It Won't Wash

 If you live in the northern part of Britain then you won't need me to tell you that the weather is shite. We are being bombarded by back-to-back storms. Still, at least the one currently raging outside is named after a wargamer. The one due on Friday, on the other hand, shares a name with a flame-haired doxie from my youth. ["I beg your pardon," interjects the Rhetorical Pedant "but you can't call someone a doxie. It's not nice."] Fair enough, although I doubt very much she'll be reading this. And good to hear from you again, RP, it's been too long. I haven't thought about the lovely Eunice for several decades and for some reason the main thing that comes back to me is her throwing a complete paddy when the restaurant we were in ran out of steak. ["Nope, can't say that either".]

A different Eunice

Anyway, the storms mean that there is still no opportunity to spray resin casts with primer. Clearing away the previous game in the annexe took quite a while as I found that I didn't have anywhere to put anything. The fortress and all the siege works had been laid straight on the table from being laser cut or cast, and then painted with nary a thought as to what I might do with them afterwards. Some biscuit tins have been pressed into temporary service. A tin full of resin is very heavy though, so I am reluctant to put them high up on a shelf.

I then tried setting up a medieval siege, the idea being to have three players against the umpire. But inspiration has been sadly lacking, so I'm now thinking of perhaps a WWI action. To that end I've been painting some odd German figures that I had handy. But when I came to apply the black wash that I have used on all their kameraden, it wasn't there. I am baffled by where it can have gone; it's not a big house (*). Anyway, online orders have gone in for a few alternatives and, while the weather is bad,  I shall be experimenting with various ways of making figures look better without doing the hard graft of actually painting them properly.

* Can I refer anyone who wants to know why it's a small house to the early entries of the blog wherein I documented my divorce, the subsequent period of nomadic wandering and why I don't wargame the War of the Spanish Succession.

Not Piedmontese

We're going further down the rabbit hole of stuff that will never be used. These are some of the remnants of the long-abandoned War of the Spanish Succession project. What is odd is that I could have sworn that I had built an army from Savoy/Piedmont. However, these are clearly Bavarian:

As is the only commander to survive:

I'm not sure who the cavalry are:

What I do remember is that I was keen to fight some sieges, and decided to build suitable stands in neutral uniform colours so that anyone could besiege anyone:

WSS (not) revisited - not?

I can't keep up with what's going down in UK politics so I'm not even going to try, other than pointing to what I said in the comments on this post.

I am instead going to write about wargaming. Right back at the beginning of this blog there was a big focus on the War of the Spanish Succession. Then, during the great wanderings of 2012 and 2013, I managed to lose all the infantry that I had painted and vowed not to replace them. However, tempus fugit etc. etc. and Strelets are, it seems, about to launch a Marlburian range. Is six years sufficient time to have sulked?

Look at that, not only is the WSS back, but so are the rhetorical questions. It's deja vu all over again.

Quinto McFabio

And so to the opera. Your bloggist is in the Peak District for a spot of walking and opera going and has been to see 'Lucio Papirio Dittatore' by Antonio Caldara. Don't waste any time searching your memories for when you last saw it because this was the very first performance for three hundred years. I rather enjoyed it, and who's to say that I wouldn't have enjoyed it at least as much had it been two thirds the length; in other words, it went on a bit. Baroque composers seem to have collectively taken the view that if a thing was worth saying then it was worth saying seven or eight times.

The director had a difficult task, after all what is there left to say about the Second Samnite War that hasn't been said already? Especially on a very low budget for scenery and props. For reasons that probably made sense to him everything was wrapped in the style of Christo and costumes ranged from basically none, through anachronistic Imperial armour to Quintus Fabius in what appeared to be a kilt. Quintus and his father were both countertenors (the former being the pick of the cast) and Cominio was a soprano in a trouser role, except that this being Ancient Rome she didn't actually wear any trousers. The music and singing were excellent and Buxton Opera House is lovely, but it did all rather reinforce the truism that sometimes less is more.

I know you all like a wargaming connection, and in this case (assuming the Samnites were insufficient) it is provided by Caldara's patron the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI. He of course was basically responsible for both the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of the Austrian Succession, fought various other unsuccessful wars against enemies such as the Ottomans and bankrupted his country but that aside wasn't a particularly bad man. In his capacity as patron of the arts he gets a ten minute encomium at the end of the opera, which was performed in full on the night. This was not only rather unnecessary (he's been dead since 1740), but must have been very confusing to anyone who hadn't attended the pre-show talk by the musical director and wasn't expecting it.

The Raid, part 2

(Burn baby burn) Disco Inferno
(Burn baby burn) Burn that mother down
(Burn baby burn) Disco Inferno
(Burn baby burn) Burn that mother down 

My ex-wife honestly thought that 'Disco Inferno' by The Trammps was a better track than 'Shame' by Evelyn 'Champagne' King, in what must surely have been her worst error of judgement apart from marrying me. That, on reflection, has nothing much to do with today's subject which is the conclusion of the latest game in the legendary wargames room.

There was a consensus that the morale aspect wasn't working so we switched to the rules obtaining in classic Piquet. One clear purpose of those is the completion of games in a reasonable time frame and that was achieved; we finished things off in a couple of hours. I, as the Prussians, went on to the offensive, looked at one point as if I was going to reduce the Russian forces by sufficient to make the target out of their reach, but then lost a couple of crucial combats, ran out of morale and that was that. Although only three villages had been pillaged and burned by that point, there was nothing much left to defend the others.

I enjoyed the scenario. Inasmuch as I have any changes to propose they would mainly be around the artillery. Perhaps the Russians should have two small units rather than one large making them more expensive to move and use and less effective when they fire. As for the Prussian artillery, something needs to be done to give them a purpose. I like the variability of where the defending forces start and where the reinforcements arrive, and it will certainly make the thing replayable. On the other hand the set up that we ended up with from the turn of the cards and the roll of the dice was possibly among the least interesting of the possible combinations. And, as I put in my previous post, I was too much influenced by James' tale of woe about when he had played it before and should have been more proactive early on.

However, the big issue was the rules. The SYW version of Piquet developed by James and Peter is really for large set piece battles; indeed the driver behind the changes they made is precisely that the original game is for a dozen units a side fought over one evening. But with only five or six units and no real division into commands neither version work well. I've mentioned morale, but there are other considerations. Big swings in initiative (and at one point we went from 20-6 directly to 5-18) have a much magnified effect when one is only seeking to move or fire a couple of units and make the game more arbitrary than seems comfortable to me.  And then there are the opportunity fire rules. I can't decide whether the recentish change to a straight ahead fire zone had ameliorated or worsened the strong advantage that defenders get from opportunity fire, but at least in a large game the attackers can concentrate their strength at one point. In this low level sort of game - which, as I have said previously, I enjoy - one is using manouevre, deployements and fire zones intended for long lines of troops, but with isolated units swanning about on their own.

As a result of all that we had a bit of a cast about for suitable other rules that we owned and which might work better; in the end we came up with Maurice. I bought these as part of the abandoned War of the Spanish Succession project and rather liked the look of them at the time. In any event we thought we'd give them a go on the same scenario next week and see what we think.

Which just leaves room for these two, so that you can make your own minds up:

Everyone is naturally entitled to their own opinion, but if you don't think the second one is better then you're a cloth eared numptie.

Unto the breach

We've had love poetry and we've had opera and I can sense some Shakespeare and some cycling are just about to appear. I must therefore, with all due apologies to those readers not interested in the subject, squeeze in some wargaming. Which is more than I have been able to do in real life. I have been to London (getting the first use out of my senior citizen's railcard) and it must be borne in mind that I have a personal life more complicated than befits someone, well someone with a senior citizen's railcard. Not only have I missed the first night of Lobositz (although I suspect that it may, as with Sidi Rezegh, come round again soon enough), but I haven't really had a chance to catch up with many other blogs. One that I'm glad to have read is Prometheus in Aspic where General Fwa has been running through a rather fine looking ECW siege at which I urge you all to take a look.

One of the issues he raises is how to model sap diggers in 20mm. Now the good general is a user of classic metal 20mm figures with the occasional resort to plastic for the odd figure he can't source in metal. I, on the other hand, generally use plastic with the odd metal figure. Strangely, this is somewhat easier for me. Plastic figures are, in general, taller than metal. When using a metal figure all I do is, if necessary, put a piece of cardboard underneath it. Short of chopping it off at the knees, one can't do the same in reverse.

Anyway, as it happens I have myself modelled some sap diggers, as part of my doomed WSS project. In fact the engineers and siege artillery are pretty much the only elements that didn't mysteriously disappear. So, and with the added bonus of helping me try out the not particularly new any more camera (about which I am suffering some serious post purchase dissonance), are a couple of not particularly good photos of them:

The chaps actually digging are Orion Pirates. Other figures suitable for conversion are available in the Imex Pilgrims and Pioneers sets or from the Accurate/Revell box of Confederate Pioneers. I also have a bit (OK, quite a lot) of siege equipment and figures for circa 1400, and have managed to utilise figures from those sets therein. Here is the Crow, with apologies for the obtrusive plastic box in the background:

I must try to get that stuff onto the table for a game sometime. I am particularly fond of the boiling oil dispenser. But they'll have to take their place in the queue, part of which is formed by the Great War trench raid project. So finally here is a very rude looking strongpoint.

Short and thick, does the trick

Order! Order!

"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents." - Arthur Schopenhauer

The laydeez love a slaphead

Bertrand Russell thought that Schopenhauer's philosophy was diminished by the latter's propensity to a constant flow of shallow relationships driven by physicality rather than emotion. Personally I can't see anything wrong with living like that provided one doesn't take it to excess like, er, one of my friends. Indeed one of Schopenhauer's insights was to point out that we are biologically conditioned to be attracted to unsuitable mates; a point with which my mate tells me he totally concurs based on his own fairly wide-ranging experience.  In any event, Arthur was right about buying books and, by extension, about buying wargaming figures. It's all very well acquiring them, but that's not quite the same as painting them.

Or a pipe

Consequently, when I moved all my wargaming stuff into the new annexe it naturally included a huge pile of unpainted figures. Of these a relatively small number were scheduled for painting as part of the War of Spanish Succession project while the others were basically just a pile of unpainted figures. With the fall of the WSS into desuetude it was  time for some of those other figures to come to the party. My fallback plan to paint up the figures necessary for the Russian expansion of C&C prompted a trip to the relevant box and retrieval of the appropriate figures; or at least the first part. Admittedly, I did put my hand on a box of Russian Militia and the first unit of such is just about to roll off the production line, but that was it. Nowhere among the vast quantity of nude Napoleonic plastic can one find, for example, Russian heavy cavalry with no cuirasses. And for reasons that, as usual, seemed sensible at the time I made the decision, I never collected any French guard infantry or artillery. Therefore, for the first time in years, and despite the existing pile of little men shouting "paint me, paint me." an order has been placed and some new figures will soon arrive chez moi (as we still say in Yorkshire one week on from the big event). Then, without fail, they will be painted.

Or a moustache

As Einstein never said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Pot29pouri

So, another day, another dollar.

I'm not one to complain but the ugly duckling on the right below took a peck at me today.

In possibly the final Tour de France news, I went to  'La Rose et la Couronne' for lunch on Sunday and the landlady told me that she'd sold her first pint of beer at 8 a.m. the previous day. That evening I also happened to pop into 'Le Manoir' (as an aside I really don't drink) and they had sold out of virtually everything; they were almost literally a pub with no beer.

And in wargaming news, I have decided to change my painting plans. (As another aside, I feel that in typing those words I am cementing my place in the brotherhood of wargames bloggers.) As I can't find my existing War of the Spanish Succession figures there doesn't seem to be much point in painting any more. I am therefore going to paint up the units required for the Napoleonic Command and Colours scenarios involving the Russians. First up will be some Russian militia from the Hat set of the same name.

The more I like everything

"If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint', then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced." - Vincent Van Gogh

Your bloggist at work

A bit of a landmark today as I put brush to figure for the first time since August 2012. Some Bavarian infantry for the War of Spanish Succession (my period not of choice) got the honour of having their leatherwork and neckerchiefs added whilst some others received a coat of matt varnish. The world wide web can't seem to agree on uniform colours for the Kurprinz regiment and I therefore chose the one with the splash of red.

On the other hand I didn't like that blue so I went with a lighter one. As Nietzsche said "there are no facts, only interpretations".

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new"

Tennyson wasn't necessarily suggesting to his readers that change was good although King Arthur's own opinion on the matter is somewhat ambiguous; you will recall him reflecting that "all my mind is clouded with a doubt". I however am up for it. So, having dealt with the base of my own personal Maslow's hierarchy (source of income, somewhere to live, sufficiency of doxies) it is time to turn my thoughts to achieving self-actualisation through wargaming.

The transporting of my collection into the new wargaming annexe has forced me to have a think about what on earth I'm going to do with all this stuff, with a subsidiary helping of 'what was I thinking?'. So the time has come to impersonate a proper wargaming blog and write a posting about my plans for the future.

New stuff: the only new painting is going to be War of the Spanish Succession, the period that having been tricked into I am nevertheless going to bloody well finish regardless. Rules will be Piquet, Maurice, Beneath the Lily Banners and/or Die Fighting. I own them all so they'll all get an outing at some point.

Steady as she goes: My Wars of the Roses morphing into Hussite Wars collection will basically stay as is, but the half-hearted attempt to also morph into the Fall of Constantinople will not be pursued. Rules will be Piquet Band of Brothers suitably amended to incorporate the latest thinking from Ilkley, wargaming epicentre of lower Wharfedale.

Different tack: I actually have a fairly large 1813 Napoleonic collection albeit without any Austrians. In fact until I re-looked at it I'd forgotten how much I'd painted; or how badly, but that's a different issue. However, the units are pretty small and don't lend themselves to a lot of rulesets. So, partly based on recent experiences with the ongoing Punic Wars campaign and partly on game reports on Conrad Kinch's excellent blog, I'm thinking of giving Napoleonic Command and Colours a go. In fact I'm seriously thinking of investing in some hex terrain to do it as written.

Resuscitated project: I have lots of Celts and not many Romans, all individually based and destined for a game based on either Patrols in the Sudan or Pony Wars or both. I'd like to give this a proper go; needs some close combat rules to graft on though.

Complete fantasy: Mexican revolution - one day.

Pot12pouri

Yesterday's posting's reference to Benjamin Britten led to a conversation with someone who said they had just returned from Aldeburgh. When asked what it was like, she replied that it was OK unless one was a vegetarian. This, of course, tells us nothing about Britten, music or East Anglia, but will provide some comfort to anyone having doubts about Abraham Maslow's famous theory.

If you were self-actualised you'd laugh too

The blog has acquired yet another follower, and this time without having insulted the religious sensibilities of any previous follower; welcome John Preece. As a Malburian gamer you sit right in the area of my main project. Obviously I have made no progress on that project (which in any case I only took up after being stitched up by Mark Dudley) for a yonk, and far from having somewhere to carry it out I am actually moving to a smaller flat shortly. However, these issues are a mere bagatelle, the War of the Spanish Succession has called out to you, and you have answered.

The WSS beckons seductively

To the Leeds Meeples for some boardgame action. We started with Apples to Apples and I followed up with 7 Wonders (with both expansions) and Small World. The latter two met my current, though loose, criterion of being games that I'd never played before and I think that both would be worth playing again. As will all first plays I had no idea what was happening, chose a strategy blindly and came last.

A wonder, albeit not one of the original seven

Here's a t-shirt (or possibly a tank top; not my area of expertise) that seems to have been designed with wargamers in mind; except possibly for the cut. Hopefully they do XXXXL versions as well.

Pot7pouri

• There is an excellent, well-illustrated write up of a Historicon playtest of Eric Burgess's Vauban siege game on his blog. Regular readers will remember that I am very much looking forward to these being released and intend to expand my WSS set-up in this direction. They will also remember that I don't have anywhere to live and that I haven't done any painting/modelling for almost a year. These are, however, mere details.
• There was a brief boardgaming session at the White Swan yesterday with a game each of Vineta (oddly not such a good game once you know the rules) and The Three Musketeers which I won as the Cardinal at the last gasp. 
• I seem to have been transferred to the German side for Wednesday's Sidi Rezegh scenario. As Major General von Rammstein my job is to prove that the British can win during operation Crusader whilst at the same time laying down some Neue Deutsche Härte industrial metal riffs.

 

The second escarpment is mine

Fire and Stone

There is some good news on the wargames rules front. Obviously there can never be too many sets of rules either in one's own collection or in the world at large and so the announcement of any upcoming set is to be welcomed. The set that I am referring to are (currently) known as Vauban's Wars and are being developed within the Piquet rule family by Eric Burgess.

A chap in a wig

Those with long memories and/or no lives may remember that my own personal current wargaming project (as opposed to freeloading on James Roach's hard work) is the War of the Spanish Succession; or at least it would be were not all my figures etc still the marital home, from which I have been excluded due to - well, best not to discuss that. I do retain hopes of at some point in the not too distant future living somewhere with enough room for a wargames table and so keep the flame alive by counting the WSS as my current period even though nothing has been done on it for some considerable time. I started on the WSS project not because of any particular interest in it, but because I was stitched up by another wargamer, whom it would be best not to name, but whom I shall refer to for the purpose of this blog only as 'Mark Dudley'.

I can't say that I wasn't warned

 

Anyway, having been persuaded against my better judgement to throw in my lot with the world's leading instigator of abandoned projects I went away and read up on the period. It became apparent that most of the action at the time was in the form of sieges rather than set-piece battles, but you all knew that anyway. Imagine my pleasure then to discover at about that time that Eric Burgess (who blogs here: Din of Battle) was developing a set of siege rules for the period. Now, as it happens, he has also taken a bit of down time from wargaming - it happens to us all - but has recently given word on the Piquet forum that he is back in the saddle and that these rules are likely to see the light of day later in year. If my luck is really in then that will coincide with me having somewhere to play them.

The WSS (not) revisited

So, you don't ask. If you aren't interested in the WSS - except for sieges - then why do you bother not wargaming it? (Note to self: one last time, if you don't cut out those bloody rhetorical questions then who on earth do you think is going to read this stuff?)

Well, the story starts at Recon in December 2010. I was talking to a wargamer of some substance, let's call him 'M'. He told me that he and another wargamer in good standing, let's call him 'T', were intending to start a new project. Now, for M it would only normally have been a noteworthy conversation if he had told me that he had foresworn all new projects and that from then until the day that he died was only going to play with the toys that he had. What raised this occasion out of the ordinary was his assertion that in accordance with the current straitened economic circumstances the plan was to use 20mm plastic figures. In fact it was to be the War of the Spanish Succession based on the excellent Zvezda Great Northern War range of figures. He, M, was intent on producing a French army, T had decided on the British and they wondered if I - a noted 20mm plastic enthusiast - wanted to join in. As a further inducement in transpired that T could source figures at a discount.

Now then what could I say? (Not to self: look I won't tell you again, stop doing it. Is it big? Is it clever?)