The Great Shelf Disaster

In my last post I made a cryptic reference to "The Great Shelf Disaster" and since that got some interest, I thought I'd tell the story and then solicit your wargames disaster stories.   Maybe it will prove thereapeutic for all of us.

So when we moved in November, Joy and I had downsized and gotten rid of a lot of our CDs.   I had a nice wooden CD tower left over and thought of a great way to repurpose it as a shelf for my command stands, which, because of the flags, are a little fragile to go into boxes.   The idea was that I could just take the command stands off the little shelves and plop them on the games table.   

Unfortunately, or better, foolishly, the shelf wasn't anchored to the wall, it was just balanced, and for some reason one evening it decided to fall over.  The stands on the top shelves shelves suffered the most, the ones lower down took less damage, and all the little shelves came out and fell onto everything, making matters worse.  Gentle reader, I almost cried when I opened the door and saw the carnage.

Since February I've been going through these figures, gluing figures back onto bases, fixing flags, finding matches from my sprue collection for missing arms and hands and heads.   It was a right old mess.  Some of these figures are decades old, and quite fragile, so it hurt to see them so abused.

  

Besides repairing all these stands, I also took the time for a rough but effective bit of DIY to ensure that this never happens again.

February was also a rough month because I grabbed the wrong rattle can when I was spraying dullcote on these figures.

The good news is that this series of unfortunate events taught me to be patient and to be grateful for what I have.  I have a dedicated gaming room, thirty years worth of figures, and a hobby that I love, so I reminded myself of those blessings regularly as I filed, glued, and repainted.

What wargaming disasters have you experienced, and what have they taught you?

Blessings, MP+

Perry Brothers British Intervention Force Royal Artillery

Some more recently completed work.

Found these half-finished figures while unpacking from November's change of house and put them in the painting queue.  28mm Perry Bros figures from their British Intervention Force range.  One day I'll get back to the ACW Trent Crisis Goes Hot project, at which time these fellows, who look suspiciously like hotel bellhops, will play a vital role in defending Upper Canada from US invasion. Before then I still have work to do repairing my ACW command stands from a terrible shelf disaster.

 

Cheers and blessings to your brushes!  MP+

Steppe Scalawags Sortie! - More Cossacks for Seven Years War

 Continuing my painting streak by slowly turning out more Foundry 28mm Cossacks for my kleine krieg Seven Years War project.  

On the right, the Cossack commander rides beside his blonde son, who is headstrong and hoping to prove himself in Dad's eyes.

Most of the paints used here are from the Foundry triad system.   I'm especially glad that I invested in their horse paints set.

One-Eyed Yuri, despite his eyepatch, can hit a rabbit or a Prussian jaeger from the saddle at the gallop.

New vicar arriving in the parish.  Father Berserki is feared by everyone except the Ladies' Garden Guild.

Dismounted cossacks ready to pillage and annoy.

I'm now about half way through the Cossack project.  Painting irregularly dressed figures slows me down, I think a lot about the colour palettes and try not to be too repetitious but OTOH painting them is more enjoyable than working on 24 musketeers in the exact same uniforms!

Hopefully we'll see these scurvy fellows on the tabletop soon.

Cheers and blessings to your brushes,  MP+

The Duellists in Miniature

I'm no Ridley Scott and these figures are not Napoleonics, but this is a set of Seven Years War officers who have chosen a particular conflict resolution path.  With pistols, which is one way to settle a dispute.

Both gentlemen wear the obligatory flouncy shirts.   The sculptor has made their calves quite buff, so they obviously don't skip Leg Days at the gym.

Some of the assembled witnesses that are included in this Foundry set (CIV004): seconds and a referee.   I've taken some liberties in painting their uniforms.   Once I enlarged the photo, the head on the fellow in the middle made me think of the muppets, and now I can't unsee it.

These figures will also be useful as Big Men, staff officers, and command groups.

More Seven Years War figures coming soon.   Cheers and blessings to your brushes!

MP+

Fast Boats for Torpedoes and Tides

 One of the pleasures of running my WW1 naval game last year was getting to know Thomas Brandsetter, who has recently published his rules for coastal naval battles in WW2, Torpedoes and Tides, which can be found on Wargames Vault.

I read the rules eagerly, and appreciated the linked game narrative approach that Thomas demonstrates on his blog, The Raft.  Like some of the campaign-driven games in the Too Fat Lardies stable (Sharp Practice, Platoon Forward), Thomas' rules also provide a vehicle for new boat commanders to rise through the ranks, or die horribly.   

I needed some boats, so my dear friend Trish, the genius behind 4P Press, pointed me towards some STL files on Thingverse.  Just do a search there for Cruel Seas and you'll find lots, all scaled in 1/300 for the Warlord rules.  For the core of my British force I printed and painted five Fairmiles,  three MTBs and two MGBs.  The hulls are all in one piece a printed clearly on my Bambu filament printer.  The guns were a little more fiddly but look ok from a distance.

The masts are made of copper wire and the Red Ensigns ship in Skytrex Cruel Seas kits, of which I bought several.

To oppose them, a quartet of menacing Kriegsmarine E-boats, two S-100 and two S-38 boats, all Skytrex plastic kits.  They assembled cleanly, though I had to go online to various blogs to see how the parts went together.  Skytrex evidently thinks that these things are self-explanatory and don't require instructions.

They all look quite good on the Geek Villain naval mat.  I'm quite happy with GV products.

Next up in the shipyards is a Bangor-class RN minesweeper, a resin kit, nicely detailed.

I hope to have a first playthrough to report on soon.   

Cheers and blessings to your brushes!

MP+

First Time Playing Snorkers: Good Oh!

Just before I went on holiday this month (St Vincent in the Caribbean, quite nice) I had a chance to drive the two hours to Stratford (Ontario) and have a rare gaming day with old chum James.   Having both been bitten with the nautical bug, we wanted to play a game James has been quite obsessed with, Snorkers! (Good Oh!), which is billed as "an exciting, fast-paced WW2 naval wargames ruleset".  

James has a number of games under his life-vest and agreed to teach me the rules.  He pulled no punches!  For our first game we decided to use models from my 1/2400 collection and pitted two RN cruisers (Ajax and Achilles) and three Tribal class destroyers against two German CLs (Koln and Nurnberg) accompanied by three Karl Galster class DDs.  Here is the RN force steaming ahead out of a mistbank at full ahead.  The game tokens are 3D prints.  The ships are all metal models from GHQ.

 

The Kriegsmarine prepares to accept battle.   I put all that work into painting the ships and bases and none at all into preparing some nice labels.  Mea culpa.  At least the three GHQ Galster class ships look good.  The CL in the background is a rather old Panzerschiffe model, though still available for purchase!   The white cotton in the background represent mistbanks which obscure LOS and which can move randomly or dissipate.

One of the adjustments I had to make to these rules is the way they handle speed.  Ships can go from stationary to full speed in a single turn, whereas in other naval rules I'm accustomed to, there is usually a "throttle" rule where ships can only increase or decrease speed by so much per turn.  Not a criticism, just an adjustment I had to make.  And since lighter ships like DDs can move some 20" on the table, and then shoot, there's not a lot of time for fancy maneuvering.   An aggressive player can launch a devastating attack in one turn.  Here I managed to launch a torpedo at James' lead Tribal, but I don't recall it exploding.  German and USN torpedoes in the early war can be duds, which can be quite distressing.

Torpedoes in this game are wicked and deadly.   Launch and impact occur in the same turn, regardless of range.  Targets get a chance to evade, but if a ship is hit by one torpedo, its usually crippling for a bigger ship, and fatal for a smaller one.  Here a torpedo is about to find its mark and send some Nazis to the bottom.  One of the things I learned about torpedoes from this game is to use them before you lose them.  If you have a ship in range, its best to launch everything you have rather than to sink with fish in the tubes.

Of course gunfire is important, and I found the system fairly simple and workable.   Unlike crunchier games which require rolls to penetrate, Snorkers works in a fashion reminiscent of rules like Dan Mersey's Dragon Rampant.  Depending on the defence rating of a ship, you need so many hits to cause damage, and of course there is the possibility of exciting critical hits.   

After our Saturday night game had chased the Nazis away from Narvik, we decided to play a game set in the early Pacific.   For this game we used James' models, which are all 3D prints done in 1/1800 scale.  Even with the larger scale there is just not as much detail as there is in the GHQ models, but the overall look of the larger ships on the table is quite impressive. 

In this game I took the USN and put two CLs and a CA, with about ten Fletcher class DDs, up against James' similar IJN force.  We also gave ourselves an air wing so we could see how airstrikes and AA fire went.  Here the Japanese split their focus on the USS Quincy and some of its escorts, and did no damage to speak of.  I was a little luckier, getting a torpedo hit on one of James' CAs.

Once again, James showed me how deadly the torpedo can be in these rules.   I had been content to hold my main force back while sparring with James' most advanced DD squadron, and was getting the best of it, but in that time James brought the rest of his DDs up and raced them through a mistbank, at which point there were fish in the water everywhere.  An IJN DD can carry multiple centre-mounted launchers and can fire torps through wide port and starboard arcs, and so my three cruisers all blew up and sank before they could engage James' heavy cruisers.    We called it a game and it was a good learning experience.

So this isn't an exhaustive review of Snorkers, but I would say that it is true to it's billing in that it's true to its billing as "an exciting, fast-paced WW2 naval wargames ruleset".   It has a minimum of dice rolling, but when you do throw dice, you can be throwing a bucket's worth.   The maneuvre rules are simple (there is the obligatory template for turns) and things happen very quickly.  The turn sequence is somewhat randomized by card draws, which is arguably a more playable approach than simultaneous movement plotting, and thus makes Snorkers more suitable for solitaire play.

 The core rule book provides lists for most ship types that featured in the early war navies of Britain, Germany, Italy, the US and Japan, and it can be argued that for surface actions, WW2 naval gaming is really only interesting from 1939-43.  After that, most battles are just aerial massacres.  There is also an expansion for the French Navy and a new one that provides more focus on the early Pacific war.  In short, if you are looking to wet your feet in WW2 naval gaming, Snorkers would be a good place to start.

Finally, to end our gaming Saturday, I wheedled James into trying the MMP Siege of Jerusalem game I've touted in earlier blog posts.  James took the ruthless Romans, and benefitted from cards that allowed him to build siege ramps against the two key locations I had to defend to have a hope of winning the game.  Without my lovely wall defensive modifiers, it was a long struggle but late in the game the Romans achieved a sudden death win by capturing both Herod's palace and the Temple.   Kudos to James, he's not that interested in boardgames, but he is quick learner and an excellent tactician, as well as a great host and good friend.

You can read James' account of these games here.  Thanks mate, you're a grand friend.

Thanks for reading and blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

Foundry Grenadiers and Happy Civilians for Old Fritz

 Recently finished and mustered into service with the Prussian army are these 28mm Foundry sculpts, grenadiers painted in the uniforms of the Anhalt Desau regiment as per Kronoskaf.   They will eventually represent the 3/6 Kleist converged grenadier battalion once I get the grenadiers from the Von Retzow regiment finished.

I had a terrible moment when I was spraying these figures with Windsor and Newton matte varnish, I was working too quickly and picked up the black primer can by mistake.   It took a split second to realize my mistake but by then I'd done enough damage that I had to essentially repaint the exposed side of three figures.   I will never do that again!

According to Kronoskaf these fellows had yellow piping on the cloth backs of their mitres, I opted for an ochre-ish colour which isn't that visible in this photo but which looks good enough for me.

The new troops are inspected by Der Alte Fritz and found to be satisfactory.

Two finished Foundry SYW civilians also done in this batch.  Magda the camp follower has big natural apples, and Johann would give his other leg for the king if he could.

Hurrah boys!

I should get these fellows on the table and give them their baptism of fire.   Thanks for looking and blessings to your brushes!

MP+