Handsome Hans And The Nasty Nazis

Christmas last Madame Padre gave me a bunch of two-fisted figures from Bob Murch's Pulp Figures range for my Weird War Two project. I liked the somewhat cartoonish quality of Bob's Nazis and I thought they would be the perfect minions for my occult Nazi leaders and monsters, and useful cannon fodder for battles with "S Commando". Here's my first test figure from this lot, "Handsome Hans".

There are a few things about my paint job for this guy that I would be grateful, dear reader, for your feedback. First, because I fear I don't fully understand the art of painting black clothes, I gave him a base of black but then dry brushed him using a colour called "Midnight" (basically an indigo) from a craft paint line called Folkart. I rather think the net result looks too blue, rather like a Union blue from the ACW period rather than SS black. Do you think the uniform is too blue?

Secondly, you will note that Bob has sculpted a swastika armband on the figure's arm, and that I have painted it red but have not added the white circle with the swastika in the centre. The reasons for this are twofold. The first reason is that I fear a swastika is too fiddly to paint well. Second, and more important, I'm not sure I really want to paint one. I am mindful of some forums, such as Lead Adventurers, that don't allow Nazi symbology since they hosted in Germany and abide by German law, not that I post a lot of my work on that forum but I might want to. More to the point, and this goes back to an earlier post I did on Weird War Two and ethics, I think it's plain that my bad guys are intended to be minions of the Third Reich without having to paint a symbol I find repugnant.

I've been giving some more thought as to the kind of alternate reality I wanted to create with Weird War Two. At first I think I envisioned it as "Hammer Studios Meets Allo! Allo!". The charm of the Hammer films, which terrified my dreams when I was a young teenager was that they were campy, low-budget, set "somewhere in Europe somewhere in the past" and didn't take themselves overly seriously.

Allo! Allo! never took itself seriously. If you could accept Nazis as harmless clowns, you got the joke. If you couldn't accept that premise, you probably didn't watch it.

I'm just not sure that I want my Weird War Nazis to be that silly. Recently Madame Padre and I recently discovered the 1970s era ITV series, "Enemy At the Door", about the German occupation of the Channel Islands. In this show the Nazis are definitely not clowns. In fact, they can be downright scary, in part because the decent German types, like the Commandant, are decent men trapped in an evil system. If you have a moment, watch the contrast in this episode between the Commandant, Major Richter (played by Alfred Burke) and the SS Haupsturmfuhrer Rienicke (Simon Cadell), who would pull Cafe Rene apart in a few days.

So for now I'm thinking no swastikas, but scary Nazis - just, hopefully, not too blue Nazis. Thoughts?

Resurrected Armies Project Third and Last: Turkish Redelight

Sunday last was the Sunday of Pentecost and the end of the Easter season for this year, so it brings to an end my resurrected armies project. I was able to get three armies out of mothballs and made some plans for repairs and additions in the time remaining before everything goes into boxes for our move sometime in July. The third and last army I am showcasing for this project is my 28mm Seven Years War Ottoman/Turkish army. Here it is together for a recently finished battle with their Russian nemesis, an excuse to test drive Sam Mustafa's Maurice rules.

As I mentioned when introducing my SYW Russians, I got into SYW gaming with my club in the mid 1990s, and after deciding that I needed a second army for solitaire gaming, I opted for the Turks on the theory that, A) no one else wanted to do them, and B) they were more colourful and more interesting than any other of the European armies of the period. The interesting fact about this army is that almost none of these figures have been painted or based by me. Some were gifts from kind gaming friends I've made over the years, and some were bought used from friends who bought them used. An example of the latter are these fellows, who I showed here a few months back when they appeared in a colonial game using Ross MacFarlane's MacDuff rules. Yes, it's those lovable rogues with the big axes, the Turkish Love Slaves, though as I recall we decided that they were actually some flavour of Cossacks, though we never figured out whose sculpts they are. Most of these have been repainted by me, and they work as irregular massed infantry with melee weapons. If they survive the hails of grape and musketry usually directed at them, they are fearsome enemies.

I have three units of scruffy archers who look like they would be more at home in a Crusades game fighting Richard the Lionheart. They were part of a job lot of figures purchased by a friend at some kind of boot sale, and he kindly sold me the lot. Lord knows who made them. They function as the equivalents to Russian pandours, since mobs of irregular skirmishing infantry are always helpful.

The pride of the army, are of course my elite armoured cavalry, the Sipahis. I gather that sipahi can be a generic word meaning cavalry of any kind, and that the heavies were called Sipahis of the Porte. I have twelve of these latter chaps from The Assault Group waiting for a turn on my painting bench and they are lovely figures. THese fellows here came in that job lot I mentioned and were extensively repainted and rebased by my younger self. Again, they look rather medieval to my eye. With another twelve figures done once I get to the TAG sipahis, I'll have an impressive shock arm for those key moments in the battle. My limited reading of Maurice doesn't seem to give any distinctions to light or heavy cavalry, but I am only reading the free "Lite" rules, so there may be something in the full rules if I decide to buy them.

The heart of my Turkish army is a small brigade of three small regiments of Janissaries. These figures in blue are Esex (I think) and were never really finished. That blue banner needs doing and they are rather expressionless. I am also not sure if the red fez chaps should be mixed in with the more elaborate headdress. This unit needs some revisiting to be sure.

I also have two units of these handsome chaps in red - Minifigs, I think. I didn't paint them, they were the gift of a friend who started collecting Ottomans and then gave up. A very handsome and decidedly old school bunch, and the only units I have who have any chance of standing and slugging it out with the Russian line infantry.

My Turks don't have the same weight of artillery that their Russian foes possess, but they aren't helpless. Besides this based gun, they have this monster, never got more than half painted and still needs basing. The crew are Minifigs.

Finally, we have more fellows who look like they have ridden out of a Crusades or El Cid game, these magnificent horse archers in their colourful robes, all drawing the bow at the same time. Such choreography! Some of these fellows I've repainted.

And another unit of light horse, none of whom have received a lick of paint during their time with me. From my limited knowledge of Turkish tactics, they would pack their wings with light horse and try to win the battle on the flanks. My Russian hussars will be busy fending off the Turks while the line infantry and artillery tries to decide the battle.

I neglected to take a photo of the big cheese, the army's CinC, but he's busy in a refight with the Russians using the Maurice rules, so I will include him in my AAR of that battle, or I'm told some burly eunuchs will drag me off and apply the thumbscrews in a dark dungeon. Hmmm, I hope he wins that battle, for my sake.

A couple of to-dos here to be sure. 1) Finish painting the blue jannisaries; 2) Base that big cannon, assemble a third gun, a piece from Minifig's ECW range, and finish four artillerists somewhere on my painting table; 3) get cracking on those TAG sipahis of the porte. The first two I think I can manage before the move. The final task should take me into the fall.

Fiat Lux! - Solving The Lighting Problem

Several weeks ago Madame Padre and I went to the big city of Calgary for a night of culture and then on to Banff and the Rockies. While in Calgary we visited her favourite camera store, where she found a macro lens for her signature flower photographs. I suspect her camera is smarter than I am and that I will never be allowed to touch her macro lens (my iPhone works well enough, I find) but I did grab something I had been wanting since my last visit just before Christmas.

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I have often read and heard that 90% of the problems encountered when trying to photograph miniatures have to do with insufficient lighting. I have tried all sorts of jerry rigged solutions, usually involving me holding a lamp with one hand while trying to manipulate my camera phone with another, with sometimes sketchy results. I had mixed feelings about dropping $95 to solve this problem, but this piece of kit, a light tent by Optex, seemed promising.

Here's the kit unfolded from its box and set up. It's a clever design of folding vinyl screens, with lighting on either side and diffuser panels, and a choice of four colours for background in two double sided fabric panels.

For a test run, I couldn't resist cramming in all twelve 28mm figures from my current project, an SYW Russian hussar unit that has been featured here several times in past, and which is now 98% finished. As you can see, the inside area is small enough that twelve large based figures spill over the background fabric and so the aesthetic effect is somewhat marred. Still, I think the lighting looks pretty good - very clean, doing justic to the colours, and no annoying shadows! How does it look to you?

With half the number of figures, and by cropping the image slghtly, only the bckground fabric is visible, giving a pleasing (to me, anyway) impression. I didn't notice the bits of stray flocking on the blue background until I'd put everything away.

First thoughts: Pros, this kit produces good light that illuminates all sides of the model fairly equally, and gives an attractive result. It would be good for photographing individual models or small groups for purposes such as entries in contests, showing off special projects and additions to collections. The folding box takes only a few minutes to set up and take down. Cons: the area of the light box may not large enough to photograph large units all together, or to include backgrops or diorama elements. All that being said, my intial opinions of this kit has me thinking it was money well spent.

A Big Step Forward

Hello all! There's been precious little blogging this month, and very little gaming, but a lot of painting. Alas, the painting was all house-related - walls, baseboards, steps, fences, etc. As readers may remember, the army is posting me this summer, and since Madame Padre and I opted to buy our own house rather than rent a PMQ when we were first posted here, we now have to sell our house. Several weeks ago I received the posting message which allowed me to engage the relocation people and get our house listed to sell. That meant a flurry of work trying to get the final jobs done - new carpets, study baseboards, various painting projects -- and there is still a list of jobs that need to be done. But, on Monday, we got to this point, with a For Sale sign on the lawn.

The market here is a little slow at present, and older, character homes like ours require the right buyer, so we are hoping that the right buyer comes along soon. In the meantime, we are trying to keep the place clean and tidy for showing, but there are some things I'm not putting away, like the wargames table. Who knows, maybe the right buyer is a wargamer, and the sight of a wargames room will be the final touch that convinces them to buy our house?

Our goal is to be packed and moved in late July, and the house sold by 1 August, so I have a little time to enjoy my toys. I am trying not to think about having to pack them.

Resurrected Armies Project Two: Rediscovered SYW Russians

This coming Sunday is the Seventh Sunday of Easter and after that is Pentecost Sunday, so I only have a few more weeks before my self-appointed deadline to talk about my Resurrected Armies project. To recap, the purpose of this project was to use the season of Easter to "resurrect" some long-neglected armies in my collection. I showcased my 20mm Soviet WW2 collection some weeks back, so today here are more Russians, from my 28mm Seven Years War collection. I started building this army around 1990 when my club at the time went through a Seven Years War craze, inspired by the (then newly published) Age of Reason rules set.

Here on parade is the mighty Russian Army of Emperor Mikhail The Good (none to his courtiers as "Mikhail The So So"). All the base sizes are as per WRG basing and troop type specifications. At one point there were some 20mm Revell Prussian infantry painted in Russian green, and some Esci Napoleonic Polish Lancers in paper caftans posing as Cossacks, as well as a box of Esci Crimean War British Hussars posing as, well, Russian Hussars. The plastic figures were all released from service in the Emperor's first Force Reduction Plan, following a report from the Nevsky Institute of Strategic Studies saying that they were icky.

The army's Commander in Chief, the gout-ridden General Ivan Blottski, a Front Rank figure. I have a blister of Foundry Russian officers currently deploying on my painting table to give him some subordinate commanders, and possibly some rivals for command if things go samovar-shaped.

My light infantry, the dangerous Serbian Pandours, of whom Blottski once quipped that "they would steal the family silver of the blessed Mother of God and then ask for her blessing in battle". These are Minifigs kindly gifted to me from the collection of an old gaming friend, Mark Chappel.

Here is the senior of my line infantry regiments. The command figures and the firing musketeers in the front are I think from Falcon Miniatures, but I wouldn't swear to it. The flags are hand painted and I'm still quite proud of them.

I placed several orders for Front Rank infantry to the Emperor's Headquarters of Chicago when it was in business. Here is my next unit of Russian line. Hopefully one notices a slight improvement in my painting skills over time. At this stage I was giving exaggerated red cheeks to my soldiers, giving them a slightly Nutcracker look.

Once I started doing some research, I realized that I had to paint the famed Apcheronski Regiment, which wore red gaiters in honour of their performance fighting the Prussians at Kunersdorf, when they were said to have stood and fought knee deep in their own blood. I am sure the reality was less impressive, but a splash of red on the gaming table is irresisitble. I recently discovered that GMB make Russian flags for this period, so there will soon be a service where the Apcheronskis are issued new colours.

Wanting more variety, I then added two regiments of the Observation Corps, which as far as I remember meant "under observation" for their new uniforms, including these rather stylish knee high boots, which I'm sure were proper bastards to march in.

One of my Observation Corps regiments intermixes Front Rank figures with these chaps, which some kind soul gifted me. Not sure who makes them ... possibly Falcon as well?

When we weren't using the Age of Reason rules, my crowd often got out the WRG rules for black powder, on the theory that was good in the 1970s was just as good in the 1990s. A rather quaint and charming notion in this era of trendy and expensive glossy rules. I always liked the morale modifier that gave Russians in line a -3 just for being Russians in line. That rule made all the Russians pretty tough on the defence, but for the offense one has to have some Grenadiers. Here's my unit of Front Rank grenadiers. Note the coats of pale green. I'm not sure what the thinking was there when I painted them that shade, I think I just wanted them to stand out from the dark green ofg the rest of my army and I thought the paler green gave them a tough weathered veteran look. At any rate, they're a pretty tough bunch, of whom General Blottski once said that they would storm the gates of hell or Berlin for a cannikin of vodka and a potato.

The only unit of cavalry currently in service is this unit of mystery manufacturer hussars, a gift from some kind friend and painted ... ummm, err, orange? Not sure what I was thinking there. They are colourful, and will soon be joined by a second unit of hussars, which are demanding to be finished and released from the painting table. I would dearly love some dragoons and cuirassers to fight the armoured Turks lurking out there.

This chap, another mystery manufacturer figure, illustrates my painting style ca. 1990, when I was just discovering drybrushing. I call him "Captain Kronsky" and he may one day serve in a game of Too Fat Lardies' Sharpe Practice, adapted to Russia's Ottoman frontier.

Finally, what Russian army would be complete without a shedload of artillery? The guns here, all painted glossy fireengine red because I thought it looked cool at the time, are either Minifigs or Front Rank, and the crew are either Minifigs Prussians painted in Russian colours or Front Rank figures.

In my thinking, to be a properly resurrected army, it isn't enough for the figures to be dug out of boxes and refurbished, but they have to fight in a tabletop action. My Russians recently took the field against their Turkish nemesis, in an attempt to master the demo rules for Sam Mustafa's Maurice, and the tale of that battle, and of my thoughts on Maurice, remains to be told.

What Was Britain's Greatest Battle? The Answer Will Surprise You

US journalist Tom Ricks put me on to this piece in last week's The Telegraph on a question asked by Britain's National Army Museum. One hundred paid guests heard five historians make their case for Britain's Greatest Battle. Over half of the attendees then voted in favour of the argument made by Dr Robert Lyman, an author and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, that Britain's greatest battle was actually two, the twin fights of Imphal and Kohima, fought in Burma in 1944.

Lyman had this reaction: "I had thought that one of the bigger names like D-Day or Waterloo would win so I am delighted that Imphal-Kohima has won. You have got to judge the greatness of a battle by its politcal, cultural and social impact, as much as its military impact. Imphal and Kohima were really significant for a number of reasons, not least that they showed that the Japanese were not invincible and that that they could be beaten, and beaten well. The victories demonstrate this more than the US in the Pacific, where they were taking them on garrison by garrison.”

I freely admit that I know next to nothing about these battles, and only a little bit about General Slim and the campaign in Burma. I need to fix that gap in my military knowledge this summer. Hammock reading suggestions, anyone? Any good paper wargames of these fights or of this campaign?

On The Shoulders Of Giants 2: Jim Dunnigan On SPI And Wargaming

A few months back I posted here on an interview with Don Greenwood, formerly of Avalon Hill, as run by David Dockter on his excellent Guns Dice And Butter blog. While on David's site I noticed that he had also recorded an interviewwith wargaming legend Jim Dunnigan, the founder of Simulations Publications, Inc (SPI), and resolved to go back and listen to that interview when time permitted. I've now done so, and the interview unleashed a horde of gaming memories and thoughts which I'd like to share with you. Hopefully I'll say something interesting.
A small(ish) preamble is necessary here. When I was a kid in a small town in Western Canada in the mid 1970s, my older brother Alex introduced me to a copy of The Courier, a small mimeographed newsletter in a construction paper cover that introduced me to the world of toy soldiers. God alone knows how The Courier found its way to our little town in the Rockies. I saw photos of grown men playing battles with stiff toy soldiers of Scruby/early Minifigs vintage on tables adorned with wooden hills and model trees, and I wanted so much to do that. But I was a kid and my allowance and paper route money wouldn't go allow for armies of toy soldiers, so that dream got deferred for the day when I would one day be a grown up.
That kid grew up and now owns more toy soldiers than he could possibly imagine back then, so the story ends happily, but it wasn't so sad in the middle, either, because that little kid discovered paper wargames thanks to two people: David Lewis and Jim Dunnigan. David Lewis was the son of friends of my parents, and he was living at home while pursuing a summer job. David became my hero. He had just finished a degree in history down island at the University of Victoria. He was worldly and listened to Boz Scaggs and Fleetwood Mac, which opened my ears to adult music, and he introduced me to paper wargames, starting with a great SPI Waterloo monster game called Wellington's Victory, a Frank Davis design that had just been published (1976). With the abundant patience of a surrogate big brother, David introduced me to the world of adult wargaming that Jim Dunnigan had opened up to us with SPI. I still have a treasured copy of this game that David gave me as a gift.
That year, 1977, I persuaded my parents to get me a copy of the SPI house magazine, Strategy and Tactics, which came with a game in every issue, and a lot of the S&T games I got were Dunnigan titles - Berlin '85 was a special favourite of mine because it was scary cool at the time to think about World War Three and it had some innovative mechanics, including unknown unit strengths, so that when you moved a unit into contact you flipped it to the revealed strength side to find out how good it was. That same mechanic featued in a bonus game that came with my S&T subscription, Panzergruppe Guderiananother Dunnigan title.
While the artwork in the SPI maps and counters of that era was primitive compared to those published today by the likes of GMT and Victory Point, there was a cool modernist vibe about SPI that appealed to me. The sleek plastic boxes with their build in counter trays had a space age aesthetic that the Avalon Hill bookcase games didn't have (almost everything about AH was stodgy and slightly dull), while the SPI cover art and counters were minimalist but appealing.
When I was a high school senior I lost touch with David but remained connected to SPI. My proudest possession in those years was their monster game Atlantic Wall, a divisional level treatment of Normandy where the smallest unit was the company(!). Through most of Grade 12 I had all five maps spread out on my bedroom floor and tiptoed around them to and from bed. My parents were bemused. I had the sense that I was somehow touching history in a real sense, and even if I didn't really understand all the nuances of the Normandy campaign I felt I was doing something very important and grown up.
When I went to college in 1980 I fell in with role players who mostly played Dungeons and Dragons, and there never seemed to be the room or time to spread out a big game for any period of time. In the mid 80s came graduate school and a turn to miniatures gaming, so that decade wasn't very kind to my boardgaming, and in the 90s I alternated between computer games and miniatures. One of the computer games that consumed a lot of my time was an early MUD, a multiplayer online game, Hundred Years War, hosted on the GEnie network (anyone remember GEnie?) that was a Dunnigan design. Little did I realize then that the evolution of my gaming life in the 70s, 80s and 90s pretty much matched the rise and fall of SPI and paper gaming.
In the GDB interview, Dunnigan doesn't talk a lot about his own designs, but he does describe with broad strokes how SPI came on the scene in the 70s and took wargaming in a direction that the more conservative Avalon Hill wouldn't go in. You get a sense of how clever this guy was in seeing opportunities, such as the appetite for contemporary/Cold War games, particularly from US military gamers, that led to titles such as Red Star/White Star. My own personal favourite was Dunnigan's World War Three (1975), a grand strategic game based on his WW2 engine, where players had a limited number of nukes which could obliterate whole hexes and all the fleets and armies therein, but each time at the risk of triggering a global nuclear exchange which ended the game. My younger brother and I blew up the world quite a few times playing that game. An interesting moment in the GDB interview is hearing JD describe how interest in contemporary gaming declined precipitously ("it fell of a cliff" is JD's phrase) after the Cold War ended.
Another takeway from the interview is what a tech-savvy businessman JD was. SPI was brilliant at capturing user feedback and figuring out what gamers wanted. In a pre-Kickstarter era, each issue of S&T would float several design ideas and make production decisions accordingly. I remember poring over the stats and rankings at the back of each issue of S&T, numbers that Dunnigan himself crunched using the programmable computers of the day. The interview also shows that JD had a pretty shrewd idea of what games would sell, and of how SPI's SF and fantasy titles would merit larger print runs (maybe 10 to 12 thousand) than the historical titles did. Several non-Dunnigan titles of that era, War of the Ring (1977) and their thinly-disguised Star Wars ripoff, Freedom in the Galaxy (1979) were friends of mine in high school, as was their terrific little Creature That Ate Sheboygan a homage to the old Godzilla-type movies of the 1950s and 60s. I regret that I have parted with these titles over the years. I suspect that every kid like me who bought Freedom in the Galaxy subsidized SPI's clunky monster games like their legendary Campaign For North Africa.
The trajectory which led to SPI's demise in 1982 pretty much describes the evolution of my own gaming life in those years, which wandered away from paper wargames into roleplaying, computer gaming, and miniatures. AS JD describes it, paper wargaming flourished in the 1960s and 70s because a well educated generation came up that was ripe for the kind of mental and imaginative challenges that wargaming offered. The first crop of AH games offered the appeal of chess, two players locked in an intellectual battle, but SPI exploited the idea that any conflict or historical period in time could be presented as a simulation, which added an extra dimension to the basic appeal of the game. By the late 70s, however, a number of factors, including the rise of TSR and D&D, and the coming microcomputer revolution, spelled the doom of big wargaming companies that were built on the publishing business model. SPI lost customers like me because we had more hobby options in the 1980s.
In the middle part of the interview JD makes a few interesting comments about how miniatures gaming survived and grew as a hobby despite the decline of the paper wargame. He rightly notes that miniatures gaming was always a niche in the hobby, with a high cost of entry in terms of time and money to paint the "figurines" (sic) and to master what he calls the "arcane" rules, but the people who got into the hobby (as I wanted to do when I was a kid lookng at those Courier magazines) were always loyal and enthusiastic. In JD's opinion the limitation of miniatures gaming is that it only allows for tactical games, rather than the grand strategic games that make up so many of his 100+ published designs. While this comment may be true of many club and convention games, a quick survey of wargaming blogs shows many examples of tabletop games that are driven by rich and complex strategic designs.
Another advantage of tabletop gaming that JD doesn't necessarily realize is that his own comments in the interview about how good designs should allow for players tweaking and customizing games (variant and what if scenarios, for example) is eminently true of miniatures gaming. The only limits to how we as gamers can modify history, explore what-ifs, etc are our imaginations and the number and type of figures/models available to us.
At the end of the interview, JD makes some comments on the barriers to entry to wargaming that apply to all parts of our hobby. The idea that wargames are difficult to learn and play, the "I'm not smart enough to do that", certainly applied to an SPI monster game in its day, and applies equally to many tabletop games, though we've come a long way from the scary, brain-busting rules books of the WRG era. JD is a great believer in turnkey solutions, giving the new player everything he or she needs to get started and making entry to the hobby as painless as possible. Those of us who mock companies like Battlefront or Games Workshop might do well to remember that they understand how to get new people/customers into the hobby. The strategic alliances developing between Warlord Games and Osprey, or the Battlegroup rules affiliated with PSC, or moves that JD would approve of.
Hearing David and JD talk for almost ninety minutes is a great treat. Love him or hate him, Dunnigan was a key player in our hobby. He had a great, even modernist, belief that with enough data and a spreadsheet you could model pretty much anything. His best games had a few brilliant mechanics, and his strategic level games often included clever political and economic subsystems. Empires of the Middle Ages (1980), another SPI game I have sadly let go of over the years, is a brilliant example. Dunnigan also had a belief technology should be explored and exploited, and he knew that much of what the monster paper game tried to do could eventually be done better by a computer. Today companies like Matrix Games show his foresight. For miniatures gamers who still keep a foot in the paper gaming tradition (or are returning to it, as I am), he's someone we all owe much to. If you want a trip down memory lane, or want to see an annotated list of Dunnigan's 100+ designs, Dockter has one here.
Now, where's my copy of PG Guderian?