Graham's Wargames

 Colin got over earlier today,so we could have another bash a the Great Northern War using Blucher rules. I had expanded the size of my Swedish and Danish armies, so both sides now had 3 infantry commands and 2 of cavalry.

The pre-game mini campaign finished with a fairly typical deployment. We each had 4 commands starting on the table facing each other and one command entering as reinforcements. The reinforcements could make things interesting, I had a cavalry command following up on my left flank and Colin had an infantry command reinforcing his left flank. Unfortunately they were going to enter to the rear of my right flank!

It was an interesting, hard fought game and a lot of fun. We each started off with half our forcing facing each other across a stream. With neither side wanting to risk a crossing under fire, they spent most of the game looking at each other.

My cavalry reinforcements turned up early and with their support I was able to disperse the Danish right flank and swing around onto the flank of the Danish centre. They had punched a hole through the Swedish centre but were unable to exploit it before being over run. The Danish reinforcements were late in arriving and a Swedish regiment, holed up in a small village, prevented most of the units from rushing forward to catch the Swedes in a pincer manoeuvre.

The Danes belatedly attacked across the stream, but lost the cavalry fight, which took their army morale to breaking point!

Here is a few pictures from the later part of the battle.

The Swedes Left Command starts to flank the Danish Centre.

 First a bit of background:

Around Lockdown I picked up  a bucketload of plastic 10mm-ish 18th century miniatures. I think these were originally were made for a verson of the boardgame Risk. I had intended to incorperate them in my 10mm WSS armies, but the plastics are more 12mm and tower over my metal armies (mainly Pendraken).

So I put then aside for a bit, then I decided to make up some GNW armies. This would take minimal painting as these plastic had already been basically painted as Swedish and Russian forces, I would just need to repaint a few units for Danes and add cuff turnbacks to the rest. I now have nearly half done, to make up basic Swedish and Danish armies for the later part of the war, around 1711/12.

I am already using Black Powder for my WSS armies and wanted to do something different, when I came across a Blucher varient for the WSS, which I thought would be fine for the Great Northern War, as they overlapped in time for most of their duration. I had already played a few games of Blucher (by Sam A Mustafa) and enjoyed them, I found the 18th century variant, Eugene, somewhere online (sorry I am not sure where).

One with the game:

After a couple of false starts I finally got Colin around to give the rules a go. Due to time constraints, and being Colin's first time with the rules, we skipped the pre-game mini campaign (usually one of the best bits IMHO) and straight on with a meeting engagement.

Sorry, I forgot to take any pictures of the initial deployment (and I really need to finish basing some of the units). I deployed my Swedes with cavalry on the left and infantry on the right and centre. Colin mixed his columns up, so unintentionally deploy in mirror image to me! My cavalry advanced as did Colin's centre, our other infantry flank advanced a bit, then both just took a break and watched the action for a while.

The view of the infantry battle. The Danish centre is closing on the Swedes, but taking casualties from muskets and accurate artillery fire. The Danish guns had attempted to soften up the Swedish unit on the right as they advanced, but failed. In fact I think the Danish artillery only caused 1 Morale Point all game.

 I have amassed way too much wargames terrain and I've decided to cull my collection.

These are all items that due to size and weight and/or fragility, I would prefer not to have to send by courier/post. So at the moment I am offering these on a collection only basis, from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.

A 28mm figure is shown for scale in some of the photos.

Starting off with an antique piece (or at least "Vintage"), an old 28mm castle from the 1980s/90s. It is made of lightweight foam resin and I am pretty certain this came from the late, great Ian Weekley's company Battlements. £60

28mm Dark Age Fort from the Grand Manner, made from resin. I bought this in the early 2000s, there is a little bit of wear and tear, a couple of post have broken off, but nothing major. It now seems to be out of production, it's not showing on the GM website (but looking at the prices there I dread to think what it would cost if it was!!). £100

Thanks for looking and please get in touch if you are interested.

I didn't get around to posting an update on my painting log last week so I thought I'd combine the two weeks with my latest construction for my Streets of Venice layout.

I've got a bell tower, but the other iconic building I was missing for Venice was a church, so I finally got around to building the TT Combat kit I'd picked up in March.

 At first glance it looked complicated, but I realised that the basic construction was relatively simple, a lot of the pieces were decorative pillars and  arches for the windows.





What else have I been up to....?

 I picked up a bargain on Ebay, 30 Oathmark goblins, assembled and painted for the price of a new box! The lighting was really bad in the photos and the skin tones looked grey, but when they arrived I realised they were actually sades of green. Not the vivid GW palate, but still a bit to green for me as I would be adding them to my Middle Earth armies.  But that's still a minor problem, so I experimented with a couple of different browns on the flesh.
 Once I was happy with the result I could bang the whole lot out in no time at all.

My friend Mark in South London very kindly sent me the next figure. It's a Plague Doctoress from TT Combat's Carnevale range. I painted her in various shades of grey to match the Plague doctor I already had, but it doesn't really show up much in this picture.
And using a flash just washed all the colour out. I really need to look at getting a light box for this photos.
A steampunk contraption from Ramshackle Games.
A test unit for my 10mm French Foreign Legion.
Another set of captives from Ramshackle Games, I'd originally only ordered one set of 4, but they got missed of the original order, so Curtis very kindly sent me two sets!
Another Viking warrior.