Experimental painting

 Ever since the library's teen tech-lab, YouMedia, started a Dungeons & Dragons group and got a new 3D printer a few months ago, I've been eager to try painting again. The initial plan was to sit down the DnD players with their new character minis and teach the basics of painting; the current, tentative plan is to open this up to all teens. This may seem like the same thing, since virtually all high-schoolers at my branch end up in YouMedia - it's nearly impossible to run teen programs outside of it, so we really haven't. But my manager wants me to try, to the point of actual advertising with posters and the library's social media. The YouMedia staff, luckily, are okay with this, since it can still be done in or next to YouMedia and they can spend a few minutes talking up the program to any kids who aren't already in it. It does at least let us get to kids under the age-fourteen limit, and maybe interest parents too.

That does mean we'll need extra minis beyond the ones designed by the DnD players; something generic is in order, possibly animals, videogame characters or ordinary medieval warriors or civilians. We'd pick a few types, and print a couple dozen ahead of time for anyone who hasn't already designed their own. Suggestions welcomed, though I lean towards animals for the appeal to younger kids. Perhaps suffragettes for Women's History Month?

Civilians from Paperboys Little Wars.

The one on the far right is hand-drawn, inspired by Man of Tin.

So I "borrowed" a tyrannosaur from some of the samples YouMedia have been cranking out, and bought a handful of Army Painter bottles and a few Contrast paints.

About 15mm scale, I think, and is poorly balanced.

Based with Army Painter Ash Grey and a basic brush.
Will use spraypaint in future.

"Basecoated" with Ork Flesh Contrast paint.

Sorry for the poor lighting.

Scar Tissue mouth and Troll Claws on
the teeth and claws.

Crude stripes in Matt Black. Also tried
highlighting with Goblin Green and Skeleton Bone;
doubt it's visible even in good light.

Better view of the stripes, which I tried
(but failed) to taper.
Paint pens would work better.

Complete with base to keep him standing.

This should be a good sample to show what a beginner painter can make of the models the new printer makes. Having painted a couple from the older printer, I'm surprised at how smooth and realistic this model is; it was remarkably easy and fun to do. Even counting drying of the different layers, might have taken an hour (though a few days working in my spare time). I do suspect a proper event might require two days even with prebasing.

I next hope to try a large bust of Groot (the Treeman from Guardians of the Galaxy), which should show off Gore-Grunta Contrast paint to effect and be easy to drybrush as well (with good-sized brushes, of course).

It's been a long while since I tried to paint something like this; I'm looking forward to trying again, and getting some teens to do it with me!

Reading, and surviving the plague

 Am not getting much done game-related at all this first week of 2022, due to having caught the plague (though I don't think it was at the Regatta, more likely passing out thousands of Covid tests at work). Appropriately, I just finished two books by Martin R. Howard:

 

Thanks to commenters Ross MacFarlane and James Fisher, who recommended the second one. Both are short and contain lots of period commentary. I will admit that, at least, government response to the present pandemic could have been a LOT worse. Walcheren fever (seemingly malaria) is sickeningly and repeatedly described.

Also received two Charles S. Grant volumes from On Military Matters: 

• Refighting History vol. 7: Warburg, Vellinghausen, and Wilhelmsthal
• Wargamers Annual Summer Special 2015

I ordered the latter on a tip from Graham Cummings on the Wargaming the '45 Facebook group, who wrote a very useful article and wargames campaign for the abortive French invasion of Britain in 1744. I may need it, as it looks increasingly like Bonnie Prince Charlie in my '45 campaign is going to run into overwhelming numbers of unhappy Government troops. After the "conventional" campaign ends, I may want to try the '44 too. We'll see!

As for the first book, I have to admit I like the smaller, more compact style of Grant's previous series, Wargaming in History. I have his first two volumes and find them delightful. The newer series is in a larger format, but there's something about it... maybe the lack of artwork by the late Bob Marrion, though the German artist whose characterful, almost cartoony sketches fill the pages is just as good in his own way. Maybe more white space. And maybe the lack of detail about the Lorraine and VFS armies, as the Refighting series uses more deliberately historical units. I won't tire of rereading the Wargaming in History volumes.

That's not to say they're not good. I selected the 7th and 8th volumes specifically because I'm not as interested in Frederick the Great and more in the British and French, and these are specifically about the Western theater. There are useful and beautiful articles about the British, French and German "specialist" units such as legions, early Highlanders and converged grenadiers. They make me want to collect Crann Tara... (No, Jennifer! Bad hobbyist! Stick to stuff you'll actually use!)

I was hoping to spend this week painting a couple 3D prints as samples for the program I keep telling myself I'll do at work. Not happening anytime soon now, though I'll have to delve thru my desk to see what paints I have undried.

Back to bed, with books to finish reading. Hope your turn of the year is better than mine.

Christmas Clash

No, not Trenton (though I've done that in the past, and might next week at work), but a repeat of Prestonpans. While I feel the Charge! version was a mess, there's another reason for a simpler game - more units on the table. With Stephen Simpson's rules, a regiment just needs a couple bases and one or two casualty figures, and this way I can field the number of units recommended in the Black Powder supplement and fit them on my table. I tried Simpson's '45 scenarios (from Wargames Illustrated 134) last year shortly before starting this blog, and was very pleased with them. The blog title image is from my runthrough of Culloden.

Unfortunately, Simpson's rules use D8 and D10 dice, and virtually all my RPG dice have been turned over to the Dungeons & Dragons group at work. But I found a variant of Simpson in MWAN 98, written by Prior Aelred Glidden, which uses only D6s. It was apparently inspired by a review of Simpson's rules by Wally Simon, and if anyone can tell me where that review is I'd be obliged. I like Wally's writing very much, and I'm interested to know what he thought.

The above is Simpson's simple Prestonpans scenario from WI 134 - an empty field with five regiments on each side. The British units are all "below average;" ie, they will rout after one morale failure. According to the Black Powder scenario and my successful 'Rising rolls, there will be twice as many units available:

Government:

• Five infantry battalions (White, blue, yellow, green facings and Hessians)
• Two dragoon regiments
• Three guns

British army, with supplemental cat butt.

I'll count all of these, except the Hessians, as three-base units - under Glidden's rules, they will rout after one morale failure. But at least there are more of them, including guns, so it might not be as bad as it looks.

Rebels:

• Eight Highland clans (all with four bases, or average strength)
• Two dragoon squadrons (I'll count these as a single regiment with, like the British, three bases to represent its small size.)

Left.

Center.

Right.

Two thirds of the Scots will start 14" from the British - ie, one move out of musketry range. The rest of the units will be 19" away, or two moves. 

The British formation will be classic, infantry in the center interspersed with guns, cavalry on the flanks. Glidden's version of the rules includes brigade commanders, who provide bonuses to rally attempts (but can be killed in the process, so let's not have Charlie do any of this!). The Brits get one commander, Cope, and the Scots get four - Charles as CinC, Murray, Perth and Nairne.

To save table space, I started the game immediately after the first Scottish move, at which point the two left-hand brigades are in musketry range and the third will have to move again first. This will allow the British a round of shooting before the Highland charge of ten inches next turn. The Scots are advancing (hence their generals in front of the units) and the British are holding their ground (Cope next to, rather than before or behind, his line).

Turn 1: Firing

• All Scottish fire misses (Highlanders have -1, so needed sixes).
• Three Highland regiments are hit. Two, rallied by their commanders, take no effect, but one loses a base. It may continue, but one more loss and it will break.
• A British dragoon regiment charges, but fails to hit despite +2 to the roll (+1 for first round of melee, +1 for cavalry charging infantry.

Turn 2: Highland charge!

• Four of the five clans in range of Cope's line pass their rolls to charge (requiring the number of unit bases or better). The last may still move forward, but not contact.
• One dragoon regiment takes musketry and breaks off the board.
• The second continues its combat with the Highlanders, who lose a base but do not break.
• The white foot regiment loses a base and breaks.
• The rebel dragoons take casualties from a Hessian volley and break.

Right moves up, with cavalry flanking.

Some badly lit charges:

Turn 3: Hand-to-hand struggle

• Two more clans get into the fight, which is however inconclusive until...
• General Cope is killed while trying to rally one of his regiments!
• His army checks as one and ... holds on. Boring!

Battle in the center.

Hessians and gunners hold out on the right.

Turn 4: The final push?

No, not really, though...

• One gun is eliminated and presumably captured.
• Two clans are decimated and driven back.

Turn 5: The grind

• One of the retreating clans reforms.
• The Hessians, after holding the British left flank all alone for ages, are overwhelmed and retreat from the board.
• One of the British guns, cleared to fire, fails to run off the increasingly unhappy clan in front of it.
• On the British right, a regiment swings into the combat on its right but despite the +2 roll, fails to hurt its opponent.

British right flank. The battle threatens to turn into a swinging door
as both rights outflank!

Turn 6: Maneuvering for advantage

The Scottish right, ready to sweep down the field.

Turn 7: Collapse imminent?

• Units on both British flanks break.
• One reduced clan does its best to keep the remaining dragoons busy, charging and retreating.

Turn 8:

• Yellow-faced regiment takes casualties and breaks.
• The Scottish right reforms into column with intent to cut off the British line of retreat.
• The dragoons turn about and charge into the Highlanders pushing back their infantry. Only the Scottish brigadier manages to keep them in the fight.

Turn 9: 

• Last gun eliminated.
• The Scottish right has marched to the center.

Turn 10:

• The last two British regiments (blue-faced and dragoons) take casualties and break. End game, at last!

Outflanked.

The scrum!

That really should have ended earlier - like right after the Government commander was killed. Perhaps I should have repeated the army-wide morale check? There isn't a flanking rule, either, and it's pretty hard to outnumber in melee. A little free kriegspiel might have been useful here. I'm not entirely satisfied with Glidden's rules, mostly because of the morale check, which is random and a roll of 1 or 2 always keeps a unit in the fight. In Simpson's original rules, to-hit and morale are combined. I think I'll return to them for future games, but under the circumstances this still went much better (and quicker) than Charge!

Now for the Black Powder campaign recovery table. One British dragoon unit left the table without suffering casualties, while the Hessians took casualties before leaving the table and all other regiments were destroyed. Also, the Scots captured three guns.

Their recovery roll is 3. Units destroyed are lost, but those that left the table without taking casualties first (remember, as Poor units they can only take a single "casualty") are restored. That's one dragoon regiment and the Hessians who escape to join Wade south of the border.

On the Scottish side, one Highland regiment and the dragoons were destroyed, and three Highland regiments took casualties.

Scots roll a 6 on the recovery table - that allows them to restore the damaged units to full strength, get half the destroyed units back (I'll take the Highlanders), and upgrade two units. That enables me to make two of the Highland regiments elite - ie, they now get three hit points.

They also get to roll on a Jacobite Victory Table: 6 again! D3 Highland regiments join my cause - and I roll a 1. Ah, well. I now have nine Highland regiments and three guns to advance on England with. See you next time!

Regatta at Das Krieg Haus

 The local club of the South Florida Miniatures Gamers is lucky to have its own clubhouse (read: a rented storage unit), with the affectionate nickname of Das Krieg Haus. Members take it in turn to run monthly games, usually historical and usually horse-and-musket to WWII. One member takes on the responsibility of rent, though the rest of us chip in as a quasi-membership fee, and in between games there is plenty of room to store minis and terrain - also a small library, fridge, and TV for showing appropriate films. I find it a comfortable place to just spend some time, and members spend more time reminiscing and eating pizza than playing some days. Yesterday was one of those for me...

Traditionally in December, we play Limeys and Slimeys, a beer-and-pretzels naval game that leans more towards pirates than ships-of-the-line - not that there aren't some of those, and the table can barely fit the fleet some years. There were about thirteen people present, including the father-in-law of one player and the daughter of another. This year's scenario featured a convoy of Maltese ships, sometime in the 1740s, fleeing a pair of Franco-Spanish warships and defended by a single British frigate.

Fore and aft views of the largest ships: 

 

A few representative pictures of the club. The second level, used for storage, is visible in the second pic.

 

A couple of my favorite posters. The second is Maryland militia at North Point, 1814 - a game I'd like to run at work.

Usually the ships are stocked with 15mm miniatures - this year we used 28s.

 

Line infantry doubled as marines aboard ship:

 

Towards the middle of the battle. The dhow in the center is mine. The Frenchman on the left is catching up with the larger merchantmen and boarding a little one, while the Spaniard on the right is dueling with the British escort. Later in the game, we removed the rear mat, dragged everything towards that end of the table, and replaced it on the forward end to provide more room to sail through the Straits of Messina.

Ultimately, the Brits and Maltese lost; the larger merchantmen were taken, the British frigate sunk and the smaller ships escaped after tossing their cargoes overboard. I never even fired a shot or had one fired at me, just sailed down the table with occasional tacks to avoid other ships, and spent the game ogling the ships and miniatures, talking with friends, drinking Cokes, and reading a loaned copy of Eight Hundred Fighting Englishmen - the large-scale version of Larry Brom's classic The Sword and the Flame, which I'm thinking of using with the Zulu War Paperboys.

Still had a good time - this was only my second visit to Das Krieg Haus since the pandemic started. Maybe not the smartest idea, but it did our hearts good if not our immune systems.

Dropped by the game store afterwards, but unfortunately they no longer had a copy of Chris Peers' Death in the Dark Continent and were short on paint (the teen tech lab at work would like me to run a basic painting class for all the kids busily printing DnD miniatures). Coming not so soon...

Charge! at Prestonpans

"... the broadswords came whirling out of the mists at Prestonpans to fall on Major-General John Cope's redcoats and cut them to ribbons in something under five minutes." -- G.M. Fraser, Johnnie Cope in the Morning 

It didn't go too well.

As a game, I mean.

Despite its relative simplicity (it was published in the '60s, after all) Charge! is a bit messy to play. Especially with multi-based figures, because close combat is largely one-to-one. And because the morale mechanic is based on casualties alone, I have to track each unit on paper. Then track overall casualties against the original number of men, leaving out those who fled the field, and ultimately I gave up and accepted a more free-kriegspiel result. The methods I used to make the British lower-quality didn't work too well, so the Scots took a lot of casualties on their way in.

The field of battle. Five Highland clans and a handful of horse...

... facing three and a half foot regiments, a gun, and English horse.

The Scots advance, with the right unit in skirmish order.
(Highlanders may move as light infantry.)

Cavalry clash.

The Scots cavalry are broken, but the rallying British
are in range of a Highland regiment, which fires into them.

The right-hand clan spreads out to flank the Hessians.

The British troops count as militia and roll one die per ten men,
the Hessians one per eight men. At this range, the roll is halved
for casualties (marked on the slip behind the unit).

A Banshee of the Highlands appears out of the mists!
Some of the Hanoverians fall over on the shaking ground,
and the Highlanders feel a supporting paw on their backs as they
hurtle towards the enemy!

The lines meet, unluckily for the gun-crew.
The last volley kills dozens of Highlanders.

The Hessians draw their combat.

While one Highland regiment breaks, so do two
British regiments, and the gun is lost.

The British horse were close enough to their target
to avoid a volley, and draw the combat.

By my calculations, the Jacobites have about 80 men left on the field, less than half what they started with, while the Government have 79 men left. But while the Hessians and horse on the flanks have held their own, their center is gone. I think the Scots have won the day - at the cost of many of Scotland's finest.

At this point, I roll on the Jacobite Victory Table, and the Recovery Table for both sides. The Jacobites get volunteers - my choice of one Highland regiment or D3 Lowland regiments. I'll choose the latter, and two units of Lowlanders join my banner! (I also claim the enemy gun as spoils of war.)

For Recovery, the Jacobites "rally," recovering the casualties of unbroken units but failing to recover the broken regiments. The British roll the same and won't get their broken units back either.

On reflection, using Charge!, with its lack of real morale rules, probably was a mistake for the sort of morale-based battle Prestonpans was. With Stephen Simpson's rules, which I used for this same battle before, it is entirely possible for the British line to break on the first turn!

On to Edinburgh and Stirling! Unless I repeat this under a simpler ruleset. Time will tell...

Raising the Standard

I've committed myself to running a Jacobite '45 campaign. It would probably be smarter and easier to go with the very nice (and brief!) rules by Stephen Simpson, which I've successfully used in the past, but I really want to give the simplified Charge! rules a workout. That may require a larger table and slightly bigger armies. I intend to try the campaign structure from Black Powder's Last Argument of Kings supplement, and this requires a maximum of thirteen (!) Allied infantry regiments and up to six cavalry regiments.

My table is five feet across. A base of eight men is 30mm wide, so a Wofun regiment of five bases is about six inches. 

Yeah.

The other option is to reduce the armies by, say, a third or even half (I do want to retain the regiment sizes). This isn't hard for the Hanoverians but may be tricky for the Jacobites, as their army size is more variable. The campaign is a series of linked battles and choices, where direction, victory and defeat modify the numbers of troops available in the next action. Perhaps modifying the improvement tables (rolling on -1 or something) would work to start.

I roll for the Raising of the Clans; 2. I get only three clan regiments. I can roll again at +1 at a delay of two weeks, and this time I roll a 6! Eight clans and two squadrons of horse are available to me.

You may notice the poor bastard with the standard has
had his foot glued back on. A bad omen?

I posted a poll on the Wargaming the '45 Facebook group for Johnnie Cope's actions:

• Await Reinforcements: 6.
• March on Edinburgh: 3.
• Leave Garrisons and Retreat to England: 0.

Someone added:

• Retire to Carlisle and Berwick, then await reinforcement: 2.

Await reinforcement is the obvious winner, so Cope gets an extra regiment and another "turn" begins. I repeated the poll, and this time March on Edinburgh was the clear winner, though Retreat to Carlisle and Send Cavalry to Reconnoiter were also suggested.

For the battle, I decided to go by raw numbers, assuming a normal infantry regiment to number roughly a thousand men and cavalry to number 500. Thus, the original battle of Prestonpans had about 2,500 men a side, this one has 3,000 for the Hanoverians and 4,000 for the Stuarts. So I'll need 3-4 odds.

The Scottish side will be composed of five 32-man Highland clans and 12 cavalry, the Government of three 32-man plus 18 cavalry and a half regiment of Hessians. Probably will add one gun for the Government as well, though perhaps give it limited shots to reflect the crew morale? Except for the Hessians, the Government are classed as poorly-trained militia, thus will fire at one die per ten men. To reflect their poor morale (again barring the Hessians), they will retreat at one-third casualties and break at half casualties - the Highlanders retreat at half and break at two-thirds.

I imagine with the Hanoverians in such poor shape, the goal will be for them to mostly escape the field to reinforce Wade. A game of Charge!-lite normally ends once one side has taken half casualties; I think once all Hanoverians are retreating instead that will work, and if they can cause greater casualties on the Scots they will at least hold their heads high.

So soonish, a battle report. Will this work as a scenario? No idea. Any suggestions are welcomed.