ECW - Mac Colla

Alasdair Mac Colla Chiotaich Mac Domhnuill (1610-47)

With some approximation in the tartan trews department, I have painted up the Mac Colla – otherwise known to you and me as Ali MacDonald – yet another figure I have assembled from Tumbling Dice parts. Alasdair was born at Colonsay, in the Inner Hebrides, the son of Col Chiotaich MacDonald – “Col the Left Handed”. Col was known as Colkitto, in Anglicised form, a name by which Nigel Tranter also refers to the son, Alasdair, in the Montrose novels. One would hesitate to suggest that Mr Tranter was mistaken, so let us assume that Alasdair was known as Colkitto as a sort of patronym.

Alasdair spent much of his life in Ireland, and he was appointed to command the Irish brigade which was sent over to Scotland to fight for the Royalist cause in the Civil War, joining forces with the Marquis of Montrose. Mac Colla is a bit nearer to the Warhammer end of things than I am used to – you will find a lot of stuff about him on the internet, frequently (apparently) confused with Conan the Barbarian, and representing a type of superhuman Celtic warrior hero much loved by American chaps with beards, many of whom would not know a Celt if they fell over one. 

The real Alasdair seems to have been a big, strong fellow – brave but sometimes a bit hasty. A head-banger, no doubt. He left Montrose, officially to raise more troops in the western highlands, but became distracted by the pursuit of his family’s traditional feud with the Campbells, who were – needless to say – staunch Covenanters.

My figure is simpler and calmer than most representations of this trusted lieutenant of Montrose.

ECW - The Marquis of Montrose

I'm not sure that Dame CV Wedgwood would fancy my version much

Since my armies for the campaigns of Montrose are pretty close to ready now, I need to provide a few leaders and a few more frame guns to fill in some remaining gaps. Since we are hardly spoiled for choice of specialty figures in 20mm, I'm having to raid the spares boxes for bits and pieces. Here is the Marquis himself, assembled from various Tumbling Dice bits and an SHQ horse.

He looks slightly more Neanderthal than his portrait, but those artists always took pains to flatter their clients, as we know. His personal standard (all right, actually the King of Scotland's flag, but Montrose used it as his personal standard) is carried on a separate base, which is unusually fiddly for me, but gives the advantage that I can use the Marquis's figure as someone else if I do it this way. Cheapskate Productions' corporate strategy in action once again.

Next on the bottle tops will be an improvised Alasdair Mac Colla, also from TD bits, which will require me to attempt some rough approximation to tartan. I failed to find any tartan paint in the Games Workshop catalogue, so I guess I'll have to try it the old fashioned way.

Once the leaders are better advanced, I'll put in a group photo of the new forces in their current state.

ECW - Never Mind the Quality

Busy, busy

This morning I varnished 180 pre-owned foot figures for the English Civil War – that’s a further 4 Scottish regiments of foot plus 5 non-Scottish (who will be Irish and other things). Sometime over the weekend I shall “grass” the figure bases and mount them on MDF stands. Then I just have some finishing off jobs to do, including flags of various levels of cleverness and interchangeability, and then they can all go into the official Pink Box-Files and I can do Something Else.

The figures are not brilliant, but they are going to work out better than I expected, and I am warming to them as I proceed. They may not be the most beautiful figures I ever owned, but they will be useful, and – by golly – there’s heaps of them. Montrose, here we come. Any week now.

Subject 2 – Banks (yet again) – never mind the quality…

This is the middle of March, as you will have observed, and this is the time of year when I have to pretend that I have replaced my bank accounts with new ones, so that I may graciously be granted some non-zero rate of interest by institutions who (allegedly) make a profit by using our money to finance house-buyers or small businesses. Of course, we all know that neither of these groups of people actually exist in the UK, but we are expected to play this game to show willing.

This year I am finally losing patience, and am moving my savings (humble as they are) into National Savings and Investment (NS&I), which is effectively the UK Government, which means that guarantees become irrelevant, they will not try to sell me house insurance, and we shall no longer be required to play this yearly game of Let’s Pretend in order to qualify for interest.

I have no particular complaints about this process, other than to lament that NS&I appear to be almost as inept as their competitors. The Contesse phoned to see why her new account was taking so long to set  up, and the nice lady on the phone said “what is your membership number?”, to which the reasonable answer was “I don’t know, you haven’t sent me a welcome letter informing me of the number”.

The lady said, “Did you ask for a paperless account? (i.e. email only)”, to which the answer was “yes”. In that case, the Contesse was told, we cannot send you any letters.

In that case, the logic goes, how can I learn what my number is, so that I may access my account online and save the paperwork? This caused the lady a moment’s pause – obviously she had never reached this part of the script before.

What to do, she suggested, is write and pretend you have forgotten your membership number, and we will send you a letter and we can start all over again. Our distress over this development was temporary – about an hour later the postman delivered the aforementioned welcome letter, which had obviously been in the mail all the time. Phew. Not terrific, but survivable. Since this is the Government we are talking about here, we are filled with confidence for this new arrangement.

Yesterday, as part of this same migration, I decided to close my old Post Office account (which, oddly, is managed by the Bank of Ireland behind the wraps). The Post Office savings operation offers online banking, presumably because their customers (which used to include me) expect it, but they manage to present the online banking service in a way which minimizes all possible convenience or utility.

The account number appears on screen as, for example, ****3521 – this is so secure that not even the customer can see their own account number, only the last 4 digits. There are many things that you cannot do online with a Post Office account – in fact I am struggling to think of anything you actually can do with it online. If you give up and phone the call centre, the first thing they want to know is your account number. If you can only provide them with the last 4 digits that is no use at all – they refer you to a paper welcome letter you will have received two years earlier (in this case) which gives the full number. If you cannot find the letter, I guess you are soundly shafted.

I have hopes that NS&I will turn out to be OK – they are the last chance for the savings industry, as far as I am concerned. If they are as stupid as the rest of them, I swear I shall put what money I have left in a sweetie tin and keep it under the floorboards. Or just buy more soldiers.

ECW - As You Were - Switchable FLAGS

Low-tech, cheap solution - job done!

Very many thanks to Steve and Gary and Martin for the advice. I had a go at making up some flags on the plastic tubing which forms the stem (stalk?) of a standard Cotton Bud - just to see how it went - and it went well enough to be the answer, I believe.

Above you see the pikemen from the (Royalist) Regiment of Foot of Gordon of Monymore, with their colonel's colour mounted in this new way. Since the flag swings around like a weather vane, I think I'll introduce a sliver of BluTak to hold it still. If I wish to switch them to the other side, to become a Covenanter regiment for Marston Moor or the Siege of York, for example, it is necessary only to slip on a suitable replacement flag.

A sample cotton bud is included in the picture - we also had some with blue stems, but they are a little thicker. All in all, one of the easier DIY jobs I've attempted recently - thanks again, gentlemen.

ECW - Switchable Standard-Bearers

…and other cunning stuff.

The man himself - in Montrose High Street

Work on my windfall acquisition of second-hand ECW troops is going ahead – there is quite a lot to do, but it’s a factory process, and it’s mostly a matter of making time to sit down and get on with it, ensuring I have plenty of music to listen to.

This is figure painting of a style I haven’t done much of for many years – the previous owner was a doctor, I understand; sadly, he passed away recently and his widow arranged for his enormous collection of figures to be presented to a local charity shop, who raised a considerable sum on eBay. I believe that there were over a hundred boxes of stuff, representing a huge range of periods and styles of warfare. I bought some of his ECW figures – mostly Scots and Irish type figures – and found, to my surprise, that they were flagged and organized to suit the campaigns of the Marquis of Montrose, which – by a complete coincidence – is exactly what I had in mind myself when I bought them.

The figures are mostly SHQ and Tumbling Dice, which fits right in with my existing armies, but they are painted in a way which I used to employ myself in the days when my main concern was to get as many soldiers ready for battle as I could, in the shortest time possible. They are, to use what I think is Mr Featherstone’s phrase, “effective in the mass” rather than individually exquisite. That is not to dismiss them as crude, you understand, but recently I have grown accustomed to commissioned paint jobs on my ECW chaps which make each man a little personality, and these new troops for the Montrose unpleasantness are not like that. The painting is OK, though I have a lot of rebasing to get on with, and the acreage of Humbrol gloss varnish is astonishing, but the overall impression is of a major invasion by a faceless horde which you wouldn’t wish to meet up with.

Somehow this fits quite well with my feelings about the Covenanters and their opponents – masses of rather dour, businesslike fellows in “hodden grey”, with blue bonnets. The Scots army, we must remember, was a national army, not a collection of individual units raised by wealthy or prominent individuals, so a mass-production approach is maybe appropriate.

The task in hand is to identify the figures I can use, organize them into sensible units, clean off the remains of the old basing, get the old tweezers busy removing the cat hairs which are tacked onto the old varnish (not embedded in the stuff, fortunately), wash everything, touch up any chips or outstandingly poor bits of painting, give a thorough application of Galeria acrylic matt varnish, paint the figure bases in the house Crested Moss #1 shade, stick them on new 60 x 60 MDF stands and prepare flags. When you get within tweezer range of someone else’s figures, it all gets very personal. While I’m tinkering away I find myself chatting idly to The Doc, as I refer to the previous owner, and Whiskers, as I have christened his cat.

A box of Scots - just the first of a big new contingent - no flags yet

I have already produced a unit of Scots horse, and I have enough figures for 6 regiments of bonneted Scottish foot, plus 5 of non-Scottish chaps of generally northern (grey/brown) appearance. The plan is that Montrose will get two of the first group (Strathbogie and Gordon of Monymore) plus three of the second (who will be his Irish Brigade), and the balance will be available to his opponents, as will my three existing Covenanter units. There are also 4 small units of highland levies, who are up for grabs to either side, depending on scenario.

Almost certainly not Whiskers

Flags are interesting. Those of Strathbogie and Gordon of Monymore, and of the Irish Brigade, are distinctively Royalist, but I do not wish to disqualify these units from being called up to pitch in on the other side in the Bishop Wars, or against the Marquis of Newcastle, or at Marston Moor, if need be, so I have come up with a Cunning Plan for flags. Montrose’s foot regiments will have their standard bearers elegantly tacked onto the bases with BluTak, and spare officers will be available with alternative flags, such that they may switch allegiance as required. The Scottish fellows (including the spares for Montrose’s people) are to have general-purpose Covenanter style colours, and the non-Scots (including the spares for Montrose’s Irish) will have generic English (Northumbrian) colours, appropriate to their faceless-mass role.

One of my generic Scots units will, of course, have a colour very similar to that of the Duke of Argyll, the cross-eyed, craven, dastardly villain of Dame Veronica Wedgwood’s very readable but extremely biased life of Montrose.

Booo! - Argyll, the Pantomime Villain

I have much work to do, but at least I now know what it is. It is a comfort to have plans to dovetail these new forces with North-of-England scenarios, since otherwise they might be seen as a distraction from my main effort, for which I haven’t yet produced a proper campaign in my intended Lancashire theatre.

What fun, what fun! More pictures will appear in due course.

Fiddling Around – Trenches and Varnish

Abstract representation of Siegeworks

You may recognise the objects in the picture – they are wooden blocks from a game which goes by various names – the very big garden version is called (I think) Jenga – I only played it once, and I wasn’t very good at it, though the beer was good, I recall. I subsequently bought four miniature sets, very cheaply, from a local general store, just to get my hands on the blocks.

You see, what these are really is siege trench sections. Yes, I know they don’t look very realistic, but they are what I have available. I am reminded of a very old schoolboy joke about survivors of a plane crash in the Tunisian desert searching for food; the bad news was that the only organic material they found was camel dung – the good news was that there was a lot of it. So my trench sections might look rubbish, but I have more than you would believe.

Since my siege gaming is still in its extended prototyping stage, and since I am a lazy beggar, I have stuck with these dreadful lumps of wood on the grounds that it wasn’t worth splashing out money or effort on anything better until I have a game which works. Disadvantages, of course, are multiple – for a start:

(a) It’s not very motivating or interesting to build trenches which look this ridiculous

(b) Recruited players – particularly younger ones – may find themselves building odd shapes with the blocks during the game, to create a welcome distraction

(c) Etc

I am starting to think seriously about more acceptable trenches. Whatever I do has to be cheap, simple, and easily stored. There are some splendid looking resin castings around, but that is hardly a cheap option. I could scratch build something, but I fear I am not very skilled at such things, and it would take me ages to produce enough – and then I have to remember that all the scenery I ever scratch built fell to pieces very quickly.

Somewhere, in an old book, there is a suggestion for the use of triangular section hardwood strip, cut and mitred to provide proper lengths and angles. That’s cheap and storable, and would paint up OK, but it’s only a small step up from the Jenga blocks. What else is there?

Well, the bold Mr Kinch mentioned dado rail recently, and I had previously thought myself of picture frame mouldings, so I have been having a bit of a look at what is on the market, studying the websites of Wickes and a few specialist picture framing suppliers. Some exotic stuff out there – nothing jumps out at me yet, and I am starting to realize that I don’t even know very much about what a real trench looked like, so I’ve started reading up on that, and I’m heading backwards at a decent rate. If anyone would like to come round for a very large game of miniature Jenga, I might be interested.

More on this subject soon, I hope.

Subject 2 – Varnish

Moss Troopers and friends, waiting to be de-shined

I have become the owner of a collection of ECW figures of the correct size – SHQ and Tumbling Dice, mostly, plus some others I haven’t identified yet – which are painted up and should be capable of being worked into my armies without a life-changing effort. They were part of the (vast) collection of a chap in Belfast who died recently, and my interest was kindled by the fact that they contained numerous Scottish and Irish figures, which might give me an easy way to expand my armies in such a way that I could have a bash at the campaigns of Montrose.

I’ve received about half of the new arrivals so far, and am somewhat shaken to see that the flags and the organization of the units suggest that the previous owner had them set up for – that’s right – the campaigns of Montrose. I’ll have to see what comes in the second box, and there will be a lot of re-organising and rebasing needed, but this is quite an exciting little development.

Only slight fly in the ointment is that the figures are finished with a very heavy gloss varnish – almost certainly an enamel-type varnish rather than an acrylic one, so I’ll have some work to do calming this down a bit to match the rest of my forces. I’ve been trying some pilot figures, to see how a wash in detergent followed by a coat of matt acrylic works, and it looks promising. I was afraid that the acrylic would just form into blobs, or wouldn’t cover properly, but it is looking good. I’ll have to do a bit of extra detailing on the horses once they are dulled down, but I am reassured that it is feasible.

So I’m busily reading Start Reid’s booklets on the Scots armies, and am quite enthusiastic about the potential of this little exercise. Again, you should hear more of this in due course.

ECW - Updated C&C-based Rules Available Again

Since I have now managed to arrange for a proper PDF Editor on my Mac, I have been able to update my Commands & Colors-based ECW rules, which for file-storage purposes go by the snappy name of CC_ECW, and thus I have re-inserted the section in the top right-hand corner of this window where, if you are interested, you can (or should be able to) access the latest versions from Google Docs, or whatever it is called these days.

I am now up to Version 2_64 of the test rules, which implies a lot more activity than has been the case – my numbering system is too pathetic to explain. Death by Version Control - the legacy of a life in IT. I have dropped the summary of changes (from C&CN) sheet, since it was just one more thing to maintain, and I have revised QRS sheets and a nice new Stand of Pikes tracker, similar to the Squares tracker in C&CN.

Changes in the rules since the last available version are based on my own playtesting and feedback from friends. The significant ones are:

Foot - foot may now move a bit quicker - they may stand still (and carry out either melee or ranged combat), move 1 hex (and carry out melee combat) or move 2 hexes (and then may not combat at all). They may not make a double move if it starts, or at any point brings them within, 2 hexes of the enemy. This is subject to normal terrain rules, and seems to work well.

Horse - this has been a bit trickier - the advantages for Gallopers over Trotters (and Trotters includes Cuirassiers) were too generous - with lucky dice, Galloper cavalry could become unstoppable. Revised version of the rules are:

Gallopers fighting Trotters will get first blow in a melee, regardless of who is the attacker, and may follow up and carry out cavalry breakthrough in a successful fight even if they are not the attacker (i.e. if it is not their player's turn). Trotters attacking will still get to carry out follow-up and breakthrough if they win and a hex is vacated. Other changes here - bonus die for attacking Gallopers is scrapped (they have enough advantages already), and the number of breakthroughs and bonus melees is limited to 1 (the open-ended series of bonus melees can give a crazy game, so I've dropped that).

Rash Gallopers - and these are strictly limited to 1 or 2 units in a game - are like other Gallopers, but they also get a bonus die in melee against non-Galloper horse, and they MUST follow up and carry out breakthrough and bonus melee if they are able to (which simulates their getting out of control). Again, only 1 such bonus melee. Veteran Rash Gallopers fighting Raw Trotters is not a pretty sight…

One further change – because the Chance Cards occurred so infrequently as to have little effect, I’ve doubled the number of Hazzard a Chaunce cards in the Command pack from 2 to 4, so, if you download them, print p8 of the Command Cards twice to give you the extra cards.

Any problems with the links, and/or anything crazy in the documentation, please let me know.