Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i Miniature Wargames

Welcome readers! This issue cover’s the usual broad selection of topics which I do hope you’ll enjoy. On the cover we have a free sprue of Wargames Atlantic Horses – almost universally useful models – with a guide to painting them. Plus we have an Indian Mutiny Siege; a WWII Japanese armour piece and we visited a couple of shows, including Hammerhead where the editor took his camera. Conrad Kinch has advice for better use of your gaming prep time; and Jon Suthertland shows you how to start a fight! Finally Mr Harwood builds a flying Cloudship. I don’t often have a model that represents me on a table top, so here’s a recent release from Brigade of a 15mm someone – who may be me (he’s wearing a silly…

I took a trip to Hammerhead 2023 in March and it was a great show. I helped run a game based on the UFO system that I’d previously written for this magazine: a triple layer affair (never seen before!) and the ground game appeared most recently in issues 471 and 472. I’d wanted to debut it earlier but – what with illness and such – this was the first opportunity and it went down, I have to say, very well. But – all of that aside – there was a lot more to see. The show was reduced to just the main building – so the walk across the car park to the gamers lounge was removed this year. However – speaking to Sally from Kallistra (the organiser) – I’m…

In August 2022 the Gothenburg Wargame club staged a participation game at Claymore 2022, organized by Southeast Edinburgh Wargame Club, which was a little unusual to say the least. The game focused on an incident during the fall of Singapore in 1942, where Japanese tanks attacked British positions across the pristine fairways of the Singapore Island Country Club (SICC) golf course. This is a somewhat unique scenario and we expected that secretly – deep down, and whether you are an avid golfer or not – driving tanks across the manicured greens of the oldest and most prestigious golf course in pre-war Singapore would appeal to the anarchic sense of fun in all of us. The group were inspired by the account of the action found in the book Tigers in…

SPEED PAINT 2 ◗ thearmypainter.com◗ £179 Army Painter have just released Speedpaint 2.0 and they sent one of the Mega Sets for review. They are also producing a Complete Set for over £300 with even more paints but let’s concentrate on what they actually sent. The complete Mega Set has 45 new colours which do not – for the most part – replicate the colours in the earlier releases. They also include three new Speedpaint Metallics and the box comes with some excellent guides for their use and a very decent brush (big belly with a fine point). I have used the first iteration of Army Painter’s Speedpaint and had some success with them – see the Wargames Atlantic horse painting article in this very issue. But one of the…

INTRODUCTION Tom Egan, wargamer, soldier and all round man of action, is one of the people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting through Twitter. A Commandant (Major) in the Irish Defence Forces he enjoys mountain climbing, painting and shredding my carefully balanced scenarios with the single-mindedness of Rommel’s panzers headed for the enemy rear. Not only that but he has achieved all of these feats while labouring under the tragic disability of being from Cork. One of the other things he’s rather good at is churning out painted figures at a rate of knots. This is no mean feat as he juggles many professional commitments, marriage and all the other demands on his time. Spend much time in his company and sooner or later, something will be described as “doctrinally…

TALES OF MEN, MYTHS & MONSTERS ◗ caliverbooks.com ◗ £19.95 Caliver Books have produced a new set of rules by our own frequent contributor Chris Swan. Called Tales of Men, Myths & Monsters and subtitled Rules for Adventures in Greek Mythology it does, as they say, exactly what it says on the tin. The rules will be premiered at Salute accompanied by a game by Chris and his team. So – what do you get for your twenty quid? It is 145 pages in softback and packed with colour illustrations, including uniform details (Greeks and Thracians etc) plus heroes straight from Homeric legend rather than central casting, which is nice. Plus – at the rear – there are eight pages of play sheets and a character record sheet. There is also a…

I took a trip to Cavalier 2023 hosted by the Tunbridge Wells Wargames Society at the Angel Centre, Tonbridge. Numbers seem similar to last time which – as it’s the first show at this venue for three years (Covid etc) – is as good as can be expected. GAMES This will be very brief as space is limited so I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Highlights for me were the nice 40mm Ballard of Lynyrd Skynyrd AWI game and the superb Fallujah 2004 in 20mm by the Maidstone club. Worthy runners up on the grabbling attention front were the Eagles and Lions at Carantan, a very tidy ACW game by SEEMS and Gravesend Gamers Guilds, Song of Ice and Fire game. CONCLUSION There were over a dozen games and…

It’s over twenty years since I was first introduced to the Victorian Science Fiction miniature game Aeronef written by Matthew Harley and Steve Blease and published by Wessex Games. In fact it was a Bifrost convention somewhere in the West Midlands that I picked up my first copy of the A5 size rule book and within days I was scratch building flying blimps and Nef’s from pen barrels and scale model aircraft parts. Since then I have built three distinct fleets, an initial set of minis based on The Adventures of Luther Arkwright: a beleaguered Royalist team fighting for independence from a tyrannical Parliamentarian force led by a re-imagined Oliver Cromwell, then a huge collection of 1/300th scale Nef’s based on Space 1899 with additional craft from the Brigade Aeronef…

“He is the Chief of the Mearas, lord of horses, and not even Théoden, King of Rohan, has ever looked on a better.”Gandalf on Shadowfax. OPEN THE BOX I wanted to try and put together a few of the Wargames Atlantic horses from their boxed horse set as swiftly as I could. Each box has six identical sprues, each of which features six half-bodies that can mix and match, four heads, three tails and some saddle cloths. ASSEMBLY This may sound strange, but I was astonished at how well the body halves went together. All of the ‘lefts’ matched up to all of the ‘rights’ perfectly which means that you get a lot of variation of basic bodies, but all work and none make for weird looking horses. By the…

Jon provides us with another generic trip in an alternate direction. Ed. Reading about military campaigns it becomes apparent that few battles are fought on mutually advantageous ground, and under circumstances that suits both generals. Some generals are commanding exhausted, hungry or thirsty troops; others are leading forces low on supply and eagerly awaiting reinforcement. Often we fight balanced games in terms of points, opportunities, objectives and victory conditions. Real war is rarely like that. ORGANISING YOUR FORCES Ideally, begin with a scaled down version of the real force and the way it was organised. Typically, this means having a number of brigades, commands, divisions, tribes or even nationalities. A typical Roman force might include legionary cohorts, auxiliary infantry, skirmishing infantry and some cavalry. The first thing to do is to…

Malc recently re-based all of our Indian Mutiny collections, onto smaller bases. This instantly increased the room to manoeuvre on the table and was time well spent. With only a couple of breakages it was relatively stress free too! We took the opportunity to revise our Victorian Steel rules to make them more fast play. We no longer allocate casualties between company stands. We still allow troops to fall back rather than receive the Casualties, but we introduced an element of jeopardy by giving the player a 50% chance of a save. This seemed to work well, and an added bonus was the effect it had on the Morale tests, which are quicker and this has a definite effect on the gameplay. A quirk we added was the option to…