The end of an affair

Or how I still can't not walk in to a Games Workshop.

Previous readers will know my first GW purchase was a copy of Advanced Heroquest. My first store purchase however was a few years later, a Necromunda gang. Sold to me on the promise that I would just need that one small gang of models, one simple purchase that wouldnt break the bank and I could play this awesome new game.

Not a perfect rule system, Necromunda however was awesome for its time. I of course later bought the box set, all that multi level terrain and the multitude of models in the core box set was a perfect example of how Games Workshop earned its reputation as the "Gateway" to wargaming.

All except I think one of my fellow wargamers started with painting Citadel miniatures. I was drawn in to this community and found my people. I could tell you minutae detail of the stories behind Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, I went to Games Day, I even applied for a part time job at my local store (I didnt get the job, but I am now kinda glad I didnt. Painting to deadline? Not for me, see my previous post!)

As I have become a grumpy old gamer I have fallen out of love with Games Workshop though. I don't want to start an anti-GW rant, there are plenty of those all over the internet, believe me. I just genuinely believe they have lost some of us older gamers. Maybe this has always been the case, there are teenagers now going to their local store every Saturday without fail just like I did, maybe I am the problem, maybe I don't "believe" anymore. Have they really become "over priced and share holder led", or were they always that way and I didnt know any better? Of course they have to gear their product towards selling you new models every week, they have staff to pay and shops to rent.  Maybe I have just matured in my tastes, or maybe I just miss the old days?

My favourite days of the year are day trips to wargame shows. It doesnt surprise me that some of favourite companies have ex GW staff running them. Warlord Games started by John Stallard and Paul Sawyer (affectionally known to us oldhammer players as the non politically correct "Fat Bloke") has a very familiar GW feel to its business model, I am particularly fond of their alternative history WW2 game Konflict 47. Alan and Michael Perry of Perry Miniatures are the Rock Stars of wargaming in my eyes, I love their Napoleonic range but my favourite model I have is a Salute special of an American Civil War general.

Hasslefree Miniatures gets a special mention as the nicest family in Wargaming. They are always my first visit at Salute each year and I love everything Kev White sculpts, I would even go out on a limb and call him the best sculpter out there right now. If I remember correctly, Kev used to sculpt for GW, he is so prolific at sculpting that following him on Facebook is a must to witness his talent.

The Trenchcoat wearing "Harby" has been given horns by yours truly with some clumsily added green stuff.

My wife has an excellent way of describing my relationship with GW. They are like a terrible ex partner. I tell everyone I am over them, that I want nothing to do with them, but every now and then we bump into each other and I only remember the good times. I know they are bad for me, I know there are better products out there, I know their game systems can sometimes seem unbalanced and possibly even geared towards selling more products than making a fair game. Yet I will still pop in and say hello and have a peruse. The staff are always lovely, they are conveniently just round the corner if I need some Goblin Green, if it is still called that? (I miss the old paints, where's Brazen Brass gone?!) and if there were no Games Workshop this hobby may not be in the renaissance it is now.

I said I didnt want to do an anti-GW rant and I hope I haven't. I'm still keeping my stack of Warhammer rulebooks and I will still buy every new Dan Abnett novel when it comes out. (I could write another whole post about my love of the Gaunts Ghosts saga.) When my boys are older if they want to wargame I'm not going to refuse them a trip to Games Workshop, I shall just have to start saving now for it.

Maybe I should hope they want to take up sports instead.

Why did I decide to paint kilts?

How I learnt to love painting redcoats.

My Grandfather, a veteran of WW2, didn't really talk about his experiences during the war, something I really don't blame him for. The one story I do remember him telling me was of when a bomber returned from a sorty with it's hatch not fully closed, the offending obstruction being an unexploded bomb. A very long piece of rope tied to the release mechanism and lots of fingers crossed and the crew and the plane survived to tell the tale.

 

Why I am telling you this? Well, although he really didn't want to remember his wartime experiences, my Grandfather did introduce me to historical wargaming. I learnt to play chess against my Grandfather, an excellent teacher, he got the exact balance of being a challenging opponent, but not putting me off the game. I still have the copies of Stratego and Campaign that we played and I was entrusted to take home with me. (I wonder now if he already had them or bought them with the intention of gifting them to me after our game.)

We built an airfix Hurricane kit together (I later discovered he had been a mechanic of the real thing.) and then one Sunday afternoon out came a box of humbrol paints and the Battle of Waterloo in 1/72 scale. My Grandfather had painted some of them already, and he showed me how to very carefully paint more. (Including leaving them on the sprue for ease of handling, a habit I still to this day know is the right thing to do, but yet still get over excited and unclip and glue before painting on many an occasion.)

So, I was dispatched home that night with the box of paints and soldiers with the promise that I would finish them under parental supervision.

  

Fast forward 20 odd years and I'm perusing the wares at a wargame show. My wargaming colleague is buying some French 28mm Napoleonics from Front Rank miniatures. This reminded me of the promise I made to my Grandfather and so my first purchase of this period is made. I may not have finished the 1/72 models, but I would paint a Napoleonic army of some sort. This very slowly done task has taken me at least ten years. (I am a very slow painter and get distracted by new shinies all the time.) My final task was painting Highlanders in their finest Black Watch tartan. It has become a bit of a running joke in my wargamers group and my long suffering wife rolls her eyes at the mention of them, but finally I have finished them. 

My Dad has since found the original airfix set for me, although even I admit I might struggle to get them done (as my father in law admits, an increase in age correlates with an acceptance to give up on trying to paint smaller and smaller scales.) but I would like to think that if my Grandfather were still with us, he would appreciate the achievement and accept that I had at least performed the promise in spirit. I won't pretend to be anywhere near expert level at painting, but I like to think en masse they look impressive enough.

 The models are a mix of Front Rank, Perry and Vitrix miniatures. The Front Rank models being metal have that great feel of weight and durability. I could not however have afforded this entire army without buying some of it in plastic. My wargaming gang have yet to decide on a rule system, I would say this is the era I have the most rulebooks for and yet we still may end up writing our own.

(Now, no-one tell my wife about the unpainted Prussian army in my to do pile.)

One Hour Wargames

I'm sure I'm not the only wargamer who has found his available time for dice rolling and painting shrunk a bit for a few years following the arrival children. For this reason I gratefully received a gift for Fathers day of the above title, One-Hour Wargames by Neil Thomas from Pen & Sword books. My wife is one of the few people that listen to my ramblings about the needs of a wargamer and so also knew that I struggle to find something I can play on the limited size of our dining table that unfolds from a three foot square to a staggering three by six foot rectangle.  The two selling points of this book then, play a game in an hour on a three foot square, jumped out at my wife as perfectly suited for me.

From Ancient and Dark Age, right through to the Machine Age and Second World War, this book presents a simple ruleset that is tweaked for each period to enable the player to play a simple wargame for a desired moment in history. Each chapter starts with a brief explanation of how the fighting styles of the period are represented in the rules and how the unit types are simplified into between two and four types. Obviously we are looking at finishing a game in an hour, so this is a very simplified system, the rules for a unit size just stating the size of the frontage, it is up to the player to decide what scale models they use and how many they squeeze into the unit. All units have the same capacity of damage of 15 hits.

After the rules there are 30 different scenarios, some based on real battles. This is the section of the book I will find the most useful, not just for this rule set, but I can imagine they will be extremely transferrable to Warhammer, Kings of War, Rapid Fire, in fact any gaming system.  Nobody wants to repeatedly just play "pitched battle" over an empty battlefield all the time. The author takes great care to mention where his inspiration for each scenario came from, a real encounter or another author. (The Godfathers of wargaming Charles Grant and Donald Featherstone receive a couple of name checks.)

Of final note, my youngest offspring has already begun to have a keen interest in Daddy's wargaming (He has already begun "Thundercoating" and painting his own toy soldiers) so I have started to think about how to introduce gaming to the boys. This book is the perfect tool. The simplicity of the rules are perfect for them, I don't want to be constantly referring to tables and rulebooks (I myself am terrible at remembering rules and always find wargaming easier when a "third player" is on hand with a rulebook.) small minds wander easily as we know.

There is also that one last use for this book. You know sometimes you just want to get your entire collection for a period on a table, just for the shere magnificience of it. Your club want to demonstrate a massive Napoleonic war game with everyone's models on the table and you havent got a week to play it in. This system I am sure will easily scale up for this purpose. This book is going to get well thumbed.

Researching Grenadier

I love a good charity shop/car boot find.

That feeling when you find a box of second hand toy soldiers is a joy for us all. I once was at a carboot and spied the ugliest cardboard box I have ever seen. Covered in kittens, (my wife made me dispose of the box as soon as possible, it was creepy, seriously creepy.) something about the box made me open the lid. Inside it was jammed full of warhammer dwarves and orcs. I didnt even delve, just bought the lot for a couple of quid and had the joy of going through it all at home.

I also love researching and identifying items I find.  My latest bagfull I will admit wasn't found by myself but by a friend, then passed on as they had no use for it. So, challenge accepted, let the research begin!

Most of the models I discovered were from Grenadier (the capital G on the slotta on some was my first clue.) These first ones are Troopers with Heavy Weapons, from 2015, I'm keeping these and painting them up for Rogue Stars.

A pair of Cyberpunk Nomads from 1995. That bike has difficult to base written all over it. I do like the design though, somebody was watching Akira when they sculpted that.

Orcs with Field crossbow, more Grenadier from 1987, sadly one of the Orcs has some knife damage. I have seen this set for sale from Campaign Game Miniatures, I'm guessing they have bought the molds.

An assortment of adventurers from Grenadier in the 90's. These will be painted up for Heroquest or Pathfinder.

Not sure on the first of these two, some kind of Ogre or Troll, maybe? Both are a good 40 to 45mm tall, the one on the right is the Lord of Death from Grenadiers Fantasy Lords range.

These chaps are interesting and I have yet to properly identify them. They are Grenadier, coded underneath from A653 to A657. They seem to be dressed in fantasy/medieval gear and are armed with what look like one shot black powder weapons or fireworks? Any help identifying these would be gratefully received.

A motley crew of I am guessing post apocalyptic survivers. I know nothing about these other than they are Grenadier, no date, no identifying codes.

 Finally, the only non-Grenadier models, two oldhammer Games Workshop models. On the left,  Lord of Battle in Unicorn Helm and then Stro Knor MaceKiller, from 1987.  For some reason people lap up old school Warhammer, so I might have to part with these.

I must admit, at first glance I thought a lot of this was going to the Father in Law to melt down for re-casting, but actually there are a couple of nice models here. More to add to the to do pile then!

Achtung!

Regular readers of the blog (all six of you.) will know I favour a more Hollywood approach to my wargaming. However, one of my esteemed wargaming opponents is a fan of the more accurate methods of gaming WW2, Rapid Fire! As I regularly subject him to my crazy homebrew rules, I should also sometimes humour his tastes.

A nifty little set of rules, I don't pretend to be particularly knowledgeable of them, more relying on the method of asking my opponent what I need to roll. (There are lots of tables.) Nonetheless, I do enjoy how they play. The need to "spot" your opponent before opening fire on them across the crowded table is more accurate than my usual experience of gaming like a general who has a super manoeuvrable helicopter and a powerful set of binoculars.

As it was D Day, we played a scenario based on the Battle of Perrier Ridge. I took command of the Germans, my opponent, the British. Having most of my force squeeze onto the table at the point where the road enters the table, somewhat limited my deployment. Having constraints on setup can sometimes help though as you really don't get the chance to think too hard about deployment.

My opponent wanted to make it clear that we weren't being perfectly historically accurate, mainly due to the limitations of his collection. This meant both forces were reduced slightly. As we were playing in an evening of limited time it wasn't a bad thing.

My reinforcements being due to arrive on turn six, all I had to do was hold my own against the dug in British forces until my extra six Stug 3's arrived and then I would surely roll over the opposition.

Of course I rolled terribly for spotting any of the British infantry holed up in the buildings of the town and having my force bottle-necked in the open road approach meant they were pretty much stuck there for the game.

One infantry platoon were convinced a building was occupied bit just couldn't spot anyone, so had to come out of cover and charge the building. Taking heavy casualties from the inevitable machine gun fire, they did manage to set fire to the building with their flamethrower and chase out the inevitable occupants.

My armour suffered drastically as the game went on, nothing but luck kept them alive for the first couple of turns, but eventually being a stationary target in the open road will lead to your downfall.

Turn five and supporting fire from the Allied navy wiped out an entire Platoon of my infantry in one fell swoop, a careful advance through the cover of woods may help against infantry, but some luckily accurate shelling from a battleship can't be defended against. This in turn meant my CO immediately surrendered to the nearest British Officer he could find, putting an end to my German counter attack. 

Dubya, Dubya Two

I like to wargame Hollywood style.

So, you may have noticed, the next generation of wargamers are getting into historical, myself included. The "Old Guard" (and I don't think they'd mind being called that) started wargaming with Waterloo, D-Day, Culloden and Isandlwana. We started our tabletop gaming with Spam vs Orks and The Empire vs Chaos. In my opinion this has meant we are approaching historical wargaming in a different way.

The perfect example of the new type of historical gaming comes from Warlord Games. A company that has taken a huge chunk of the Games Workshop business model and applied it to Historical wargaming. Its no surprise that my current favourite companies, Warlord, Hasslefree and Perry Miniatures are all set up by ex- GW. I think this different approach to historical gaming means I prefer a more Hollywood style game. I got into Napoleonics because of Sharpe, a lot of my WW2 knowledge comes from reading Stephen Ambrose after enjoying Band of Brothers and I can't play a game in the Old West without hearing Jon Bon Jovi in the back of my mind.

 One of my favourite sets of rules is the Warhammer Historical, Legends of the Old West. These rules are definitely a representation of movie cowboys rather than accurate representation of the period. I have always dabbled with using existing rule sets for my own ends and felt that these rules could easily be adapted to make a Hollywood style WW2 skirmish. (The book itself even makes many suggestions for tweaking the rules for other periods including Tommie Guns in the Prohibition Era.)

To this end I produced an extensive set of rules with four factions for the period, Hellboy and the BPRD, Captain America and his howling Commandos,  Female Russian spies and their Werebear bodyguards and The Red Skull leading his Agents of Hydra. I added rules for various period weapons, some light vehicles and even rules for Steve Rogers ricocheting his Star Spangled Shield off multiple enemies. After a hardcore weekends gaming I felt it worked. The Germans couldnt hit a barn door, Captain America acted suitably heroically and the Russian Werebears (beatiful models from Warlord Games Konflict 47 range which my painting has not done justice.) were horrifically over powerful in combat, only one fell, after the German armoured car it was tearing to pieces exploded in his face.

We finished the weekend with an attack on the Hydra base. (I love my Terraclips terrain, go buy some!) The Red Skull and Captain America facing off at the end in classic fisticuffs. For our next time I intend on adding some tanks to the skirmish and maybe some more generic Germans.

Most of the models I used were from Warlord games. The Russian female spies were from Bad Squiddo. Hellboy was from Hasslefree with some green stuff to convert him slightly. The Hydra Agents were from a bring and buy, so sadly I don't know the manufacturer. (If anyone has an idea, let me know.) Apologies to any other manufacturer I have missed.