Innehållsförteckning för April 2025 från Miniature Wargames

In Issue 504 we have the usual excellent selection of articles with rules, builds, reviews, scenarios and more. There’s a definite North American flavour: after last month’s outing at the ACW, we follow up the initial salvo with a two part campaign for the ACW in Command Decision plus Oh Canada! Wargaming the War of 1812 from Conrad Kinch. Operation Phantom Fury is bang up to date modern combat whilst Starship Troopers (part two) gives us rules for future combat. Meanwhile there’s a gangster shootout otout in Salt Lake City, some thoughts on urban combat in Stalingrad plus a scratch build to make you finish up your vegetables. All that and a trip to Tonbridge for a show! So – some suitable music for wargaming will round it off. As…

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombsbursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flagwas still there. O say, does that star-spangled banner yetwave O’er the land of the free and the home ofthe brave? The Star Spangled Banner (song), Francis Scott Key THE ROAD TO THE CANUCK I never actually set out to wargame the War of 1812. It wasn’t the plan. But much like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, the Lord intervened and set me on my way to wargaming the “American sideshow” as my pal Du Gourmand always calls it. About ten years ago just before Christmas, a colleague and I were dealing with a chap who had an interesting/non-existent relationship with personal hygiene. We dealt with him and thought no more about…

ARMIES OF THE UNITED STATES ◗ ospreypublishing.com ◗ £25 Following from last month’s release of the German Forces guide, here’s the new Armies of the United States: a detailed guide to the US forces for the Bolt Action Third Edition rules released by Osprey. As always the question is “so what’s new?” With this recent volume players now have all the information they need to field the varied military forces of the US of A in all periods of the conflict (well, from 1941 onwards, obviously). Entering the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US immediately entered the conflict on several fronts both in Europe and North Africa, fighting the Germans and Italians. In the latter part of the conflict the Army and Marines faced the forces of Imperial…

INTRODUCTION I wanted to user the assault on the Lazur Chemical Plant, Stalingrad 1942 for this example of Urban Warfare (spurred on buy the fact that the editor had some suitably illustrative photographs to hand!). The Germans’ final offensive efforts to take Stalingrad took place between 11 and 19 November 1942. Their mission “Operation Hubertus” aimed to break through to the Volga to the east of the Barrikady Factory. They would also attack the Red October Plant. Many of the chosen German units were pioneers. The Russian commander, Chuikov held a pair of bridgeheads neither of them more than 800 yards deep. With his headquarters based in the Lazur Chemical Plant, Chuikov’s northern pocket was centred around Spartanovka and the southern one at Pavlov’s house. He held a thin strip…

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TAKING FLIGHT Up and coming from Osprey Osprey Publishing have a big list of publications scheduled for release during the year and we have had a peek at some and news of others. There’s Hide, Stone, And Bone: a Palaeolithic skirmish wargame of ice age survival, hunting and combat where players take control of a tribe of early human ancestors and lead them to survival and victory over other tribes (using alternating activations and d10-based core rules). There’s a new edition of Burrows & Badgers where mice, badgers, toads, and other animals wear armour, wield swords, and cast magic spells (with new material, species, warband types and more). Another blue book game is Pacific Command: a WWII tabletop miniatures naval wargame set in the Pacific (with a unique fog-of-war mechanic…

As we wetted your American Civil War appetites with a single action from Gettysburg last month, we asked Jon to give us a Command Decision that enables play of the entire campaign! Ed. I have been fortunate enough to visit Gettysburg twice along with many of the other iconic battlefield sites across the Eastern seaboard of the United States. There is something fascinating and fatalistic about Gettysburg that sets it apart from the other 1800 or more fighting engagements of the Civil War. There was an odd series of events that led to this battle, often forgotten in set-piece recreations on the tabletop. That made me think it was about time I constructed a campaign framework to wrap around the battle. BACKGROUND INSPIRATION In May 1863 at Chancellorsville Lee’s Confederates soundly…

Last month Peter Merritt gave us an introduction into revisiting this cinematic Starship Trooper period (after his last outing of the game a quarter of a century ago). This month he explores rules and offers some scenario outlines. Ed. ‘STARSHIP TROOPERS’: RULES (V2.1) An A4 playsheet is available for download (which is all you need after a short intro), but our esteemed editor has asked me to expand somewhat on my normal ‘clipped’ written style, so here goes…. Unit/Figure Definitions & Set-up: ◗ A ‘unit’ is any single coherent force in the game either: • a group of ordinary infantry Mis (including LMGs, missile launchers) • some specialists (engineers), or a senior command group • a single support craft (fighter, retrieval boat etc) • a single Bug ◗ Dice refer to ‘normal’ D6s…

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THE SETTING For our Old West games we created the fictional Pima County, New Mexico. There is a real Pima County in Arizona, but we moved ours to New Mexico so we had more freedom for creativity. Our Pima County is a microcosm of the real New Mexico featuring all of those iconic terrain features from your favourite western movies, ranging from wide arid deserts to verdant grasslands, from broken mesas to high, snow-capped peaks, with plains and Bad Lands thrown into the mix along with a border with Mexico provided by the Rio Grande. So Pima gave us a setting for shootouts in towns, raids on banks, assay offices and ore carrying mine wagons, cattle rustling, range wars, actions against hostiles, attempts to rob stage coaches and trains, incursions…

FRENCH ARMIES OF THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR 1618-1648 ◗ Stephane Thion ◗ Helion & Company (2024) ◗ £29.95 ◗ 216 pages (softback) ◗ ISBN:9781804514481 ◗ helion.co.uk Number 117 in Helion’s Century of the Soldier 1618-1721 series describes one of the first standing armies in Europe, explaining how Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu gave the French Crown an efficient army that would win many victories under the command of officers such as the Duc de Rohan, the Viscomte de Turenne and the Prince of Conde. The Introduction explains that this is a new updated and expanded edition of the work first published fifteen years ago. A three-page Chronology of events 1617-1648 precedes the first chapter, titled Context: The Thirty Years’ War, which describes the origins of the war and explains French…