Innehållsförteckning för November 2022 från Miniature Wargames

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about wargaming with kids. It wasn’t really about wargaming with kids, but wargaming while one has kids. I pottered along for about a year with my little ‘board on a tea tray’ setup using Bob Cordery’s Portable Wargame rules. I played games with my son asleep in a car seat tucked up the wargames table and found time to paint in between feeds. Five years on and all has utterly changed: terrible beauties are being born all over the place. The Kinchlet twins, once small pink things given to an engaging series of giggles and burps, are now a fully fledged little boy and girl who occupy all available space and time, leave jam sandwiches in the loo and are full…

Many wargamers like to think of their models as developing their own unique character as they play more games with them. Our games are filled with moments of high drama as units achieve the impossible or fail spectacularly, anecdotes that may be talked about among your gaming group for years to come. Yet unless you are playing a dedicated campaign the impact of such memorable actions will not be represented in future games. INTRODUCTION Across the history of warfare veterans have been marked by their experiences, those who survive becoming more adept in the art of war, although often being scarred by their experiences. Such traits can have a discernible effect on a unit’s battlefield performance. Famous examples include Caesar’s 10th Legion, notable for its steadfastness, or the 7th Armoured…

RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE ◗ warpaintfigures.com◗ £19.99 At Colours I came across Warpaint Figures. They have an extensive website and – apart from fun stuff (like mugs and tee shirts) – they also sell figures (including individual bits and bobs of the sort useful to Warhammer fans) and historical as well. However, their big ticket is making scenery and they supplied samples of two ranges and – as I’d already stopped to purchase another product (grass tufts) – I’ll cover all three of them. The Grass Tufts are exactly what you’d expect: 2mm, 4mm and 6mm; with flowers (or not); sticky backed and self adhesive grass in various colours. Mine were well packed and priced (£4.75 for 80 to 100 in random shapes) and – as with all the ones…

EVERYONE FIGHTS: Nobody quits in 28mm plastic Wargames Atlantic are teasing some new releases. A couple of months ago we mentioned that – in the pipeline – they had The Ooh Rah: a new faction for their Death Fields range representing American troops that were abducted more recently in the timeline. The Ooh Rah are a relatively new team to the Death Fields Circuit: comprised of members of the 33rd Marine Expeditionary Unit: the ‘lore’ for the force says the team was abducted during a colonial uprising on New Florida. The Ooh Rah will represent a highly-trained and multi-disciplinary approach to the arena (honed, no doubt, as America’s force-in-readiness across her expanding interstellar empire). The fact that they look a fair amount like excellent substitute forces for a Starship Troopers…

Buck wrote us an introduction to his rule Feudal Patrol set in issue 459 – well here’s more detail plus three more linked [article018||break||]scenarios to whet your appetite. Ed. INTRODUCTION The legend of Robin Hood is generally an archetype for a number of outlaws who fought against the Crown before and during the Baron’s Wars era. Apart from the classic Erol Flynn movie, my first literary exposure to Robin Hood was the novel Ivanhoe, the character of Loxley generally being omitted from movie adaptations of the book. In this article, I describe three Robin Hood-inspired scenarios, playable with Feudal Patrol, published by Sally 4th. Feudal Patrol is a skirmish game based on the popular game engine used in Combat Patrol. Players control two-to-four-figure groups and a leader figure. The rules are suitable for two-player games…

This is a rather different Command Decision in two ways. Firstly, it is not a set-piece battle or a campaign: instead, it looks at the mechanics between battles as part of campaigns. Also, it can be used as solo taster game just to get the soldiers on the table and have them manoeuvring about. SITUATION REPORT We can make some basic assumptions. Some armies were specifically drilled to march at a certain rate: a rate that (under normal circumstances) would not exhaust the troops or lead to excessive straggling. Other armies pretty much took their own time, turned up when they could, probably in dribs and drabs and in various states of exhaustion and disorganisation. As wargamers, we tend to assume that our armies are more like the drilled force and not so…

There’s not many of us who can say they have been wargaming for over six decades, and much of it with their own range of figures. But Jack Alexander, the man behind Jacklex Miniatures, can as he celebrates his 93rd birthday. Back in 1962 Jack’s wife gave him a copy of Wargames by Don Featherstone and he started making his own 20mm figures, based on Britains toy soldiers minimal detail style. There was little detail on the first figures and if the gamer wanted Sam Brown belts he painted them. Jack told me he has never able to paint the straight lines for belts, so he cut strips of electrical tape and glued this on instead. He said it was easier! For all that the figures had a charm and…

SUBSTANCE OVER STYLE (SOMETIMES) This month we spoke to Mike Carr: he’s very much a part of our community as he’s the layout person for the magazine you are reading, and a wargamer to boot: “I’ve been wargaming since around 1984. As with many of us, it all began for me with Tolkien and getting into roleplaying and then Warhammer. I found I wanted to swing a sword around and wear armour on an actual battlefield so – with a friend – I joined The Sealed Knot. This led me to meeting historical wargamers within my chosen regiment, (Sir Gilbert Houghton’s Regiment of Foote), which included, if my memory serves, John Stallard as our Commanding Officer.” “Back then, I enjoyed playing pretty big Napoleonic and Renaissance games with armies that…

Colours – always a big show – has slipped from the calendar in recent years. What with reducing it to a one day show a few years back and then the whole ‘national shut down’ business plus – last year – the organisers pulled the show… well I for one did wonder if it was ever coming back and what it was going to be like on it’s return. Would it be triumphant? Well – it was certainly a good day out and with lots of changes. For the better! A DAY AT THE RACES The venue was located – as it had been for a decade or so – at the Newbury Racecourse but, in the last few years, that venue has had lots of upgrades. Parking is fabulous:…

“This spirit of chivalry… we see it in acts of heroism by land and sea, in fights against the slave trade.”Alfred Lord Tennyson. I am lucky enough to live just 10 minutes drive from the Chatham Historic Dockyard. This World Heritage Site is not only filled with a large number of Georgian and Victorian buildings which have been used in many films and TV shows but also has three fully restored warships as its centre piece. These are HMS Ocelot, a submarine built at the dockyard in 1962, HMS Cavalier, a destroyer built in 1944 and finally there is HMS Gannet. This last vessel is a Victorian steam sloop built on the Medway at Sheerness dockyard in 1878 and typifies the small warships used by Great Britain to impose its…