead mountain to see what I can find to paint up next.

Another Painting Challenge Update

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Can it really be twelve days since the last update to the Painting Challenge?

Lockdown time is obviously different to real time!

Lot’s of gorgeous entries have come in: check out the individual galleries, but here’s a selection from this batch…

A Game of Warlord

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With five of us from two-three different generations all living on top of one another during lockdown, tensions can sometimes run a little high. One survival mechanic that we have adopted is to try every day to sit down to a family dinner (other meals being more ad hoc) and then do a family activity together. Sometimes it’s a film, sometimes an online quiz night with the extended family etc.

Some nights it’s a board game, and having exhausted Monopoly, Cluedo, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit etc we were looking for something different. That’s when the teenager spotted Warlord: that classic game of conquest and nuclear war.

Initially dubious (“it looks like a wargame, Dad”) we’ve now played a couple of games and eagerly added it to our regular stable.

I first played the game at school as a slightly smaller version of what you see here was released by Games Workshop in 1980 (when they were a “general [war] game” publishing and retail company) and bought my copy from the original designer, Mike Hayes, a couple of years ago.

It’s a game with incredibly simple mechanics (you can literally learn all the rules in five minutes) but a combat system that is fiendish in application. Here’s the description from Board Game Geek:

Gaining territories through combat is an elegant use of cunning and bluff. Instead of rolling dice, the attacker simply chooses with a single D6 how many pieces they wish to attack with (subject to restrictions based on terrain). The D6 is then concealed and the defender attempts to guess it. If they guess correctly the attacker loses that number of armies; if they guess wrongly one defender is lost, and if the territory is now left unoccupied the selected number of attacking pieces or greater are advanced into the territory to capture it.

The picture above shows the final position from last night’s game, played on the European map. The black counters represent areas that are now permanently uninhabitable due to radiation. As you can see, Spain and Central Europe got hit badly but, despite having the heart of her empire H-bombed, the pinks under daughter #1 took the day.

Highly recommended!

Hawkmen from The Scene

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I am trying to reduce the lead mountain a little bit during this lockdown period, but it’s very hard when you have two to three active projects on the go and Battlefront are doing daily deals at 40% off,

The tactic I’ve decided to use is to paint one “new project” unit then one “lead mountain” unit in turn…and it’s amazing what you find at the back of the cupboard. Today’s treat is a platoon of 15mm Hawkmen - think Flash Gordon - from The Scene.

Onward my brave Hawkmen! Let this be known forever as Flash Gordon's Day!

I bought these as relatively low-tech allies for my Hauk force from Khurasan Miniatures to be used for Quadrant 13, the sci-fi adaptation of IABSM.

I undercoated them, painted two, then just fell out of love with them. I think it was something to do with the work needed on the wings to get them to look good…because, let’s face it, get the wings right and the rest of the figure doesn’t really matter!

Step forward GW’s Contrast Paints. One coat and the wings pop beautifully. I finished off the whole platoon in a matter of hours. Apologies for the crappy pictures, btw.

All I need now is to convert a spare into Mr Blessed’s Vultan himself and I’m good to go.

IABSM AAR: The September War #01: Chojnice

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It was time for the first lockdown game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum!

The daughter’s boyfriend K (trapped here for the duration) had tried and enjoyed To The Strongest, it was now time to introduce him to WW2 gaming, and what better place to start than with a game of IABSM set in Poland on 1st September 1939.

The scenario is taken from the first September War scenario pack, and involves the fighting around Chojnice, an important Polish communications hub where, during the first day of the invasion, the Poles fought a delaying action, only withdrawing in late afternoon.

The game itself centered around a railway bridge that the Poles must hold, rig with explosives, and then blow up before the Germans can take the bridge and defuse the charges.

Click on the picture below to see all…

Matching Figures

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As previously mentioned, I’m bringing my Vis Bellica 100YW English army up to To The Strongest strength: which means doubling the size of some of the units.

The big problem, of course, is how do you match the new elements to the old: especially when you painted the old elements at least a decade or so ago?

The first problem is sourcing the right figures. I’d used Museum Miniatures first time around and, doubtless because of their continuing quality of product and excellent service, they are still around and actually going from strength to strength with their Z Ranges. Their 100YW range was still available, so I was easily able to match up my existing unit of Household Archers in terms of the raw lead.

The second problem is the colour scheme to use. Yes, I can see what colours the existing figures are, but I haven’t always kept a record of exactly which paints I used. I do for many of my armies, especially for WW2 and later periods, but not for the 100YW one.

The new element is on the left, furthest from the camera

Fortunately I had painted the existing archers very simply: red and blue and metal, so I wasn’t too worried that the old and the new would differ too much.

Far more important was the development of my painting style. As you can sort of see in the picture above, my old way of painting was a simple two-shade approach over a black undercoat. So undercoat in black, paint a dark version of the colour you want, highlight with a light version. This was very effective, and looks good, but quite time consuming: you are actually painting each figure twice. These days, however, I tend to use GW Contrast Paints over their Wraithbone undercoat: an entirely different method.

And from behind (the new element is now on the right)

Here is where the pleasure of using Contrast Paints comes in to play: the results are almost identical to the shading, and half the effort. You can also get some very nice depth on things like the axeman’s hauberk and the belt around it.

Okay, so I’m only painting to good wargames standard, but you can achieve some incredible things with Contrast Paints. I was, for example, very pleased with my ECW command figures (Essex 15mm).

So you now have the right figures painted to a good approximation of the existing element: all you have to do next is base them.

This is where I came more of a cropper. Firstly, for my existing army I had used thin metal bases, but had now run out. I could have sourced some, I suppose, but in the end decided to take the easy option and use my now-standard Warbases premium mdf versions.

I also had no paint that matched the existing bases (a very oddly light green) and had no note of where I had got in from. Worse, I had totally run out of the flock that I had used previously and, again, had no idea of where I had got it from. In the end, I bit the bullet and just went for the closest thing I could find in my flock collection: it doesn’t match, but it’s not too bad.

So there’s what you have to do to match old and new units:

  • the figures

  • the colours

  • the painting style

  • the bases

  • finishing the bases

I’m pretty happy with the match, and I’m sure that under “battle conditions” I’ll stop noticing any differences within minutes.

Post Script

I also painted up a unit of what Museum call Brigandines and I’m using as Billmen:

Missed Four Entries

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Whoops! Missed four entries off yesterday’s Challenge entries: some lovely terrain from Carole, ECW from Mr Helliwell, more Gangs of Rome from Chris Kay, and more re-basing from Stumpy. All galleries and the Scorecard now updated, and here’s a special four-person gallery of some of what I missed:

Lockdown Painting Challenge Update 3

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Well it seems as if I am not the only one taking full advantage of lockdown to paint little soldiers: a huge number of entries into the Challenge since the last update a week or so ago.

I encourage you all to visit the galleries to see what people are producing, but here’s a sample from everyone who sent something in:

More Painting

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Not commuting every day has certainly increased my painting output, so it was time to start a project that’s been on my mind since before Christmas.

Regular visitors will know that I play the Ancients game To The Strongest using 15mm figures on a 15cm grid. This way, I can use the armies that I originally put together for Vis Bellica on 6cm frontages by using two VB units for one TTS unit. This has meant a lot of investment in my old VB armies: effectively doubling the size of each or, where “deep” units such as Hoplites and Warbands are concerned, quadrupling the number of bases needed.

One of the last armies to need the TTS expansion treatment is my 100YW English army: knights, longbows and billmen. The trick here was going to be matching the figures and paint schemes that I had used before.

Figures weren’t so much of a problem…once, that is, I’d remembered (i.e. searched the Internet until I got a match) that I’d used Museum Miniatures for the core of the VB army. Paints would have to be as close as I could get with the originals using Contrast Paints.

Here’s the first two contributions: a command stand and an element of longbows:

I also managed to find time to complete a second unit of Commanded Shot for my ECW armies. As with the other, these were Peter Pig figures in 15mm.

I’ve also just had another delivery of Hallmark figures so (once the wife has wiped the package down with Dettol!) it’ll be on to more Dutch Horse.

Two Games of To The Strongest

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Another two lockdown games of To The Strongest with Daughter#1’s boyfriend, who is staying with us for the duration.

This time we ditched any pretense of involving the distaff side of the family: leaving them to watch The Queen’s Corgis on Netflix or Amazon or one of the other multiple streaming services that we seem to have adopted over the past few months, as we men got down to some serious gaming.

As this was our third session of TTS, I wanted K. to experience something a little different to the largely “deep units on both sides” games that we’d been playing so far. I therefore mocked up a Sarmatian army from my Sassanid Persians: four units of veteran heavy cavalry with lance and bow represented by cataphracts (represented by, not counting as!) and four units of standard heavy cavalry with lance and bow represented by clibinarii. There was also a unit of horse archers in there somewhere too.

K would take a Syracusan army: a core of four Hoplite units, one bodyguard; a mercenary command with a couple of units of Celts; and then a sprinkling of light infantry and raw cavalry to add flavour. It was, I explained, the first time that the Cretan Archers (see post from a couple of days ago) had been on the tabletop, so he was to expect them to perform extremely badly indeed!

“Why are all your men on that side of the battlefield?”

We deployed our troops, and K immediately noticed that I had heavily weighted my left flank, leaving many of his units with an open battlefield in front of them. He queried why I had done so, and I kindly explained that he would find out in a few minutes.

The reason, of course, was that I was going to try and smash his weak right flank to pieces and then wheel round and roll up his line like a yoga mat before his slow, left-flank units could get in on the action.

The first phase of my plan went, well, according to plan: one command of veterans and one command of standard cavalry did indeed clear K’s right flank from the table, leaving things looking like this:

Tough love!

Some of you might suggest that it was perhaps a little harsh of me to take advantage of the lad’s inexperience in this way, but I did explain exactly what I had planned and what I thought was going to happen as I did it: making sure that he would understand what was going on and be able to either counter or employ the same tactic in the future.

Back to the battle.

As a command of clibinarii duly held off his rampaging Celtic mercenaries, my cavalry duly wheeled round and, in text book fashion, slammed into his flank and, in one unit’s case, went for his camp.

Cretan Archers fulfilling their first-game destiny

Syracuse has fallen!

K began shedding victory coins right, left and centre, and the day was soon mine.

Game Two

As that game hadn’t taken very long, we swapped sides and prepared to do battle again.

I was expecting K to try and copy my refused flank tactic of last time, so determined that I would use an advance in echelon tactic to try and disrupt his plans. As it happened, K deployed his men evenly over his side of the table, so after I had made my first move, the battlefield looked like this:

On his right flank, K advanced his cavalry forward to meet the two units of Celts coming towards him over the hill. This left his horse archers to hold off the mercenary Greek cavalry coming through the pass.

This turned out to be a bit of a mistake as, admittedly with a bit of luck, my cavalry rapidly dispersed his light horse and found themselves in a fantastic position on the flank of one of his commands.

By rights, his horse should have been able to turn to face me, and then a normal face-to-face combat would have occurred, but K managed to draw not one, not two, but three Aces in succession for activation: his horse weren’t moving anywhere!

By rights, I should then have been able to crash into his flank and roll up both units rather pleasingly before going on to sack his camp: seven of his nine victory coins should have been mine. Again, however, a weird series of cards meant that his cavalry, although they wouldn’t turn to face me, were able to hold me off for the duration of all his Aces. I did eventually destroy both units, but not before events on the rest of the field decided the day.

Battle was then generally joined across the rest of both lines, with K’s lance armed cavalry attacks compensating for the depth of my foot units.

the first cut is always the deepest!

I kept expecting my horse to roll up his cavalry and win the game but, as I said above, it kept failing to happen, and gradually my foot units began to lose the day. A lost general sealed my fate, and the turn after my horse had finally rolled up those cavalry at the back, I lost one victory coin too many and the day was K’s: a grinding triumph for the Sarmations.

K was naturally chuffed to bits to get his first victory. The only thing that now puzzles me is where he’s going to sleep tonight…