The Big Table Takes a Bow

I'm expecting a visitor tomorrow, so I've set up the newly-extended version of my wargames table for a battle. This will be an expanded (17 x 9 hexes) Commands & Colors: Napoleonics session, which is basically a stretched version of the official scenario for San Marcial (August 1813) from Expansion 1 of the GMT game, and I'll use the Battlelore tweak for the Command Cards to facilitate the bigger battle. [If you are at all interested in this rules tweak, let me know and I'll explain it in a further post.]

The set-up - Spaniards on the left of the picture, Gen Freire with the yellow border

View from behind the French right flank - the Spanish hill at this end is held
by a brigade of voluntarios,  who are classed as militia and thus are subject to triple
retreats. There may be trouble ahead

The pictures show the set-up, ready for tomorrow. The French (mostly Germans and Italians, really) under General Bertrand Clauzel will cross the Bidassoa, which is fordable along its length, and try to knock General Freire's Spanish army off a line of 3 hills. 10 Victory Points for the win, and there is a special rule that the side occupying the greater number of hexes of each of the hills at the end of their turn will gain a temporary VP for each hill held. I'm not using the Guerrilla rule for this game, mostly because I think it's rather a silly rule…

The historical Battle of San Marcial ended with the French abandoning the attack, and thus losing on points. We'll see how it goes.

Board Extension - Done!

Well it took a bit of fancy timing, with ducking and weaving, watching the World Cup games between coats of paint, but the new 28-inch extension to the battleboards has been duly collected and finished. As an option, I can now play a Commands & Colors game on a 17 hexes x 9 hexes field (over 30% bigger, as they would say in washing powder adverts), or use a similar enhancement in my non-hex plain boards if I deploy them the other way up.

The flank marker is shown as the triple dash marks at the left edge for the normal
13 x 9 game; the single dashes are the flank marker for the 17 x 9 game, with the
three sectors becoming respectively 5, 7 and 5 hexes wide

After 3 coats of the official Crested Moss shade, it became clear that the insert was never going to get to be quite the same colour as the original sections (it's the same paint - it's even the same tin, but the surface texture is slightly different), but it's near enough for jazz. In fact the photos make the difference a little more obvious than it looks when you're in the room with it.

This is just a hurried mock-up to check it works - for a battle, the table stands
in the middle of the room, so there's less space than there appears here

I still have to paint the backside of the new piece, to be honest, but there's no immediate rush for that. My war-games may not be better, but I have the option now of making them bigger.

By the way - in passing - I read that the forthcoming C&C Napoleonics expansion for double-width games is to be called La Grande Battle. What language is this, exactly? I have a good number of American friends, and I know for a fact that as a nation Americans are neither stupid nor ignorant, so why would GMT Games want to try to convince us all otherwise? Why not The Bloody Big Schlacht?

I guess it's a worthy successor to Guard du Corps - Franglais êtranglé strikes again. Come on, GMT - don't blight a good game with a crappy name.

How about Something in a Larger Size, Sir?

Last September I finally took the bull by the wassname and repainted my 40-year-old battleboards. I had some misadventures on the way, but ended up with a much smartened tabletop – one side now having the hexes the correct way round for Commands & Colors (previously I was 90 degrees off, though I could justifiably claim that I was there first), while the other side is now very smart, plain Old School green.

I was so pleased with the results that it started me thinking again of producing an extra section of table, to produce an optional, bigger battlefield. There are a number of drivers for this.

(1) I’ve always fancied a huge tabletop as an occasional variant – the fact that I have nowhere handy to set up such a thing is an issue, of course. I have a secret hankering for a vast battlefield in a marquee in the garden, but that is impractical for a number of reasons. Nice idea though.

(2) I recently read the Black Powder horse and musket rules, which I enjoyed, though it was a bit of a shock when they casually announced that, of course, the game was best played on a table at least 12 feet long. Er – right. Of course, I ignored this, but I kept finding myself thinking, “hmmm, 12 feet long…”

(3) When I repainted the battleboards, I did some thinking and some measuring, and I came up with something, as follows:

My tabletop is 8 feet wide by 5 feet across, cut into 4 sections, each 2 feet x 5 feet, for easy storage and to enable them to be laid out on our (large) dining table, in a dining room whose design, if I am to be honest, was influenced by wargaming needs. The C&C-style hex board is the correct 13 hexes wide by 9 across, and the hexes are 7 inches across the flats. These are big hexes, but they sit well with my 20mm (or so) armies. Since the 4 tabletop sections are symmetrical, the centre line of the table could have a 4-hex-wide fillet inserted, which would give an expanded version of the table which is 28 inches wider, and a revised C&C board of 17 hexes by 9. This would require a couple of MDF hex plates to be painted to allow the C&C flank demarcation line to be shifted one hex in from each end when the long version is in use, but this is a trifling matter.

I estimate that this extended version of the table will still fit in the room, though it will now be necessary to walk around it at one end only – full circumnavigation will not be possible, but – hey – I need the exercise.

At risk of getting really wild, it would be possible to add further, similar slices to the centre of the table in future to produce a Memoir 44 Overlord (or CCA Epic) style giant board – but at this point we really are looking for the marquee in the garden, or a church hall yet to be identified.

Back to the point. The first 28-inch extension fillet is feasible, and I have plenty of paint left over from September. If this is not going to go ahead, I’ll have to come up with some new and better excuses. The most obvious excuse is that the tabletop is made of old-fashioned ½-inch chipboard, which I am not sure is available any more.

That excuse didn’t last long. I phoned my local branch of B&Q, who have masses of 12mm chipboard, and are absolutely itching to use their computer-controlled cutter to produce my new extension for what is really a very small cost.

Well, I don’t have my truck any more, so how will I transport it home? That one didn’t last either; with the back seat folded flat, my car will take a 5 feet x 28 inch panel, no problem.

So I’m going to do it. I measured everything up accurately, and (allowing for inaccuracy in the 1971-vintage cutting of the original boards) I need a perfectly rectangular piece 1531mm x 711mm.

I have a feeling that somehow it can’t be as easy as this, but I’m off to B&Q tomorrow morning to do the deed. There will be a lot of marking up (with my tongue sticking out) and painting and suchlike, but my extension should be coming up shortly.

All Better Now

Commands & Colors board with 7-inch hexes - official layout at last.

With thanks for messages of sympathy for my dalliance with senility – much appreciated – I am pleased to announce that I have worked extra hard today, and the battle board refurb job is pretty much finished. I have some minor touching up to do to improve two points where the joins don’t quite line up, and to an extent I have proved that a battered old board repainted is still a battered old board, but mission accomplished, I think.

I’ve also wheeled out some of my new scenic plates with roads on, to see how they look – simple, but useable. Genuine C&C devotees will be perplexed by this, since roads do not feature in Mr Borg’s games. However, I have recently been reading Tactique, which is an old Napoleonic game based on Commands & Colors, predating C&CN – this was published in Vae Victis a good while ago. In this game, roads are used – interesting. I am, in any event, giving thought to including road rules in my ECW variant, so – anyway – here you see some roads, which will not win any prizes but are a big improvement on the laminated paper efforts I used in my Battle of Nantwich.

Mr Borg may have already realised that roads don't run naturally straight across the table in
C&C - maybe that's one reason they don't appear?

I’ll leave everything to cure for this evening, then get everything tidied away. You are familiar with the concept of a Portable Wargame – my wargames are Stowable Wargames, of necessity, since I use the family dining room for games. Thus all components must be flock free, easily handled and capable of disappearing into cupboards when required to do so!

Oh Strewth...!

Boards #4 and #3 (behind) - good so far...

Good news and bad news. There is even a moral – the moral is that it is possible to outsmart myself by trying to be too clever. The working definition of “too clever” is not as impressive as it once was...

I’ve been promising myself for a couple of years that I will replace my current battlefield boards with some nice new 18mm MDF ones, and paint them up with the hexes the right way round for Commands & Colors. My existing table is battered, ½” chipboard, and was painted in the mid 1970s with hexes that are, sadly, 30° awry for C&C. I did have the foresight, however, to have the correct table proportions of 13 hexes by 9. Yes – I know, I know – I even had a number of Mr Borg’s game mechanisms spot on all those 35 years ago, but somehow I still managed to avoid inventing Battle Cry, and avoid becoming rich and famous as a result.

Anyway – no matter. This week I suddenly decided that, instead, I would just refurbish my old boards. If I really didn’t like the results I could still do it again with the full MDF, and the practice would be useful. So I went to the hardware store in Dunbar that does paint mixing to order, and bought in the official shades. I was trying very hard to remember the history of these old boards, and how I had painted the hex cells last time – last time being in the days when I had crisp eyesight and knew no fear.

Last Time

My boards were originally the sort of dark, hen house green that I had seen at my local wargames club. It was the sort of green that made the room actually seem darker when you switched the overhead lights on. When the time came to apply hexagons, I switched to a paler, pea-soup shade which I have used ever since. The hex-cells were painstakingly scribed in pencil, using a homemade cardboard stencil (which I still have), then I inked in the grid lines – literally – with black Indian ink and a fine brush. I felt a bit like one of those fabulous Japanese artists you see on the TV – as I got into the job, my skill improved, and they really were surprisingly neat. Well, I thought so, anyway. Only problem was that the black ink was very vivid, and the overall effect was like the old Pop Art from whenever-it-was (1960s?). If you stared at it for a little while the room started to rotate, which is distracting during a wargame. So I had to tone it down a bit.

My plan was to thin down some of the pea-soup green – about 40% water – and apply it with a roller, building it up, coat by coat, until the grid lines were sufficiently obscured to give a better effect. I was concerned about the waterproof qualities of Indian ink – I had nightmares about my nice black lines running in all directions when I overpainted them. I recall that I asked Allan Gallacher what he thought, and he reckoned it would be all right, so I went ahead. In fact it was all right, but when I discussed it with Allan later he said he based his opinion on the need for Indian ink to be capable of withstanding monsoons. Thank you, Allan...

This Time

I decided this time I would use a similar approach, but instead of spidery black lines I would make a feature of the fact that it was hand-painted, and use a pleasing khaki shade in rather thicker lines, the intention being that I could still apply coats of thinned-down green if it was too much.

I started on Wednesday. Two coats of pea-soup green to obliterate the old markings – 2 hours drying between coats, then pencil scribing and freehand painting with the khaki, and then block-in the off-table areas outside the 13 x 9 hexes with a complementary grey-green, in proper C&C style. It looks OK – I’m pleased with it. The khaki was a bit of a fright after the old arrangement, but it has grown on me and I have decided against the over-wash.

There are 4 boards in total. I started with No.3, which is the right-hand middle sheet, and then moved on to No.4, the right hand end. Great. As of this morning, the second coat of green on No.2 – the other middle sheet – was dry and I was ready to start scribing to match the meeting edge of No.3. Because of the limitations of my work area, I had to rotate the board through 180° and work the other way round. Sadly, because I managed to confuse myself by this rotation, I then transposed the sequence of half-hexes and whole hexes at the meeting edge, but didn’t notice until I had finished painting the grid lines. I mean FINISHED PAINTING the grid lines. I made a nice job of them too. I had been really pleased with myself today – in much better form than of late – popping in from cutting the lawns to apply more paint – all that. Around 8pm I suddenly realised that I had screwed up in a big way, so board No.2 is now green again, and should get its second (fourth) coat of green about 11pm. By 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, after I get back from an appointment at the hairdresser, things will be exactly as they were this morning at around 8am. It’s hard to see this as progress.

I did get the Contesse to check that I really had got it wrong, in case I painted it over, back to green, when I didn’t need to, which would be even less amusing than the current situation. She confirmed it was wrong – I had almost kept a little hope alive that it was somehow correct...

Never mind, I’ll be even better and faster tomorrow, but it’s hard to dress this up in a way which conceals the fact that I have lost a complete day through my own, mind-boggling stupidity. The job is now half done (again? still?) instead of the three-quarters I had aimed for by tonight. Still hope to finish it off by tomorrow night, but a few other things I should have been doing tomorrow are going to fall by the wayside. That’s OK – it will feel like a little penance, and something small and dark and mean in my upbringing approves of that.

More haste, less wassname. If time permits, the plan is also to apply coats of plain green to the reverse side of the boards, so that I may keep the option of some proper wargaming if the mood takes me.

Onward and upward – with a few staggers on the way.

Hex Cells - Round & Round We Go

There are occasions when I find that I am somewhere I've been before. Sometimes, the number of footprints makes it clear that an awful lot of people have been there, but it doesn't make it any more likely that the path leads anywhere.

Prompted by comments to the previous post, I reckon it is time for one of my periodic visits to the subject of hex cells on the wargames table - specifically, what size they should be. Since the mid 1970s, I have had 7" hexes on my table, and only occasionally have I wished they were a different size. They are seven inches (across the flats) because that looks OK and fits my unit sizes nicely. Six inches would be a possible alternative, anything smaller would not be viable, given that I have no wish to allow hex sizes to drive a complete re-engineering of my armies, rules and figures-to-men ratios, nor to initiate an extensive re-basing programme. Since no-one made commercial hexagonal bits in the 1970s (as far as I know), there was no option but to manufacture my own hills, so the odd size did not make things any worse than they would otherwise have been. If someone had made pre-formed hills and rivers for 6" hexes when I started, I would probably have gone for 6".

In recent years I looked at various mats and tile systems. The most basic was a printed tablecloth made by a Spanish concern that was promoted by NapoleoN Miniatures. I can't remember the name of the firm - Microgames? - something like that. I corresponded with them for a little while, and they sent me a couple of samples. They did a range of off-the-shelf cloths, including a decent-looking Peninsular War job with 100mm hexes, but they were more than happy to discuss bespoke products. They were prepared to print anything I wanted on the cloth (it didn't warrant the description "mat"), and make it any size I wanted, which sounds ideal. The cloth, sadly, was very flimsy - you could see light through the weave, it would certainly stretch and wrinkle and move about in action. A friend said that you couldn't even dry dishes with it, which is an interesting criterion. So I dropped that idea - not without difficulty, since the manufacturer seemed very excited by my interest, and looked forward to meeting me at a wargames convention in Dublin (which is obviously just down the road from here) to finalise my order. I have seen impressive examples of heavier, textured mats, which look good (though the hex grids come in a small number of unsuitable sizes), but I worry about storing them without damage, and I have a weird dread of covering my home with bits of shed flock and resin flakes.

Tile systems are invariably impressive - sometimes spectacularly so. The old Geo-Hex tile system (which I have never actually seen) appears to have used large hexes, but it's long OOP. I have heard mention of TSS making hex tiles, and their website shows some interesting pictures, but it makes no mention of sizes. I emailed them, and they came back very quickly and politely and said they no longer make the hex tiles, since they had trouble with manufacture and accuracy of the finished pieces. They did, however, recommend their excellent square terrain tiles, and they do look very good.

One of the familiar aspects of following a hopeless path is that frequently people will fix you with a slightly pitying gaze (especially in email) and imply that they are surprised that you are still doing whatever it is you are doing, and that the rest of the world has moved on from that - all the cool guys are now buying our latest product, and here's some pictures and a price list.

Hexon - state of the art?

At four inches it's a breeze. Kallistra make what appears to be the standard-setting product, Hexon II. Looks terrific. It probably looks awesome, though I am not an expert in awe. 4" tiles in a bewilderingly huge range - you can build the most convincing looking countryside in all sorts of regional shades. I am really very impressed, but it wouldn't do for me. The hexes are too small for my armies, and the whole approach of using a wall-to-wall set of tiles involves costs and storage issues which put me off. No - I am not decrying any of this, it really is wonderful - if I was starting from scratch now I would do Napoleonics in 15mm, with small unit sizes, and I would buy the Kallistra system. The snag, of course, is that I am not.

My wargames have never been scenically realistic. There is no whiff of diorama about my set up. Plain boards, unflocked bases, simple, representative villages and woods - that's how I've always done it. I've found it practical and pleasing, and I like the traditional look. I also like the look of more exotic approaches, I hasten to add, but they are not for me. A plain table with some blocks on it for hills is fine. If the hills look half-decent and troops can stand on them, and if I can store them easily without damaging them, so much the better.

As Mr Kinch has correctly pointed out, the real reason for choosing to move to smaller hexes is because that is how you want the game to be. It is possible that I could use 6" hexes, and it is possible that there would be advantages for the game size, but it does not (yet, at least) strike me as a must-do. Cutting out hills is a royal pain in the ass, to quote Mr Salinger, and no mistake. If someone makes suitable 6" hexagonal hill blocks which could be used, singly or in multiples, without leaving raw edges, and without requiring me to cover the whole world in the things, that would be a small push toward making a switch.

I have read interesting forum threads about casting tiles in plaster, papier maché or secret-formula gloop, and all kinds of mine-is-bigger-than-yours discussions of tile systems past, present and mythical. I am, I think, not much the wiser. It looks like a choice between staying where I am or some DIY-based change. The more I think about this, the less I fancy a change. I must Google "hex terrain" and look yet again at those TMP exchanges from 2006, and count the footprints.

By the way - what happened to Hexon I?

Battleboards

Since I got on to a DIY thread with the previous post, it seemed appropriate to talk a bit about another hot topic for me - boards, or what I have always called battleboards.

Now there are four of them

I have only had one set of boards since I started wargaming. Around 1971 I bought two 4' x 5' pieces of half-inch chipboard - placed side by side they made an 8' x 5' tabletop. They have been various shades of green over the years, and since about 1975 they have had 7" hexagons applied to one side, but otherwise they are the originals. They are leaning against the wall here in my office, and it is sobering to think what long-redundant armies have marched on them, and how many visiting generals have played on them - quite a few of those players are no longer with us, I am reminded.

Same boards. A shot of a Romans v Celts battle in Feb 2001 - this picture intrigues me, since it is taken in the old dining room of our cottage, a room which is now the downstairs bathroom. This is as near as I have got to fighting battles in the toilet

Chipboard is not ideal - it tends to crumble around the edges, especially the corners, and the half-inch stuff, though light and easy to handle, tends to droop a bit if any unsupported overhang exceeds a foot or so. The boards are getting a bit battered now, and they smell strange, since for a while they were stored in the garage wrapped in tarpaulin. They have been placed on all sorts of supporting surfaces over the years - wallpaper pasting tables, various dining tables, and - surprisingly successfully - for a while I used a child's playpen, with lengths of Dexion angle-bars lashed on. This was good because the tabletop was much lower than standard and (whatever it says in the books about the advantages of high tables) this gives a terrific view and puts the middle of the table in easy reach. Gives a glimpse of what gaming on the floor would be like, I guess. Might not be too clever for the spine, but I was immune to such problems in those days.

Anyway, I'm now back up to standard dining-table height, which is fine. Our current dining table is a big fellow (2.5 metres long), which meant that I was able to cut the battleboards in half, so that I now have four 2' x 5' sections, which are much easier to store and to lug around.

My ancient hexes run in the wrong direction for CCN, so I have been working out how to remedy this. I reckon that I can keep my 7" hexes and still fit the official CCN playing surface on an 8 x 5 table. My original plan was to paint the new hex grid on the reverse side of the present boards but they are not in a good enough state - it would be a lot of work, and I would be disappointed with the result. OK then - new boards. Some swimming of the brain here - what sort of materials, how big? Yes, how big? Could I fit a 9' x 6' board in the dining room? - hmmm. In fact, commonsense prevails - I'll stick with 8 x 5 - it fits the CCN layout and gives a little room for a blank surround, and I can paint the reverse plain green, or maybe apply felt. Anything bigger, though tempting, would be difficult to walk around. For material, I fancy 20mm MDF. It should be structurally robust enough, and a sealed-and-painted MDF surface is smooth but tough. I've also given some thought to having four 8-foot battens to place on the dining table, and site the battleboards on top of these - that would enable me to have the table as eight 1' x 5' panels instead of four 2' x 5', which would store in a wardrobe or similar without drama. Interesting.

I don't think I'm going to start on this until the Winter. I am strangely reluctant to abandon my old boards, but they've been in use for 40 years, so they do not owe me anything, and it's time to smarten up.