A Little Testing in the Shade

 Since I have a few quiet days, and it really is getting pretty warm out in the garden, I am having a few sessions on the Dining Room table, rolling dice and seeing how some rules scribblings shape up. This week's mission is to add a set of tweaks to my WSS rules to make them work for the ECW. Things are going all right at the moment.

I was out this morning at 06:30, to water our new plants. There is no immediate likelihood of a hosepipe ban here - this county has more than enough water, but I like to get it done early just to be on the safe side, in case the environmental vigilantes are on the prowl. The timing also allows me to go outside in pyjamas and dressing gown (and straw hat, and gardening boots) - one does not have to look one's best. At that time of the morning, I can also enjoy the singing of the blackbird and the song thrush in residence, since they sit on top of the tallest tree on the other side of the lane and attempt to shout each other down. Excellent.

 

The inside of our front hedge has a line of extra bushes embedded in it, which give a lot of additional colour at different times of the year; I should have taken a decent close-up, but you can just about make out that the Fuschia is in full flower at the moment

 

This one is an immigrant - this is my neighbour's sweet pea, which is growing through the fence, so we can enjoy it too

 

One of our recent arrivals is a Prunus named Bonaparte. No new growth at the moment (it shows up bright red), but young Boney is doing a brave job standing to attention in the hot, humid conditions. All the new shrubs have now had their leader shoots pruned, to encourage them to bush out. Bushing out is good

***** Late Edit *****

Completely separate topic - I've been looking at some specifications for a possible new car, and am keen to make sure that the luggage carrying capacity is better than my current vehicle. I'll certainly find some more details online, so am not unduly concerned, but I am astounded that the manufacturer specifies the capacity of the boot (trunk) in litres. Interesting.

Two obvious questions present themselves:

(1) What possible use is this? Unless I convert my luggage into a liquid, and pump it aboard, I can't see that such a figure helps very much.

(2) What on earth do they think their customers intend to carry?

********************* 

WSS: A Rules Testing Night - Corporal John Sheds a Little Weight

 My Corporal John game is working well now. It's a card-driven game, derived from Richard Borg's Tricorne, which itself is a Command-&-Colors type boardgame for the AWI. I have come to realise that it would be very useful also to have a variant of the game that can be played without the cards and without the custom Tricorne dice. 

1. At present, to play a game via Zoom, each of the participants needs to have the card decks, which is a bit of an overhead if they may never play it again. A different activation system might make this a lot easier.

2. Same problem for remote players and the special dice; it should be a relatively simple task to substitute standard D6s, and just map the required rolls accordingly.

3. Anything which makes Corporal John easier to play by Zoom would be welcome, especially since it is likely that remote play will represent a growing proportion of my gaming in the future. The proposed changes would also make it possible to play with more than 2 players, which is potentially a big step forward.

4. In any case, I need a cardless version of Corporal John to handle the tactical bits of my siege games, and this has been on the shopping list for a year or two.

Enter CJ Lite, whose name is deliberately as unpretentious as I could make it. At heart, it is still Corporal John, with C&C style movement and combat systems, but the fancy dice are replaced by normal D6s, the cards are left in the box and the activation procedure is borrowed (with permission) from Jon Freitag; coloured cubes are drawn from a bag or a "bucket", activating a brigade at a time. Once a brigade is chosen and activated, the game unashamedly reverts to being C&C until the next cube is drawn.

The Jolly Broom Man very kindly joined me yesterday evening for a first test game, using Zoom. JBM and I have played a lot of  Corporal John remotely in the past, but it has only been possible because he has the cards and the dice. Last night's effort was a repeat of the Münzkirchen scenario I played a few weeks ago with David (who also has the cards and dice), so it was useful to have a direct comparison using the new game system.

Outcome? Enjoyable game - one might almost describe it as rollicking; a lot of action, all over the table, and we fought to a result in a little over 3 hours. Considering that we were in uncharted waters for much of the time, and thus had much to discuss, I reckon we should be able to play out such a game (with about 2 dozen units a side) in around 2½ hours when we get good at it.

A lot of useful notes were taken (thanks, JBM) - some things we agreed to change on the fly, some require further thought. There will be some tweaks emerging, but nothing life-threatening. The game works. It was even a lot of fun. The Austrians won again, but then their commander had played the scenario before (and wrote the rules). I shall not bother with a detailed narrative, and I only took a few photos really, but here are some bits of the action to look at. After the pictures I'll mention some thoughts about how the activation system changes the feel of the game. 

Miniatures Games Played with Cards

I don't necessarily include games which use normal playing cards as a source of random numbers or cues for events; I'm talking about games such as (in my rather narrow experience) Piquet or the Commands & Colors family, where each player has a hand of cards (i.e. cards published as part of the game or ruleset) which scopes what he/she may do next. Some people hate this with a vehemence which surpasseth understanding - often from some ancient race-memory of a cult war between boardgamers and miniatures fans; some people are disciples of card-controlled games.

Personally, I am quite a fan, but I am aware of some issues, which I shall attempt (sketchily) to mention.

Advantages of Card-driven Games (based on personal experience)

* Can add a lot of narrative colour and some welcome surprises to a game. Some of the narrative colour can be spurious, however; for example, telling a period-specific story about what special training has done to the Stand of Pikes performance of your Foot is just window dressing, if what the card really means is "Order 3 units in your Centre". On the other hand, a scarce card which allows you to issue orders to all your cavalry this turn is not to be sniffed it. Narrative, as they say, lies in the ear of the listener.

* This could be seen as a well-maybe advantage - I like the tendency of C&C type games to have lots of short turns during which you may activate a small number of units. You can't do too much in your turn, but it will be your turn again in just a minute; everyone remains involved. This is one reason why I found C&C stimulating when I first got involved.

* A major plus is that cards can be a big help for the solo-player.

Snags

* Cards can be over-prescriptive, reducing the player's role to acting out some nightmarish, randomly-generated script, which is not always a huge amount of fun (depends what you like, of course). I am not speaking of Piquet, by the way. Well, not necessarily.

* Especially in C&C, generalship can become a firefighting activity, as players try to make some sense of the cards they have been dealt, and find something in there which fits with what they can remember of what they originally planned to do. Not unlike attempting to perform Swan Lake while the audience squirts firehoses at the stage. [feeble analogy, but it amuses me]

* The ritual of reading aloud each played card, to see what is to happen next, and check the players have an agreement of what it means, is a sensible step to include (especially for a project team building a power station) but takes time and can even get a bit wearing. 

* Card based games are a no-no for remote play (since everyone has to be equipped with a deck), and coping with multiple players, or hierarchical command, needs special systems. It's possible in a multiple face-to-face game for the appointed commander to delegate cards to his subordinates, but there is a considerable risk that a subordinate may have a rotten time if he is in the wrong bit of the table. [Check your phone texts]

That's really a fairly inadequate stagger through the pros and cons, but it sets out most of what I see as the significant stuff. In the past I developed an alternative, dice-based activation system for C&C games which, among other things, made remote play possible during lockdown. I called this Ramekin (named for the little pot that a player's stash of activation chips is stored in), and I tried to keep the number of new activations each turn consistent with what you might expect from the C&C cards. This worked well enough to keep me playing during the Covid years, but I didn't care for the loss of colour and surprises arising from the loss of the cards, and I particularly disliked what happens if you give a player a small number of activations, even if you don't tell him in which sector of the field to use them.

What happens is what was always intended to happen; the general has to carefully identify priorities, and use his allotted orders shrewdly. Bad news is that the current hot-spots will use up all the orders, it is difficult to generate enough spare orders to start an initiative elsewhere, and the battle develops dead zones where the armies just snarl at each other and not much happens. This became a regular feature of Ramekin, and is why whenever possible I have gone back to the cards in C&C type games.

Last night, the new draw-cubes-from-a-bucket activation system worked well (I've used this type of system in Jon's Zoom games, so I know it works). The system activates a brigade at a time, and these brigades are not so much larger than the number of units activated by a C&C card, but since the process cycles through the brigades (it is unlikely that both armies will get through all their brigades before the Game Turn ends, but that's a detail), it means that there is stuff happening all over the field. By C&C standards, last night's test was a riot.

I had a think about this, and I perceive that the way I [we] play it has to take on board the way the new activations work. In Corporal John, the chances of getting a really useful card in your hand are not always so great, so the instinct is to make use of them, and do as much damage as possible, as and when they turn up. [This, of course, is why any kind of strategic plan in C&C is likely to last a couple of turns at most.] 

The new "cube" system is not very like that at all, and one thing I am going to have to think about is that when a brigade is activated it is not necessary to have every constituent unit rushing into the attack, or doing something dramatic. It is possible to have units, or even brigades, which are not supposed to be doing much at the moment. There could be designated reserves who are not simply waiting for a decent card. Suddenly I detect a possibility of strategic thought which may encourage a more nuanced approach to commanding toy armies. Hmmm.

I'm aware I've gone into this particular aspect in rather tedious detail, and I must repeat that thus far I am very pleased with how the new variant works, but an important part of testing is to see how the game will feel. This, after all, is why Corporal John's predecessor in my laboratories, Prinz Eugen, which used more time, effort, cleverness and deep study to produce than the Scottish Parliament building, did not survive testing. It was an interesting game, and it worked, but it was a real drag to play.

Things are looking good. You will hear more of this. 

 

 

 

Sieges: Some Thoughts on Mining

 To start this off, I'd like to hark back [how does one "hark back"? - do you need a special harker with a reverse gear?] to 2010 (in fact I had remembered it as a year or two earlier), when Clive Smithers came to visit me and we spent a couple of days on a very basic Napoleonic siege game, which was a lot of fun, but even at the time very obviously wildly inaccurate.

Once he had returned to Durham, Clive recorded the day on his blog (see here, and a few subsequent posts). I didn't have a blog in those days, though I often wished I did! I have borrowed a couple of his photos from his blog, without permission, alas, but as a taster if you wish to see how far out of our depth we were on that happy occasion.

 

Early efforts - 2010. On this occasion the fortress sat at one end of my table; I usually place it on a long side now, but since that time I have also rotated the hex-grid markings by 90 degrees, so the orientation of the hexagonal fort in the hex grid is now once again the same as it was in this picture. Plus ça change

 

At that time, we used wooden blocks from cheap copies of the kids' Jenga game as trenches. In passing, note that the Portuguese troops in the foreground were Clive's, and he had bought them from me a few months earlier; I am pleased to say that these particular chaps are now back in my possession, since I bought them on eBay after the auction of Clive's collection

Our preparation for the 2-day session was that I had bought a ready-painted fort, we pooled all the suitable troops we thought we would need, and the rules were based on a collective speed-read (and very sketchy understanding) of the famous "Sandhurst Game" in the appendix to Chris Duffy's Fire and Stone. One of the huge distortions in our 2010 effort was that we made mining so effective that bombardment of any kind was almost a waste of time. Clive describes this - we had miners digging galleries underground at something close to charge speed, and huge loads of powder being planted under key points with watch-like precision. Very exciting, but bonkers.

So, whatever else I learned from that early session, I came to realise that mining wasn't like what we had thought it might be like. Since then, the topic has always appeared in my sieges as an apologium in the scenario notes - "because the fortress is built on a marsh/next to a lake/on top of a rock, mining is not possible". I have, in fact, swerved it.

Righto. Since I am pleased with the fact that most other aspects of my still-experimental siege rules seem to be working themselves out now, I am honour-bound to revisit these underground efforts. One logical starting place for ideas has to be the appropriate sections of Vauban's Wars, in which the advance of a tunnel is driven by the roll of (yet another) trick die, numbered 0-1-1-2-2-3 (inches), in the mining phase of each turn. Since VW's turns are half a week long, same as mine, it seems it would be simple enough to borrow much of that. However, it might be an idea also to read some material which was not published by Piquet.

So I went again to the obvious place, Duffy's Fire and Stone, and on p.137 he states:

The miners were chosen from among skilled civilian employees of coal or mineral miners. They worked in squads of four or more at a time, one cutting the earth with his pick, one scooping up the spoil and piling it on a wheelbarrow or trolley, one wheeling the container to the entrance of the tunnel, while the fourth dumped the material in a concealed spot. A carpenter and a number of mates saw to the positioning of the frames and the driving of the planks. 

Experienced teams of miners and carpenters could progress between fourteen and eighteen feet in twenty-four hours, and could even drive a tight gallery beneath a water-filled ditch.

And then he goes on to discuss the limits to what the diggers could achieve without special arrangements to provide ventilation. It becomes obvious that mining, though it clearly was used, was a very short-ranged weapon, and slow. Clive and I would have been very disappointed with the possibilities back in 2010, and it seems that the best digging possible in Vauban's Wars is still very optimistic.

Let's look at these distances. Duffy's estimated digging rates would work out around 20-25 paces in half a week, which is about 1 inch on my table, or one-seventh of the way across one of my hexes, and this is assuming that the crew have not been interrupted, or frustrated in their efforts by big stones or enemy action. 

The history of siege warfare is filled with impressive (and horrifying) extreme examples to distract the reader [if you are not familiar with the event, check out the mining activities at the siege of Alicante, in 1708-09]. It is as well that we should be aware of such things, but we must also remember that most sieges were not like this - especially in the WSS.

Thus I am coming round to the idea that mining was potentially useful, but should not be contemplated as an attack on a target more than 100 paces away, unless you have no choice, or a few months to devote to the task. Maybe the 3rd Parallel could be a possible kicking off point?

Meanwhile, I am also developing ideas on a workable game system which protects the secrecy of mining and counter-mining without the need for an umpire - thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions - it seems that it is possible, but requires the players to maintain a paper-trail of mining work so that they can prove that they have actually done what they say they have done. I'll discuss this on another occasion.

 

Sieges: Testing - Episode #3

 

 

The 3rd Parallel at work

Righto - got into the bombardment, the Allies started knocking a hole in the curtain wall. I think that in the real WSS the French garrison would have surrendered by now, but in the interests of testing most of the rules I have pushed it on.

Some interesting bits and pieces along the way; since the changes in the artillery rules, the only decent strategy the defenders had against sapping was to use lots of Trench Raids, which is entertaining, and they did pretty well - they were a major nuisance, they killed some sappers, and supporting infantry, and they eliminated one of the Allied guns [they didn't take the thing away, they spiked it].

The Allies found out that their spy (code name Heinrich) was of good quality, so they directed him to have a go at damaging the town's flour store, and he did it so successfully that the garrison commander lost 8 turns of food, and the situation started looking critical. The French Governor took some of the steps available to him to make the rations go further:

(a) he reduced the standard rations, which added 10% to the number of turns in store

(b) he requisitioned extra food from the civilians, which added a further 10%, but also reduced the Local Support rating by 1 [LS is a measure of the citizens' loyalty to the garrison]

(c) he ordered the slaughtering of all the horses in the town (except his own, naturally), which added 3 turns to the food store, but reduced LS by another 1.

There were things he could do beyond these measures, but the LS was now down to -1, which is getting close to open rebellion in the town; it only required another bad Event Card, or a heavy bombardment of mortar shells, and the citizens might just open the gates to the enemy. He already had a situation where one quarter of his available infantry was required to police the townsfolk. So he was running out of food, the enemy were battering his walls, he was in danger of being overthrown by the citizens and the morale score was not great, but we'll get to that.

 

Getting towards the end game - the surviving Allied 24pdrs were moved up on to the glacis, and started knocking a breach in the wall. The pile of stone damage chips indicates that the tally is currently 33 (I think), and it takes 40 hits to bring a wall like that down - the brave French sappers in Team F, watching from above the breach, are unable to do anything beyond maybe building some barricades behind it.

 

You will observe that there are a few fires brewing in the town, that the two remaining French guns are damaged, and thus unable to use the Continuous Fire option (they are marginal on powder by this stage anyway), and the Allied 24pdr on this end of the big battery is out of action, since it started Continuous Fire, and promptly blew it's vent (which is very unpleasant, as you may know). This is one of the downsides of this option. You will also observe that the Local Support level is at -1, on a scale of +3 to -3

 

While all this is going on, the Allies still have plenty of powder to keep the field artillery and the mortars bombarding from the 2nd Parallel. The Allies also have a further 4 battalions behind the lines, off the table, to help out in the event of a storm

 

A couple of aerial views of the heart of the siege, at the time when it became obvious that the French had little choice but to ask for terms (in fact they should probably have asked before this)

 

The French are down to 9 morale points - a viable breach would drop this by a further 3, to say nothing of any further hits, and another deduction if the Local Support drops further

 

Part of the boneyard  - the French have lost 2 of their big fortress guns and a mortar, the Allies had a 24pdr cannon eliminated in a Trench Raid, and there are 2 groups of Allied sappers out of action

 

 

 

Sieges: Testing - Episode #2

 Some highlights and a few laughs along the way...

I have been tinkering with the artillery rules, and trying various versions and tweaks as I go along. My little test siege has been through a few re-takes, so overall progress in the narrative sense is limited, but a few things came up which were informative, sometimes amusingly so. There is nothing at all funny about warfare, of course, but these are merely toys, so I am able to gloss over the underlying tragedy in things which go wrong.

There was a lot of fiddling about, so I'll just show a few pictures and talk about them.

 

The artillery on both sides now get properly busy. The rules have been refined quite a bit, which is what this was all about. I think I'll take Rob's advice, and tone down those cotton balls a bit. They are not just cosmetic, by the way - the serious business of measuring powder consumption relies on counting them - two different sizes, you will note, and that's not just big bangs and small bangs - the mortars use a lot of powder for filling shells

 

The smoke puffs also track the number of fires in the town, caused by mortar fire - here you can see 5 crackling away among the buildings, which is bad news for everyone involved. During the housekeeping phase of the garrison's turn, they have to attempt to extinguish individual fires, which might spread otherwise - fire-fighting is more successful if there are sappers deployed in the town for this purpose (you can see a two-man company detailed for this duty, on the walkway near the edge of the table, with the Governor). If the number of fires still burning after the housekeeping work is 5 or more, the Local Support rating (which is basically the level of co-operation the garrison may expect from the townsfolk) will reduce by 1

 

While the Local Support rating is greater than zero, the town mayor (above, in orange coat), may stand in for the Governor on various duties, which can include making a speech to the townsfolk when necessary to raise morale. If the speech-maker rolls 5 or 6 on a D6, the Local Support will rise by 1 point. If, on the other hand, he rolls a 1 (as shown on this occasion), the citizens are less than impressed, and Local Support drops by 1 point. It did not go well. Oops - the mayor is excused further speech-making duties. This started a run of bad breaks for the French, in quick succession, which illustrates nothing beyond what a series of poor dice rolls will get you...

 

While the Allied guns attempt to soften up the French guns on the walls, two companies of sappers start the saps toward the intended 3rd (and final) Parallel, which will be on the glacis. For reasons I can't remember (yes I can - I borrowed the idea from Vauban's Wars) the defenders are not allowed to carry out Trench Raids on the actual glacis - I must think about this. However, we may now expect the French to open up with everything, including the continuous fire option (which uses extra powder and risks wrecking the guns) - that will proceed tomorrow

 

A poignant moment: the Governor, Colonel Bâtard, visits the walls (that's him in the blue coat and the red boots), since his presence helps with the job of rallying away losses among the gunners. Immediately after this picture was taken, the Allies scored a hit on the mortar crew standing next to him; the unfortunate colonel took his survival test, rolled a double-1 and disappeared from history. Perhaps he should have sent the mayor instead...

One additional misfortune for the French around this time was an attempt to use their spy, (code name Aristide). His first mission was to spread discontent among the besieging army's troops, to encourage the soldiers to desert - a form of loss which cannot be rallied away, by the way. Before he set out, a D6 roll revealed that Aristide's ability rating as a spy was 1, officially described as "pudding". Although the mission is rated as fairly easy, the situation was worsened by the fact that the Allies had paid extra to recruit a Provost, and by some freakily unfavourable dice-rolling. Aristide's failure was so extreme that he was apprehended and executed, but before he breathed his last he was persuaded to tell the Allied command full details of the remaining French powder and food stores. To add insult to injury, the French will have to pay from their remaining morale score to recruit a replacement. It was a freak result, but testing seems to be a bit like that. There is no photo of Aristide, of course, since he was a spy and - like miners - spies do not have figures on the table. Maybe it would be more entertaining if they did?

I shall bash ahead on Monday and Tuesday - see how far I get with attempting to breach the walls, and maybe get to some tactical fighting in a storm or a sortie (or both, of course).

Sieges: Testing in progress

 I was pleased to have somewhere to hide from the news onslaught this week. I carried out a few spot checks on the details of some procedures - some got changed, some were fine, at least one was axed completely!

The photos are a mixed bag from various tests - they get more serious towards the end, since I am now working on taking bombardment through its course. This will continue over the weekend, if my sanity holds out. All the changes thus far have been in the direction of simplification.

Simplification; simplification.

One useful sub-project is that I have rehoused my trenches and earthworks in (smaller) Really Useful boxes, which makes it possible to keep the battlefield tidier, and also to find individual items of scenery in real time. 

 

Boxes and boxes - I bet you Vauban was one of those schoolkids who put brown paper backings on his books

 

 

And labelled them

 

Testing encourages me to make up a proper chart for the turn sequence, so that's progress for a start

 

This is the Local Support marker, to keep track of how happy the townspeople are - on a scale of -3 to +3, this seems a bit high to me

 

This started out as the Digging Standard marker, but may have evolved into a Weather Dice - we'll see

 

Early session, with the Allies' Sapper Team A sapping forward, with a guard (a company of Franconian Grenadiers) on hand to protect them from Trench Raids

 

Here Team D is under attack (at night...) by two companies of French infantry. Team D have infantry support, and the French boys have brought their own sappers with them, so that they can wreck the sap if they chase the Allied lads away. This scrap yielded 1 hit for each side, so the Trench Raid party sulked off home and both sides applied the sticking plasters

 

Another early effort, where I made a late-evening howler with the artillery rules, and some of the Allied infantry had to be rescued by VAR

 

We're now moving on to my latest session, where the Second Parallel has been completed, gun emplacements have been constructed, while the defenders attempted to blow them all away, and I have just reached the point where the Allied guns are about to open fire. Note the nifty redoubt on the end of the trench

 

Since the Allies have (predictably) placed their batteries where they can enfilade the terreplein, the French sappers have been busy placing these inelegant green lumps on the terreplein, to reduce the effect of ricochet fire. Are these things called traverses? - can't remember. To be honest, I can't remember whether I meant ricochet fire, either. The French have more soldiers than this, but lack of space means that they are in a safe part of the town, which is A4 sized and lined with ferro sheet...

 

Allied 24pdr batteries - at the Second Parallel stage they can't see enough of the wall to start trying to breach it, so the main effort for the moment will be to wreck all the defenders' guns before the big push. There's a mortar here as well; for simplicity, I'm working with a draft rule whereby mortars can be set up in a trench, sparing the need for a full emplacement. We'll see how it goes. The mortars are mostly intended to lob shells into the town, starting fires and upsetting the civilians

 

The Allied commander, with a couple of his engineers. Although officers can't be fired on, it is generally regarded as poor judgement to ride a horse. As I recall, taking a look at butterflies outside the trench is not recommended either

 

For these test sessions, the besieging infantry are mostly Hessians. The town is in Wallonia, the garrison is French and Bavarian with a French Governor. A sort of World War, really

 

The Allies have set up their heavy batteries in the centre and on the left, positioned so as to enfilade the walls, they have field artillery on the right and mortars on both flanks. They haven't started firing yet - that will be tomorrow, when the smoke puffs will be in evidence

Sieges: Casting and Further Tinkering

 Slowly heading towards the Siege of Liverpool sometime next week, today I've been smartening up the town a bit, and also doing some casting, as in "recruiting characters to take part". Still a lot of hand-polishing of rules needed, but then testing is the main point of the exercise.

What you see is what you get...

 

Uncomfortably posed photo of the Royalist forces. Rupert had a very big army, but much of it was detached to go and sort out Lathom House, and raise more troops for the march on York. This is the force which will take part in the siege, and even then half the infantry will be off-table, available only as extra forces to take part in an assault. Rupert has 2 Demi-cannons (24pdr siege guns), three field guns (approx 12pdrs, including two long-barrelled Demi-culverins) and one of my new Old Glory mortars. Note that regiments of foot appear in this game without their pikes, which means my first-aid team can probably stand down.

 

 

Gratuitous drone shot 

Prince Rupert (with dog) and Lord John Byron (with map) have a look at the state of things from up by the windmills on Everton Hill

Here's the remodelled town, with Rosworm's new earth walls, and the Parliament artillery already in position - that's five field guns - they have more emplacements than guns

 

Rosworm has also managed a nifty hornwork, not recorded in history, which looks OK, but it is worth remembering that the turf walls are 3 times as difficult as masonry to knock down with cannon-fire...

 

 

Sir John Moore, the town's Governor, has three units of musketeers available - these fellows are his own regiment, plus "volunteers" from his tenants, some Scottish chaps seconded to the garrison by the Parliamentarian big-wigs, and some lads ferried over from the Wirral to help out. For the nerds, I must point out that, though not exactly beautiful, these figures are handy for garrison duty since they are mounted on 3-figure stands, and can therefore perch on walls and ledges, and are well suited to take part in Trench Raids (of which you may well hear more). The figures themselves are of some interest, since these are from the early Les Higgins "subscription" series from the 1960s, which were gravity-cast and sold in small numbers. I believe I bought this lot from Harry Pearson - the painting is mostly his, with a clean-up and fresh varnish. Compliments, Harry.

 

And finally a quick squint in the box with the cast of extras - these chaps will variously take the roles of sappers, extra gunners, named officers and any other necessary odd-bods. Such has been the rush for recruitment that some of these still have name tags from last year's re-run of the Battle of Kilsyth - all will be sorted by next week.