My Colonial Collection, Part 2: Mahdists, Brits and more Egyptians

 Found some more of my Colonial minis, buried at the bottom of a drawer. Again, most of the River War models aren't ready for play, needing pennies for basing. I don't tend towards strictness in basing; pennies match brownish ground well enough as is, and I'd rather get to playing than spend time and effort on detailing. I am not an artist, which is one reason why I find painting a chore - I'd rather get the figures on the table and cut to the game. Perhaps I'm more old-style, preferring basic green table, foam hills and "found" buildings.

Two dozen camelry.

35 Mahdists with firearms.

Seventy with spears.

And ninety-six Beja "fuzzy-wuzzies."

Roughly ten units (for TSATF) of infantry and two of cavalry. The recommendation in the book is for a quarter of these to have rifles, plus cavalry and maybe a Krupp gun, which I have to spare.

Also in the box were some more Egyptians and Brits:

47 Egyptians, so another battalion-worth.

And 32 Brits in classic khaki.

Buildings for the River War are fairly easy to mock up. Suggested by Man of Tin, I bought some biodegradable plant pots which have just the right color and texture. But here's another I made years ago with construction paper for a demo at work, based on a tutorial from the old Major General's Page:

While I still like TSATF for the rules, I intend to experiment with The Men Who Would Be Kings as well, for its "solo mode" if nothing else. See you then!

My colonial collection, Part 1: Egyptians

While the first wargaming books I read were Little Wars and Charge!, my first experience of actually collecting and playing with historicals was the Sword and the Flame. This was largely driven by my discovery of Major General Tremorden Rederring's Colonial Wargames page. These are not that first collection of minis, which is still lying unpainted in a box somewhere. These are (a small fraction of) my collection of minis gradually bought from a painter on Ebay a few years back. I picked up Egyptians, Mahdists, British, Zulus, and a bunch of assorted Napoleonics in 1/72 scale, as well as German Schutzetruppe from someone else.

I immediately popped the colonial figures off their painting/unit bases that they had for shipping, and put them on pennies for easier play with TSATF. I made the possible mistake of doing the same thing with the Napoleonics, long before I discovered Featherstone's later "unit" rules in which casualties are not removed but regiments have hit points instead (see Natholeon's blog for some excellent versions in various periods) - this makes the units neater, nicely regimented (heh) and more like playing pieces for use with rulesets like Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame. Unfortunately, this particular lot are on 60mm-wide bases, which requires 3-inch squares, so 12x8 on this particular board they're sitting on. Cordery's Napoleonic rules will be even trickier, as units have two bases apiece to help make different formations of line, column, and square. So I'm a bit torn over these chaps. There is even a River War variant of Black Powder available, though this lot would only make up about two brigades for that game.

Ultimately, I think I'll break up the Egyptians as I've done with other Colonials. That'll enable me to play a few different skirmish games, TSATF of course but also The Men Who Would Be Kings which has differing unit sizes for different troop types. And I can still play gridded games, just with smaller troop numbers. Though reduced sizes of Paperboys figures may work too - Zulus and Boers (which I haven't got at all) are available now.

48 cavalry; 12 more are off camera.

Bashi-Bazouks.

Camelry.

Lancers.

96 infantry.

Infantry closeup.

Artillery.

Closeup on a Krupp and crew.

Officers.

In TSATF, this comes out to five 12-man cavalry squadrons and five 20-man infantry companies. A "rounded" force in TSATF is four companies, two squadrons and three guns, which would be matched against around twice their number of Mahdists. Which I'm pretty sure I have for the next post in this particular series. TMWWBK is on a somewhat smaller, more detailed scale, but requires fairly small forces. A typical 24pt "Field Force" (the standard game size) might have four 12-man infantry units and two 8-man cavalry units, and the game can be played with units at half strength, too.

I think I'm giving myself a desire (or excuse) to read The Men Who Would be Kings again... have only skimmed it since I bought my new copy.