Innehållsförteckning för November 2025 från Miniature Wargames

I recently spent most of a day at a club Openday (run by SELWG and others) running my UFO games for players and had a lot of fun doing it. It’s interesting to see the reaction from gamers when you are putting on a game that isn’t from a big manufacturer and yet keeps people entertained with fun stories about alien organ harvesting… But – that aside – what have we got for you in this issue? Well we have a piece on the Peninsular War and we slide up to Chechnya for Yelstin’s War; we have some timely Halloween fun using Pulp Alley rules (and you’ll succeed if not for those pesky kids…); we visit the bleak north of the US in Treachery in the Tetons; investigate Case Blue…

There’s a song by an American chap named Jonathan Coulton called “Mandelbrot Set” and it’s one of those songs that sticks in my mind because it manages to be both catchy and clever, but it describes fractals and it was the first time I ever came across the idea. In brief, a fractal is a small shape that shows a structure no matter how closely you look at it. No matter how powerful a microscope you use, there will be more structure and infinite complexity. Reading about the Peninsula War feels like that sometimes. I have a decent understanding of the period and as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned rather more about the Spanish experience, but it’s rare that something surprises me. I was talking to my pal, Marcus Cribb…

HORROR RULES FOR PULP ALLEY Pulp Alley can of course be used for tabletop gaming any genre or period from Cavemen to Spacemen, but as Halloween is approaching, this month we are going to take a look at the Pulp Alley Horror rules and present a new scenario ‘Summoning the Master’ for you to try them out on Halloween. The Horror rules are an optional add on to Pulp Alley and are used when your characters run the risk of psychological trauma. They are a great addition if your scenario or campaign features the zombie apocalypse, Lovecraftian Cthulhu horror, gothic horror such as vampires and werewolves, a psychological thriller style plot or anything else that gives your little heroes and heroines ‘the wiggins’. If your game includes the Horror rules…

HI HO: OFF WE GO Epic Dwarven Host Wargames Atlantic has sent in a box of their Dwarven Host in the ‘Epic 10mm’ scale. They are individually somewhere around 9mm to the top of a putative head and you get three identical sprues of figures plus three smaller base sprues for mountitg them on so this really is an army in a box as that amounts to 72 spear (6 bases); 36 sword (3 bases); 36 axe (3 bases); 36 battleaxe (3 bases); 36 crossbow-(3 bases); 15 command and 3 casualties and 12 Ram riders (6 bases… which we’ll get onto shortly!). So 246 figures in singletons, plus lines of 2, 3 and 5 and very nicely detailed in action poses, waving weapons etc. Some of the solo figures are especially…

BACKGROUND When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet general and ardent Chechen nationalist, won a presidential poll and declared the independence of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria from the newly formed Russian Federation. The new state quickly unravelled and descended into lawless civil war. Ethnic Russians and their allies backed by Moscow tried to overthrow Dudayev. It failed. On December 11 1994, the Russian President Boris Yeltsin launched a three pronged offensive with 40,000 men with the aim of forcing Dudayev to comply with Moscow’s demands. TACTICAL CHANGES The Russians launched a concerted attack on Grozny between December 1994 and March 1995. Chechen forces tended to operate under a warlord and could be considered to be irregular militiamen. They were organised into combat groups of…

TABLE FOR ONE, PLEASE! No game ever quite captured my imagination like Rangers of Shadow Deep. It was my first experience of solo and co-op play on the tabletop, and a revelation that something could be so flavourful and fun without a human opponent. Now, I’m not even close to being in Mr McCullough’s league when it comes to writing games, but I’ve found enjoyment in creating little set pieces that can be played out alone (or co-op!) whilst still providing a bit of challenge, unpredictability, and narrative experience. Back in November of last year, our esteemed editor very kindly let me publish my Cryovolcano scenario. This was more of a guideline than a game, with the idea being to adapt it to your own favourite sci-fi ruleset. This time…

GETTING THERE I took a trip, as I usually do, to Colours organised by the Newbury & Reading Wargames Society. Last year I had experienced difficulties getting to park but – after a conversation with the nice chaps on the organising committee – I took the novel approach of following their directions on the website rather than just googling the address of the Newbury Race Course… so this year it all went very smoothly: there’s free parking and that’s all very well organised. Lesson learnt! TRADE There were almost 70 traders present (up from last year, I believe) with an excellent selection from different parts of the hobby with lots of terrain manufacturers. They all seemed to be doing good business throughout the day with a large crowd attending. When…

ADVANCE TO STALINGRAD On the Eastern Front in World War II in the summer of 1942, the Germans launched an offensive in Southern Russia. The operation was codenamed Case Blue with the right flank aimed to capture the oil fields at Baku (Operation Edelweiss) and the left flank targeting Stalingrad (Operation Fischreiher). Had it succeeded in full the loss of the oil fields would have put the Soviet Union out of the war. The German offensive got as far as Ordzhonikidze (now called Vladikavkaz) at the northern end of the Georgian Military Highway. The Russians managed to hold the Germans off in what is known as the Nalchik-Ordzhonikidze Defensive Operation (October 25 – November 12 1942). PINNING DOWN AN ENGAGEMENT Reading the sparse accounts of the actions at the very…

It all started with a Father’s Day present: an expertly packed box of one resin and three metal Oathsworn Miniatures designed for the game Burrows & Badgers (for more information on the game, see my review of B&B second edition in issue 506). It didn’t take long before three of the miniatures were based and undercoated. I did a couple of modifications to the shields but, apart from that, the minis are pretty much stock. Painting progressed sed quickly and soon I had three finished and varnished characters for my B&B warband. The bases were initially decorated with some static grass areas, static grass tufts and bits of ground foam, but… anyone who has ever seen painted Burrows & Badgers miniatures will know it is almost mandatory that you add…