Did you ever wonder

How much it would cost to replace your little lead warriors?  A post on one of the 6mm wargaming forums on Facebook got me to wondering.  A lady had come into possession of a wargames collection which had belong to a family member who had died.  She was asking for help in identifying what she had, and advice on disposing of the collection.  There seemed to be a lot of old school stuff including Heroics & Ros micro armour, unbuilt 1/72nd scale plastic kits from the 1980s and 90's and some figures that could have been Hinchcliffe although I couldn't be sure.  There was a lot of stuff there, some painted and some unpainted and it got me thinking.  What will happen to my collection once I have gone, will Mrs E be in the same boat as that poor lady, not knowing what the stuff is or whether it has any value.

That brought me around to wondering what if it was lost or stolen or God forbid melted in a fire!!!  How would I go about convincing an insurance assessor of the replacement value of my collection?  I messaged Daniel Hodgson of Reveille painting service for an estimate of the cost of painting and basing 6mm figures and set to work with the old spreadsheeting software.  The result for just my Ancients and Dark Ages to replace like with like is over £2,000.  Significant enough to need a separate entry on our house insurance.   Mrs E didn't seem surprised, maybe I'm not as good at smuggling packages into the house as I thought!

I haven't started on the 6mm buildings and scenics or the ECW figures or the WW1 aircraft or the WW2 tanks and infantry and............it certainly mounts up quickly doesn't it!  I don't think I have a lot of figures compared to most gamers of my age so what would it cost to replace your toys?

The battle of Billington Moor - player briefings.

To complete the battle planning I have created briefing packs for the commanders of each side.  These are drawn from the original scenario but add a bit of period chrome.  I have added one extra game rule.  The royal army has to draw up a deployment before the rebels disclose the battlefield layout.  This is to simulate an army in column of march having to deploy into line of battle without time to think to much.  This is a direct steal from my British Civil Wars rules.  From the evidence we have 17th Century armies had a deployment plan in mind and set up the column of march to allow this to be formed quickly and easily by simply wheeling units into line of battle.  It seemed to fit this situation so I borrowed it.

The briefings are below in case anyone wants to use them.

Billington Moor 798 AD - Alderman Wada’s briefing

The rightful King of Northumbria, King Osbald, has been deposed by the usurper Eardwulf.  His rule lies heavy upon the land, especially yours as his advisors have you marked as a supporter of Osbald.  They are not wrong and news is now come from Mercia that King Ceolwulf will support Osbald’s claim if it is clear that there is support for his return.

Osbald has sent messages to his supporters in and around his land in at Osbaldeston and even now they flock to your side.  Your own folk from your lands around Wadingasham are also here.  If you can march on York more men will come to support the rightful King from his holdings around Osbaldwick.

The is a single problem to the completion of your plans.  Eardwulf has somehow learned of your rising and is close at hand with his army his intention is clear; crush your army and kill it’s leaders.  You are faced with a simple choice fight or desert your folk and flee into exile in Mercia.  For a true born Northumbrian the choice is clear.  We fight.

Your Forces

·                     2 x Generals (4Bd) one representing Wada as CinC

·                     1 x General (Sp)

·                     2 x Hird (4Bd)

·                     1 x Fyrd (Sp) in effect a third poorer quality Hird unit

·                     24 x Fyrd (Sp) or (7Hd) For each 2 x Sp selected 1 x 7Hd must be selected

·                     3 x Archers or Scouts Ps or Fyrd (Sp)

·                     3 x Archers or Scouts (Ps)

·                     3 camps which can be massed together at one point (or the village may be considered the joint camp)

You must form three commands none of which may contain less than 6 elements.  Each must include a general.  The rules are DBA 3 using the Big Battle DBA additional rules.

The Battlefield

This is your land you know it well and can choose the battlefield to suit your forces.  You will deploy on the eastern edge of the selected ground.  The usurper Eardwulf will deploy on the west.

You will select any 9 squares from the map which form a 3 x 3 square as the table to fight the battle upon. The Rivers Ribble and Calder are tested for passability separately to each other.  The standard DBA check is amended so that it is only paltry on a throw of 1, a 2, 3 or 4 makes it slow going and 5 or 6 makes it a slow crossing with effects as per DBA 3.0.  all other streams are 50:50 chance to be either paltry or slow going (DBA scores of 1-4 with no chance of the worst result of a 5-6 arising) The Roman road counts as a track.  The solid green is a steep hill and the green dotted areas are boggy ground.

Choose wisely Alderman, the usurper will be attacking and seems likely to have more Fyrdmen and Hearthtroops than you.  Still God favours the righteous does He not?

Billington Moor 798 AD – King Eardwulf’s briefing

You were acclaimed King by the Witan of Northumbria only a few months ago and already those Mercian Dogs to the south are fomenting unrest.  The reasons are simple King Offa is dead and his successor is weak.  Already Kent and the East Saxons have thrown off the Mercian yoke and Ceolwulf has ridden south and east to crush their armies.  To keep Northumbria from descending upon his northern borders he needs to keep you busy.  If you can defeat this rising then nothing stands in your way both at home and perhaps in extending your rule southwards.

The depraved despot you replaced, Osbert, dare not face you and has roused his supporters, men who hope to thrive on the chaos of civil strife to taking up arms.  They are raising troops in the southwest of your kingdom but you have stolen a march upon them and even now are marching to bring death and destruction upon the rebels.

Your scouts have returned and report the enemy marching towards you from the west perhaps a 1,000 strong or more.  There seem to be many old men and boys with few seasoned warriors capable of standing in the shield wall. Your aim is clear; crush their army and kill it’s leaders.   

Your Forces

• 3 x Generals (4Bd) the King, Alderman Eardbehrt (Herbert). Herbert's son
• 6 x Hird (4Bd)
• 21 x Fyrd (Sp)
• 3 x Fyrd (7Hd)
• 3 x Scouts (Ps)
• 3 x camps which must be placed one per command (the king's camp counts as a double loss if captured)

You must form three commands none of which may contain less than 6 elements.  Each must include a general.  The rules are DBA 3 using the Big Battle DBA additional rules.

The Battlefield

You are advancing from the west.  Before you see the battlefield you must select your troops and draw up a deployment plan (this is to simulate a pre set line of march deploying into line of battle).  You will be the attacker but Wada will select the battlefield by selecting any 9 squares from the map which will form a 3 x 3 square as the table to fight the battle upon.

 The Rivers Ribble and Calder are tested for passability separately to each other.  The standard DBA check is amended so that it is only paltry on a throw of 1, a 2, 3 or 4 makes it slow going and 5 or 6 makes it a slow crossing with effects as per DBA 3.0.  All other streams have a 50:50 chance to be either paltry or slow going (DBA scores of 1-4 with no chance of the worst result of a 5-6 arising) The Roman road counts as a track.  The solid green is a steep hill and the green dotted areas are boggy ground.

Choose you deployment with care for who knows what terrain you will have to fight upon this day and may God in His wisdom grant you the victory.

More Objects in Space

Way back in the mists of time, well 2013 to be precise, I had a brief flirtation with Full Thrust the ship to ship space combat game.  The rules were OK although they did reminded me of a 1970s naval game I used to play a lot, called Seastrike.  This was partly because of the the hit location and damage rules but mainly because the lack of any 3D element to maneuvering.  I know how difficult it is to replicate gaming in three dimensions as my struggle with WW1 dogfighting mechanisms demonstrates.  As The Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy tells us 'Space is big', so some kind of recognition that not all actions are going to be fought in the plane of the ecliptic should really be present either in the position of units or at least in terms of reinforcing from out of the plane as a sort of 3D flank march.  So the search goes on for a set of rules which really hit the spot.

Part of the fleet the rest need a bit of TLC

Being a prone to these fits of enthusiasm I have learned not to spend huge amounts on models until I am satisfied that I'm going to stick with a set of rules or a historical period.  In this case I bought a handful of Irregular Miniatures spaceships, a few fighter groups from a manufacturer whose name I don't recall and I made the rest.

Scratch built frigates and a sensor corvette

The basic technique for making spaceships is one I have used since I was an impoverished teenager.  In best Blue Peter style (if you don't know what that is ask your grandparents about children's TV in the 1960s) these were made from layers of cardboard glued together to create something that is, if not 3D, at least 2D plus.  Details are from the bits box and include furniture fixings, panel pins, cocktail sticks, match sticks and bits and pieces of textured plastic packaging.

Home built merchantmen and Destroyer escort.  Scouts are Irregular Miniatures

After a couple of solo games that were less enthralling than I had hoped I put the models back in their box and there they have stayed.  They hadn't seen the light of day from then until today when, while sorting out my office bookcases, I found the box.  The home made stands were a bit battered but all in all they haven't been to badly bashed about by relocations over the last six and a half years.

A Fleet Carrier from Irregular, fighter swarms from who knows where and scratch built destroyers!

The dark background is the floor tiles in my conservatory which I think it actually looks nicer than some specialist space themed battlemats. 

At some point in the future I may drag the rules out and give them another go or I may start tinkering with the bits I feel are missing, if I do I will report on the outcome.

Proxy Dark Age troops - The Welsh Princedoms

By the late 8th century the Welsh had been pushed back to the area of the modern principality and the south west of England (Dumonia).  Wales itself was made up of a number of small princedoms although for short periods they would be unified under a successful leader such as Hywel Dda. Originally Romano-British in outlook by the late 8th century they had reverted back to something closer to the military organisation and tactics of the tribal societies who had replaced the Romans throughout Western Europe.  Each Welsh King had a small band of personal retainers and relied on the land owners (Uchelwyr) to raise their own retainers (Teula) for military service.  Kings seem to have had a military house hold of around 50 men but may have hired mercenaries to boost numbers.  A Teula may have been a unit of 300, but given the fixation in early Welsh literature with multiples of the number three that can't be guaranteed.  There was also a unit called a nifer which may have been a subdivision of a Teula or it may have been an alternative name for the same thing.  What we can tell is that the welsh were never able to field huge forces and small raiding forces of between 50 and 300 would have been the norm.  These would have been drawn from the Uchelwyr and their retainers and service by bondsmen tied to the land seems to have been rare.

Period accounts speak of their raiding over Offa's Dyke in hit and run attacks.  There was some use of light cavalry for scouting but the bulk of their forces were infantry.  These are described as fearsome in the initial charge but liable to fade away from a determined resistance.  They would precede their charge with showers of javelins but were only a serious threat to a shield wall if it broke.  They were fleet footed and little slowed by rough terrain and often based tactics on the use of that terrain to disadvantage more closely formed foot.

This suggests that they were not fighting in close order bodies themselves but were more akin to what the old WRG ancients rules termed Light Medium Infantry (LMI).  DBA 3.0  treats them as Warband, DBMM as fast warband and ADLG as MI sword.  Personally I'm not fully convinced by the ADLG definition and feel that they could be better represented by using LMI Javelinmen as the standard type but giving an option to upgrade to MI Sword.

Welsh Infantry or Moors in disguise perhaps?

No one does figures specifically for Welsh viking age figures in 6mm so its back to looking for a good proxy.  I have chosen to use Baccus Moorish Infantry as these are nicely animated in a variety of poses that suits the less regimented style of combat formations I imagine these troops to have fought in.  Phil Barker suggests the Welsh troops of this period were armed with swords and targets so there may be an option to use Irregular Miniatures Scots Irish swordsmen figures for them.  For their mounted troops I have used the ever popular Gothic Medium Cavalry from Baccus 6mm's Roman Range.

Uchelwyr (No I can't pronounce it either)

They give opposition to and a different tactical style to the Anglo-Saxon and Viking forces which form the bulk of the forces in play during the period.  I just need more of them so I can field a decent force and probably some sheep and cattle for them to steal!

Peasants and Pilgrims

For Billington Moor (see earlier posts) I am going to need to represent the less well equipped Great Fyrd.  ADLG counts these as levy and DBA 3.0 as solid horde (7Hd).  Now hordes or levy crop up in a number of army lists in both sets of rules so I decided that some generic units of ill armed peasant types would give me the flexibility to use any thing I created in a number of different armies.

Baccus is my preferred figures range but the nearest they have for representing what I wanted were clubmen from their 17th century range.  So I went with Irregular’s Peasants and pilgrims from their medieval range.  These are noticeable smaller than Baccus but using a slightly thicker base would help disguise that.  I also wanted to have some figures representing slightly better equipped troops in the front ranks.  So off went an order to Irregular for the peasants and pilgrims along with some Viking spearmen.  I also took the opportunity to order some laser cut 2mm PDF bases from Warbases which would give me a thicker base than my usual 1.5mm plywood bases.

Ordering was easy Irregular now having a proper online ordering and payment system which is much easier to use than the old system.  Both orders came within a couple of days, well packed and with no damage.  The laser cut bases were a bit of a revelation to me as I have always cut my own using a straight edge and a Stanley knife.  Because these are laser cut there is no variation, all totally accurate. I’m a convert.  Next time I will try the 1.5mm plywood option.  The figures were less impressive but acceptable for what I wanted.  There was a fair amount of flash between the figures on all of the peasant castings.  The Vikings were much better but compared to Baccus the casting detail is much less well realised.  Still these are figures from an earlier generation of sculpting styles so differences in quality are to be expected. It was nothing that a couple of hours with some micro files and modelling tools couldn’t deal with.

Ready for priming.  There is detail there just in low relief.

Unlike Baccus who cast figures as strips with space between each figure Irregular has three styles of castings  based on old WRG base width requirements.  Close order castings  are shoulder to shoulder 6 figures wide.  These can’t be separated into smaller groups unlike the open and loose order blocks which have some gaps.  Both castings I had chosen were loose order so out came the side cutters to break the castings down into the smaller groups I needed.  I wanted to have a frontage of 8 figures per rank so groups of four and of two were the order of the day.

Painting makes a huge difference to Irregular’s 6mm figures.  The detail is there but it is often surface detail with little depth so careful painting is vital to pick this out.  The thing about Irregular's 6mm figures is that initially they look a bit like vaguely man shaped blocks but after painting they look fine.  I tried a different undercoating technique for these, using a coat of Vallejo ‘Earth’. I wanted these troops to be less colourful so I used a range of muted earthy shades with the odd bit of colour on headgear to make the figures show as individuals.

I will let you judge if the final result passes muster.  Only another 144 figures to make the remaining 6 elements to do then.

Yet another unfinished project!

This time it is another campaign.  About 35 years ago I became really interested in the period from the Death of Offa the Great of Mercia though to the fall of Anglo-Danish England to the Normans.  So just the odd 260 some years then.    I blame the BBC and Michael Woods series 'In Search of the Dark Ages'!

 

A very poor photo of the book that started it all

I had just finished playing in a long running Wars of the Roses campaign which was a mix of play by mail and battles on a table which had lasted something like 4 or 5 years so there was a gap in my wargaming life.  The idea formed of running a campaign set in the Viking Age dealing with the conflicts arising from the formation of the modern nations of Great Britain.  The game quickly grew into a monster project and despite players signing up and a few moves being played quickly fizzled out as people's real lives got in the way.

The game started with the following states or tribal groupings in play:

• Wessex
• Mercia
• Northumbria
• Strathclyde
• Pictia
• Dal Raidia
• Dumonia (modern Cornwall and Devon)
• Guined (Welsh)
• Pouis (Welsh)
• Gwent (Welsh)
• Morgannwg (Welsh)
• Brecheniaug (Welsh)
• Devet (Welsh)
• The East Saxons
• The East Angles
• Kent

About to come into play were the two main Viking nations the Danes and the Norse who would start as raiders and become larger forces if they made enough loot from raiding.  The general idea was to have the main English and Scottish Kingdoms player controlled with the smaller ones and the Welsh controlled by Scottish Players. rebels would be controlled by players opposed to the state facing the rising.  This meant that I would need 5 or 6 players to make it work but additional ones could be slotted in to the unassigned kingdoms if required.

The key game mechanic was influence.  The leader of each state would have influence points  to spend in each turn.  The number available would be allocated according to the ability of actual the historical person or at random if this was not known.  Players would gain influence from winning battles and loose them for lost battles.  The points would be spent on a number of things such as keeping home provinces loyal and attempting to incite unrest in rivals provinces.  The further from a player's heartland the target was the higher the influence cost became.  This worked very nicely and by allowing players to negotiate in real time treaties could be put in place by both sides using influence for the same thing, equally rival states could be forced to the will of a very influential leader.  Points spent on loyalty (either plus or minus) were cumulative but half were lost on the death of the leader who allocated them.  

There was a limited amount of cash available used for buying loyalty or disloyalty or paying troops beyond the minimum period of service or as bribes to keep the vikings away (yeah right that was going to work).  A peace turn was 1 year long and consisted of use of influence collecting cash and checking for births, deaths and marriages.  War turns were one month long and with a peace turn at the end of each year.

In the original campaign following Offa's death Wessex, East Anglia, Essex and Kent all break from Mercia and the Mercians were trying to bring them to heal and the Welsh were trying to unify (with extreme prejudice!).  Wessex was attempting to pacify Dumonia before facing up to Mercia and the scots were playing influence games trying to forge two v one alliances with little actual success.

We played through one peace turn then a year of war turns resulting in a couple of field actions before it petered out.  I have all the maps and the rules, although in 35 years I have come up with some changes to the rules and I think I might try the campaign solo to see how it hangs together.

More little things

Just a short post today.  On Friday Mrs E spotted a desk in the local Red Cross charity shop.  Its an office computer desk which although basic is like new.  Saturday was spent moving some of the existing bookcases around in my home office to  make space for it.  It assembled without any issues and gives me probably double the desk area I had before, all for £20!  Well done Mrs E.

I know desks are not all that exciting ...but

As a bonus at the same time as spotting the desk she also bought two pristine Ikea Billy bookcases at a bargain price.  Ikea price is £55 plus I would either have to rent a van to collect them or pay £35 delivery.  These are £35 each and £10 delivery!  In effect I am getting an extra bookcase for less than purchase and delivery of one from IKEA, oh and they are already assembled too. Those are being delivered next week.  That is a bit of a result as I had two of the same bookcases and one collapsed recently when we tried to store LPs on it.  These are even the same colour as the one I have left.  So that will give me a 33% increase to my book space.  As a bonus our local Red Cross charity shop makes a wedge of cash for use in exceptionally good causes.

At the moment the office is totally topsy-turvy but once the new book cases arrive I will be able to move the existing bookcases around so everything fits into the room and get things back onto shelves where they belong.  For now I have space to work and paint soldiers so all is well with the world.

As you can probably tell little things do please me, especially when there is a significant saving in cost to be had.