Scenery Scales - Quick Sanity Check...

Different period, same problem - the troops look OK with buildings in a slightly
compressed vertical scale, but the greatly compressed horizontal scale means that
they are always crammed into far too little space. 

While I was constructing my representation of Newcastle, on Wednesday, I observed that the number of towers on the contemporary map is far higher than in my simplified model. Of course, I would expect this, but my attention was caught by a comment in one of my books - it refers to the medieval walls being built in accordance with "best practice of the pre-gunpowder age" - in particular, adjacent towers should be within bowshot of each other, to provide adequate cover.

This reminded me that I had previously run a ruler over my "15mm" Vauban defensive pieces (different period, same idea, similar logic) and been delighted to observe that the lengths of the bastion faces, the straight walls and all that matched up well with the official best-practice numbers out of Chris Duffy's Fire & Stone, which is most convenient, yet a little puzzling in view of the fact that my wargames, like most people's, are a mish-mash of different scales. In short, I'm pleased it works out, but by rights it probably shouldn't, so I had another think about it. There is something conceptually different about grouping representative clusters of buildings into a given area (the area is correct, but the number of houses is not) and placing a wall or a gate (the wall, or the gate - there was only one) in its correct place.

Let's see now - my soldiers are roughly 1/72 scale - what in a more innocent age we used to refer to as "true 25mm" (a phrase as smug as it was meaningless). To help a little with the look of the thing, I use 15mm scale buildings - 15mm is about 1/100 scale, which is the old TT model railway gauge, so the buildings are deliberately undersized compared with the men, but the distortion in the vertical scale is not too bad, and the saving in footprint size (and cost of the buildings!) more than compensates. As I've said before, a small cluster of small houses, to me, looks more convincingly like a village than a single 1/72 scale building. Whatever, I am comfortable with it, though it doesn't suit everyone.

When we speak of scale distortions, of course, all this fades into insignificance against the appalling liberties we take with horizontal distances. My ground scale - the one against which my Vauban bits and my medieval fortifications all fit tolerably well - is one 7-inch hex represents 200 paces. A bit of finger-in-the-air rounding gets us to something like 1/900 scale. So I use 1/72 men, 1/100 buildings and a 1/900 ground scale. Hmmm.

I was looking at the PaperTerrain website, and they offer pdf files of groundplan templates for (for example) a Vauban fort. Scaled appropriately to make the heights fit with 15mm, these templates are massive compared with my little fortification models. This is not a surprise, really, but it always takes me aback when I see it. It's OK - I understand it - the models of town walls and bastions and so on are not the sort of objects you "cluster" to represent a more numerous group. There was a wall, and there was a bastion, and they were here, and they are expected to fit the map and the tabletop - the matter of how many towers, of course, is not quite the same thing, but to get some version of the town of Newcastle to sit sensibly in a realistic footprint requires some cheating. The walls are the right height for 15mm (1/100 - which is not too unreasonable for 1/72 scale toy soldiers), but they are the right length for 1/900 - and yet it looks all right. I am forced to assume that, by luck or accident, the manufacturers have used the same numbers as I do, and their compromise works for me. If I used proper, proportional 1/900 scale walls then the soldiers would be in danger of tripping over them, and that really would be laughable.

So I've thought about it, yet again, and it works out all right - yet again. I knew it would, yet it is reassuring. I'll have to remember to check it all again in a few weeks. We all need all the reassurance we can get.

***************************

Late Edit, following Archduke Piccolo's comment:

This is an alternative map, an extract from a sketch plan prepared by Sir Jacob Astley in 1639. I have reproduced this by photographing it from Charles Sanford Terry's The Life and Campaigns of Alexander Leslie - a book which I have enjoyed immensely and which I was terrified I would wreck if I opened it wide enough to put it on the scanner! It shows the suburbs outside the Newgate and Pilgrim Street Gate, and also at Sandgate on the river, and gives a fascinating key to how it was proposed to place the artillery to defend the place. Note that Astley's 1000 foot scale is a bit different from the 200 pace scale shown in the William Mathew map I included in my previous post. I do not claim that one map is more accurate than the other - Mathew's is derived from John Speed's map, while Astley was the man who had to prepare Newcastle for defence against the Scots during the Bishop's War(s).

Pottery Buildings - probably getting a bit silly now

I mentioned recently that I was not going to buy any more Tey Pottery buildings on eBay, since I have enough for my ECW wargames/sieges (in fact I am going to get rid of a couple of the less useful items) and, to be honest, I'm running out of storage space for the beggars.

I did, however, admit to a strong fancy to get my hands on a specimen each of Anne of Cleves' House (Lewes) and the Mermaid Inn, both of which looked splendid but regularly sold for far more than I was prepared to pay. Sure enough, I was lucky enough to land a nice, cheap example of Anne's house, but I held little prospect of getting the other one, which is much coveted (by proper collectors, in fact) and seldom seen.

Well, last week I was very surprised to see that some fine fellow was selling two Mermaid Inns on eBay simultaneously, at very reasonable starting bid prices. With little hope of success, I placed a modest bid on one and - by Jove - I won it. Even more surprising, the other did not sell at all.

The Mermaid Inn - three views

So here we have the Mermaid Inn, which I understand is in Rye, East Sussex (anyone ever drink there?). I have washed the spider poo off it, but have yet to "improve" it to the house standard, which means detailing the chimney tops, obliterating the pub sign over the door, repainting the ivy on the back (maybe that's the front, mind you...) and applying matt varnish, to get rid of that fearsome shine. This, of course, is why I have to avoid contact with the aforementioned proper collectors...

The real Mermaid Inn dates back to 1420 or thereabouts, though I understand the beer taps have been cleaned regularly since then. A fine addition to anyone's 17th Century town, I would say.

Storage - hmmm. I reckon I'm going to have to get rid of some of my Lilliput Lane houses to make room for these. That is definitely the end of the Tey collection - definitely. I have consciously resisted the urge to make a bid for the (even larger) Alfreston Manor, which is currently on eBay.

So there you have it.

More Pottery Buildings - and another mystery church

Though the rate of arrival is now officially reduced, a few more ceramic "ornament" buildings for my ECW towns have sneaked under the wire of late. From the Tey Pottery "Britain in Miniature" series, I'm now really just keeping an eye open for particularly good bargains on a couple of odd buildings which I fancy; I was very pleased this week to get a very cheap example of the splendid Anne of Cleves' House (Lewes), in excellent order, and at a great price, since the collectors normally really go for this one, and prices are usually around £40 to £50 on eBay. Scrooge McFoy, naturally, did not pay anything like that amount.

I also secured a couple of nice churches - these are not from Tey, but are similar in style, and were made as part of John Putnam's "Heritage" series.

The first is, apparently, a miniature of St Michael's Parish Church, Blackawton, Devon, which building dates from the 14th Century.

The other is simply labelled "Church with Tower", which is certainly true, but the configuration with the narrow circular tower (spiral stairway?) joined onto the central square tower is a bit unusual. Anyone recognise the church? - it really doesn't matter, obviously, but I am gently interested.

All these pictures are lifted straight from eBay (for which thanks), and the buildings will be retouched (a little) and matt varnished (a lot) before they appear on any battlefields.

So - no prizes, but does anyone know the unnamed church?


***** Late Edit - Footnote *****

I've only recently become familiar with these ceramic miniature buildings, so I know very little about them, and don't really wish to know more than I need to understand to get a feel for the ranges and their availability. I am not, I remind myself, a proper collector, since I wish to use them in my toy soldier games rather than deploy them artistically on the piano. 

In case you care, Tey Pottery was founded by Carol Maxted-Massey, who produced various styles of ornamental pieces, at one time working with her brother. The factory was initially at Marks Tey, Colchester, though they later moved to 3 separate factories in Norfolk (at Hainford, Lenwade and Banham). They produced teapots, animal miniatures and painted tiles, but they also produced ranges of miniature buildings - I am particularly interested in the Britain in Miniature series, but there were others (usually smaller in scale), and they also did a number of out of catalogue or special order pieces which appear on eBay from time to time. Out of interest, I obtained a pdf history of the maker, so I have a better understanding of what is out there (and some of it is marvellous). Ms Maxted-Massey moved to Spain in 2002, and production ceased at that point.

John Putnam was a teacher who took early retirement in the 1970s so that he could concentrate on his great passion for ceramic modelling and sculpture. His output included his "Heritage" range of buildings, which became very popular. His factory was at his home, a farm near Blackawton, Devon (hence the choice of the church model illustrated above). His work was popular in the USA, so in later years he travelled to New England in order to add some American buildings to his range. John Putnam died some years ago, and his family moved to Totnes - I believe the pottery concern still exists, but whether they are still trading, and whether any new pieces were ever added, are unknown to me. 

More Old Crockery

My new collection of used pottery ornaments was recently on display in the photos of the ECW Siege of Middlehampton test game, and it attracted some favourable comments. As I've mentioned, I have taken a liking to Tey Pottery buildings, which were produced by a now-defunct firm based in Norfolk, were made in a fairly constant scale, in the region of what I would call 15mm, and are readily available at pretty low prices on eBay. I think this is a decent, low-cost way of getting in extra buildings - cheaper and less work than buying in resin castings and painting them up, and possessing a lot more charm and general brio than industrial MDF.

I have to put my hand up straight away and admit that I have been applying matt varnish to the things, in order to use them as wargame scenery, which should rightly appall any serious collectors, but am well pleased with the little 17th Century town centre I have built up with them.

The one obvious gap in my town is the lack of a cathedral, or at least a big parish church - in all of John Speed's town maps, the churches are the key points, and districts and town gates were commonly named after the religious buildings.

The off-the-shelf Tey churches are rather unimposing, but they also did special commissions, and one such appeared on eBay a couple of weeks ago. I was rather taken with it, decided I would be prepared to go as far as £12 or so to provide spiritual enrichment for my ECW townsfolk, and looked on as the auction closed on the Sunday evening. Hmmm. There was a sudden rush of interest at the last minute, and the church sold for £125 or thereabouts, which proves it was quite a nice church, I guess, but I hadn't thought it was as nice as all that.

Anyway - water under the bridge - I wasn't bothered, but I've kept an eye open to see if any similar items came up. Sure enough, one did, within a week - not Tey, this time, but a very similar size and format. This one stayed within my price range, I bought it and it arrived this morning.

I haven't got the dreaded matt varnish on it yet, but I thought I'd show it off a bit. The 20mm Les Higgins drummer in the picture would have to stoop a little to get in through the doors, but that's exactly the size of buildings I like, to keep the footprint down. This is from Sulley's Ceramics - new to me, very similar to (and frequently confused with, I think) Tey Pottery buildings - nice, isn't it? Maker's label on the underside gives an old-format UK phone number, which must date the model earlier than 1995 - I'd say 1980s, but I'm guessing.

The original church is in Suffolk, I understand - if anyone recognises it, please give me a shout! Also, if you recognise it as the trinket that used to sit on your mother's piano, give me a shout anyway.

Rivers & Farm Tracks

I've already played about a bit with the prototype pieces, but I've now taken delivery of the full shipment of my cunning new hex-grid river system - I have to admit that even I was a little taken aback when I saw how much of it there was, but you know how these things are. I reasoned I needed a dozen straight sections, a dozen curves - may as well make it the round 20 of each - plus a couple of add-ons - junctions (confluences?) and a source (or, as Michael the manufacturer would have it, an end, which to me implies that the river would run uphill to reach it).

The wargaming world is full of nifty rubber things which may be painted as roads or rivers - some of them are lovely, but this dual-purpose styling means that the rivers are actually canals, and mostly turn through right angles. My river system is designed for my 7"-hex battlefields, and is deliberately made to be as flexible as possible (as are the rubber ones, I suppose, come to think of it). The pieces are all laser cut from 2mm MDF, by Michael at Supreme Littleness Designs (see link on the right, listed under "other useful stuff").

Michael was kind enough to make a variety of bank profiles, to give a natural look, but the simplicity is impressive - the stack of parts comprises a full-hex (water) underlay for each river/water hex, and then banks of just 3 types - innies and outies (for the curves) and straighties (for the, erm, straights). Throw in a source, a couple of junctions and a customised version of one of Michael's super bridges (check out the website) and I can construct all sorts of weird and wonderful structures - some of which might make an unlikely battlefield, but it is the most excellent fun.

OCD playground - innies, outies and straighties systematically laid out for painting
- note the small "Achilles' Heel" corner on each piece, where I hold it to paint. All
the heels get sorted out at the end of the job (you probably guessed).

Painting the bits was a chore, to be honest, entirely because I bought enough pieces to model the complete Orinoco, but I set about it in a businesslike manner, and it took an evening for the water plates and a morning for the banks. Very therapeutic, in fact - a repetitive painting job, with appropriate accompaniment (chamber music by Ibert and Fauré, this weekend) and loads of coffee, and I was very happy. Mind you, if someone had been paying me to do it I'd have been knotting sheets together and planning an escape attempt. Funny how something you don't have to do can be relaxing.

The scale of the undertaking is partly explained by the fact that I am now running an extension to my original table, and I treasure the fantasy that one day I may get to lay out a full, double-width Epic C&C board. The fact that this, at 16 feet long, would require a church hall or a large marquee is a mere detail - I have already ordered the Grande Battle C&CN supplement as an act of faith - how much commitment do you want? All I need now is for some previously-unknown eccentric relative to die and leave me his castle.

This is just a fraction of the full set - test run on the Garden Room floor. Note that
I have built the bridge, though it isn't painted yet. I could do naval battles with
this lot. Hmmm....

Anyway, I got to play at rivers for a while this morning - Slartibartfast has nothing on me.

You should contact Michael and get a set of river bits, so you can play too - you know you want one.

Topic 2 - An Unusually Noisy Sunday

Something you don't get every weekend - yesterday the Berwick & District Motor Club staged their annual Berwick Classic Historic Car Rally. These days there are very severe restrictions on rallies which use public roads in mainland Britain. In the case of this particular rally, it is probably just as well, since the machinery and the drivers are all getting on a bit - good fun, though. The rally really consists of a fairly leisurely tour through East Lothian and the Borders, with a few time-trial sections on private land, to give a bit of excitement and splash some mud. One of the special sections was held on our farm - about 60 cars running along the farm lanes, starting at 1-minute intervals, and all trying quite hard - hard enough to justify a thorough wash and wax afterwards, which is only right for a rally.

The cars weren't too exotic - a nice old Allard took my eye, but mostly the entry consisted of 1970s Ford Escorts, which were by far the quickest things on show, but somehow also the most boring. One of my neighbours was taking part, so a group of us hung about to give him a cheer as he came through. I have no idea what the results were - somehow results seemed unnecessary on such a nice day out.

AC Ace? - not sure - if so, this is the granddaddy of the Shelby Cobra

Elderly Volvo going faster than I've ever seen a Volvo move - it didn't have its
headlights on, which is another first for my experience of Volvos

Ford Anglia, circa 1960 - haven't seen one of these for many years - very quick,
but they had almost all rusted into the ground by about 1963

Austin-Healey Sprite "Frog-Eye"

And there were loads of these - iconic rally car of its day, I guess, but I can't
get very excited about them

Back to the River

I've now painted up my demo pieces for the rivers/waterways, and am rather pleased with the results.

I chose a compromise colour - as mentioned previously, I wish to use these hex tiles mostly as sensible, battlefield-type rivers, but deeper areas such as lakes and coastlines are also within scope. I experimented with various varnish finishes (another compromise - this time between perfection and my natural laziness). I decided that the water will mostly be visible in wiggly, 2-inch wide strips, and even a lake should not be like glass, so I opted for 2 thick coats of gloss varnish, I didn't rub down between coats, and the resulting brush-stroked, imperfect shine has a passable look of a current, or the wind, or something - anyway, it'll do!

I used clear gloss Ronseal varnish, because it is cheap and should be tough enough to avoid flaking. Though it is water-based, it is still fairly nasty sticky stuff when cleaning brushes, but it's readily available and goes on easily.

Even with just the three basic bank shapes I have available to date (there will be one or more junction pieces in due course, and maybe a couple of small islands), it is possible to play around and create a number of interesting shapes. I hope to get more river pieces to paint up in the next week or so. They store compactly and neatly, too, so I'm pleased. This could go viral - by next Christmas you could be the only kid in your gang that isn't playing at rivers

I still have to arrange for a couple of fords (just water tiles which show some colour variation, I think). And, of course, now I have established a system, I can give some thought to an alternative river colour for the other side of the water tiles...!


For no real reason, other than the fact that I like it, here's a loosely-linked music clip. I got a bit distracted, wondering whether David Byrne's suit would remain stationary if he spun round on the spot, but I guess not. It is nice for us Wallace and Gromit fans to see a pair of tribute Wrong Trousers, though, and any Al Green song is usually worth a listen.

The Hills Are Alive, and Hollow

During this next week or so I should receive some more of the new MDF pieces for my battlefields. I was about to use the word "scenery", but they are not very scenic - they are more game equipment. In the strange world of hexagonal geology, scenery is a contextual term.

You can never have enough hills. New hills almost ready - one of the old ones
nearest the camera

I made up the 10 new hills which Michael at Supreme Littleness has cut for me to date. These are 7-inch hexes, to match my existing stock, but laser cut from 6mm MDF in two parts per hill tile - to save weight (and in the hope that someone else might want 6-inch hexes in 6mm MDF?), the underhill (?) is a hexagonal doughnut, as you see.

Weight-saving hill, worm's-eye view

The tops and bottoms were glued together (very accurately - my tongue was probably sticking out) using "tacky" PVA glue, a very useful product which was new to me. Once dried, I painted them up with the house standard Crested Moss #2 baseboard colour. I also did some gentle dabbing on (spackling?) of a diluted darker green, to match my older hills and to make them more obviously different from the unspackled plain beneath. I was far too tentative with the spackling - it dried a lot paler than I expected, so I'll improve that when I paint up the next shipment of 10 hills.

Old hill on the right - yes, I know, I have to make a better fist of texturing
the new ones - I'll get to it. I'm very pleased with the match, and the old ones
are only very slightly thicker, which doesn't matter.

My original hills are ½-inch Insulation Board, cut by hand with a steel rule and a Stanley knife in 1974 or so - I couldn't do that now - I wouldn't even contemplate such a miserable job. How I still have all my fingers and thumbs is a mystery. No, lasers are the answer, my friends. Quantum science and those billions of dollars invested to develop the laser were all to avoid Old Foy risking his fingers with a craft knife. Obvious snag, of course, is that you can't laser-cut MDF thicker than 6mm - I think it just catches fire or something. So Michael has given me two-layer hills in 2 x 6mm, which is a close enough match for half an inch.

Very nice - only practical observations thus far are that the burned edges require 3 coats of the baseboard colour to hide the charcoal, and the MDF is a lot smoother than insulation board, so I need to be a bit more wholehearted with the spackling to give better texturing. It is, as ever, a learning process...

To achieve a more interesting effect with the dabbed texture colour, I invested in a natural sea sponge from Boots the Chemist. Ouch. Great idea, but of all the money I have ever wasted on my hobby, the price of this small sponge was the most eye-watering little surprise. These must be Fair Trade sponges - the guys who harvest them must have yachts at Monte Carlo.

Research on the colour of river water continues. I had a rough idea I might be looking for a colour called Teal, or similar, but it seems such a colour is not in vogue. I have a couple of candidate shades ticked on the extant Dulux sample cards - tricky business, this. For a start, my colour vision is not wonderfully accurate, and the shade cards are just bewildering - far too much information. If someone shows me 100 different varieties of greenish-blue then I can't cope - I am even distracted from what it was I was looking for in the first place. I found a wonderful colour yesterday, but it took about 15 seconds to realise that it might be suitable for the Caribbean in July, but not the Yorkshire Moors or Aberdeenshire in February. Anyway, I have a couple of promising candidates to ponder over. I hope I don't just buy something completely different in a moment of panic.

Still in the Spares Box, with Mike and Whiskers

Whiskers developing his technique - in fact, I imagine Whiskers as rather more bald than this

Almost exactly two years ago, I scored one of my biggest-ever hauls on eBay, and bought in a load of ECW figures which came from the estate of a chap in Northern Ireland who had recently died - his entire collection, which was enormous, was sold by a local charity shop. I only bought a stack of his ECW troops - all SHQ and Tumbling Dice 20mm - but there were literally hundreds of them.

The big surprise at the time was that they had very obviously been painted up and organised to fight Montrose's campaigns - since that was exactly what I wanted them for, I had seen that there were a lot of Scottish troop types in the collection, but it wasn't until I started checking out the flags that I realised what I had.

The figures were quite nicely painted, in a very plain style, but I was a bit shocked to see that they had been heavily coated with some kind of ship's varnish - these figures were definitely intended to stand up to some severe, industrial handling, I would say. I set about identifying figures which would restore most easily, and which were of most immediate use for my Montrose project, and I did some retouching, and a great deal of applying matt varnish to tone down the finish, and rebasing, and I was pleased with the results. The episode generated a lot of very plain, rather dull Scottish and Irish soldiers, which provided a fine addition to bulk up the splendid Covenanter units which Lee Gramson had already painted up for me.

All good - I've done some Montrose things now, and intend to revisit this again soon. While I was spending a few late nights in 2014, getting these ex-eBay fellows ready for the armies, I got to know the previous owner a bit better. Of course, I have no idea who he was, but at 1 a.m. when I was preparing figures for the prescribed matt varnish I would find myself chatting to him - I called him Mike, in the absence of other suggestions.

"Well, Mike," I would say, "this one's got cat hairs stuck on the varnish as well - you should keep old Whiskers out of the painting room.." and so on. I developed a technique of loosening the cat hairs from the varnish with the tip of a penknife, and then removing them with tweezers. A strange way to spend a long evening - this is almost certainly why I started talking to Mike. As time went on, it became a house joke that I had gradually changed my mind, and that I now believed that Whiskers had done the varnishing himself - perhaps with a little guidance from Mike.

Well the horses are pretty ghastly, but they should paint up simply enough, and that
gives me the better part of two new regiments of rather understated Northern horse

Since I've recently been rooting around in the Spares Box, I found another load of the ex Mike & Whiskers ECW boys, and I realised that there are a lot more in the heap which would usefully restore in the same way. So for a couple of evenings I've been washing and debasing and removing the cat hairs. Since these figures are probably a bit worse than the ones I selected for refurbing last time, there are a lot more cat hairs - in fact I have now begun to believe that Mike did the varnishing, but that he applied the varnish with Whiskers, rather than a brush.

And oodles more artillerymen - just the job for the sieges - more than enough...

It's going OK - we are now ready for a bit of touch-up, and then the matt varnish can start. I need to paint up a few extra cavalry figures from scratch, to make up the numbers, but I hope to get a couple of additional Scottish/Northern units of horse out of this, and I will have more gunners than I will ever possibly need - certainly I will have plenty to man the forthcoming extra artillery for siege games.

Topic #2 - more pottery ornaments ready for sieges...

I previously gave a glimpse of some of my new Tey Pottery houses - this little side-project is shaping up very nicely, and I have the makings of a presentable 17th Century English town centre, such as I can lay siege to. So here's a slightly bigger glimpse...

Cue the Spares Box, plus a World of MDF

All a matter of balance - and special equipment...

I have received the first prototype Thing (not sure what it is – a buttress, a pedestal, a support…?) to enable garrison units to stand on a walkway on the walls that is narrower than the subunit bases. My ECW Foote are on 60mm x 60mm squares, but the walkways are about 20mm wide – you can see the problem. The prototype seems to work OK – Michael has produced a build-it yourself kit in 2mm MDF which glues together to give a block 50mm wide, 48mm high and 23mm deep, and I attach a piece of steel paper to the top. Since my unit bases are all finished with magnetic compound, this should be a big help. I have glued-up and painted the prototype in a delicate stone shade, as you see, so that it blends in a bit (i.e. looks less stupid than you would expect). It should even be possible to mount artillery on the walls if I use the Things two-deep. Now I need a supply of about 20, plus I need a good name for a Thing.

The Thing

Troops on The Thing

Call out the trusty Spares Box. It also occurred to me that it would be useful to have some musketeers mounted in single rank, on half-depth bases, specially for siege and fortress work. It seems a bit of a grunt to paint some up just for this role (and I’d begrudge the use of figures which could be made up into proper battlefield units), but the Spares Box came into its own. A while ago I bought some old painted ECW figures from Harry Pearson, and some of them are from the very earliest “Subscription” series which Les Higgins made before his more famous centrifugally-cast 20mm range (of which I use a great many). The early figures are interesting because they are seldom seen, but for me they are a bit puny in stature to mix comfortably with the later ones. However, for isolated special-purpose siege stands they could be just the thing, so I did some (minimal) touching-up and revarnishing, and mounted them up on 30mm-deep stands. They could never be accused of possessing actual beauty, but I expect they will do as they are told. In any case, given their age and history, it would be sad for them to live in the Spares Box forever.

Surprised to find themselves on special duties - "Subscription" Les Higgins ECW

They can do it without The Thing

While I was looking in the Spares Box, I was also reminded that the ex-Harry figures also include some of the later Higginses which are in good nick and – with a few supplementary figures painted to match, should provide me with 3 new units of foote – there are some red-coated fellows who will give me a decent double-sized unit for Francis Gamul’s City of Chester regiment – there’s that siege theme again…

I also have prototypes for some of the new MDF structures which will form the basis of my trench sections, but more of that on another occasion. I also have some MDF pieces which will provide a pretty radical solution to the placement of rivers on my hex-grid table. I’ll get some painted up – this week, I hope – and there will be some pictures (unless they are terrible, in which case I shall just change the subject – good heavens, is that an elephant in the garden…?).

The river system is that I paint up some 2mm-thick hexes to be water – good gloss varnish finish and all that – I’m still pondering the best colour for water, by the way – I tend towards mud rather than sky-blue, but I am open to ideas. Then I have a series of bags of extra parts laser-cut from 2mm MDF, painted in baseboard green, which sit on top of the water hexes, and are painted on both sides to give maximum flexibility. The bags are labelled “cheeks – straight”, “cheeks – inners” and “cheeks – outers” and that sort of describes the system – there are two different profiles for a straight (a bit wiggly, these are not canals) and two profiles for a curve. Each river piece connects at the edge, with a 2-inch wide river in the middle of a (4-inch) hex edge. Using the cheek-pieces in different combinations, it is possible to produce a wide range of river shapes, and you can even make estuaries, lakes or a coastline. Until I get more to fiddle about with, I do not know the full extent of what is possible, but it seems very promising. When I have a decent number of pieces painted up, I’ll try to put together a post to demonstrate this.

Not painted yet, but this quick mock-up gives an idea of the scope, with a
very small number of alternative shapes - does anyone else remember
Slartibartfast? It may have occurred to you that the cut-out bits which are
missing from this picture are - well, roads! - aha....

I’ve had problems with rivers since I started wargaming, and hexes are just a specific variation on that theme. The new rivers, by the way, will not be the slightest bit dioramic – these are to be flat, tidy, obvious rivers that you can stand a unit or a bridge on without everything falling over. Like an oversized version of Commands & Colors terrain tiles, in fact.

More Siege Topics

I now have work in hand to produce effective trench sections, after some years of just thinking about it, and also to fabricate support pedestals to allow troops to man the city walls when their bases are deeper than the walkway – all clever stuff, but this will require a little while to produce something worth looking at.

In the meantime, I have been tinkering with some new pottery houses (all right – ornaments, if you must) which seem to be shaping up nicely to form a 17^th century town centre, and – since I had the brushes out – I have finally eliminated those ghastly red roofs from my Eco castle.

The Eco castle - now treated with RedRoof-be-Gone

I had been offered a wide range of advice – I’ve been urged to leave it alone, or completely repaint it, or do something in between, so I have produced a good British compromise – I’ve left most of the castle unaltered, and have repainted the roofs and touched in the windows to clean them up a bit.

I have also painted the swimming-pool coloured moat section under the drawbridge – it is now a charming shade of mud, and I poured in my new-and-trendy Decoupage medium, which – in theory – should set to form something looking like water. This last step isn’t looking too promising at present – the medium contains a surpising quantity of bubbles. The received wisdom is that these should disappear as the medium dries, but they do not seem to be doing this – which may be related to the fact that the medium does not appear to be drying.

Oh well – it may all turn out wonderful. If not, I assume that the medium will dry eventually in some form or other, and if necessary I can repaint and varnish or whatever. Let’s wait and see. I refuse to be pessimistic about it.

Down in the street in 17th century Chester, or some such place?

Just a glimpse of how this might look, with the old citadel looming in the background

Back to the pottery houses – these are the OOP Britain in Miniature series, by Carol Tey, who produced them in Norfolk for a while. Not all the range is suitable, but a few of the items are a useful size, and have a nice, stylised (almost playful) look which I think goes well with toy soldiers. They are, it goes without saying, my usual underscale mismatch with the 20mm figures, but they look OK (it also goes without saying). It is a dreadful thing to admit, but I am carefully applying matt varnish to these Tey houses – it improves the look enormously, though it would very much upset serious collectors. I have picked up these pieces very cheaply on eBay. It amuses me that the range is such that my besieged town is likely to contain a very high proportion of British tourist sites – all in one small area – Chester’s Rows, Ann Hathaway’s cottage, a number of inns and historic guildhalls from Norfolk – I even have my eye on John Knox’s house, which should fit in well, and no-one will notice…

Maybe.

I got hold of a good secondhand copy of Stuart Asquith's Guide to Siege Wargaming, and have been looking it over. Apart from the appendix in Chris Duffy's Fire & Stone, and the Battlegames articles by Henry Hyde which use many of the same mechanisms (especially the fast/slow time switch), all the books I have ever read about having a bash at a siege on a tabletop give you a lot of good information on how real sieges work, and more or less leave you to work this into a playable game yourself. This is the hard bit - that final step is a big one - it is the space where the PowerPoint slide says "at this point a miracle happens". Asquith's book is potentially good and useful, but it is of this type - there is a lot about sieges, but a few implied leaps of faith about making an entertainment out of the matter. No problem - I am quietly confident - I am seen to be smiling enigmatically.

One thing that this book certainly brings home is the dreadful loss which the demise of Gallia miniature buildings represented - there are many photos of Gallia fortress pieces and so on, in both 25mm and 15mm and they are - well, fantastic, actually. I've never seen such a thing on eBay - this book was published 1990 - I have no idea when Gallia ceased production - anyone know?

A Weekend Miscellany...

The Gothenburg, Prestonpans

First thing to note is that I found some missing photos from Wednesday's ECW game - nothing startling, but I'll tack a few on the end of this post. It seems that my camera had stored some of them in a folder I didn't know was there...

On Saturday I drove through to Prestonpans (yes - that Prestonpans), which is just down the road from here, to attend the Scottish Battlefields Wargames Show, which was staged upstairs in the Gothenburg pub. I was there early, since there had been concern that the small venue and the lack of parking space might by a problem - in fact, unless it picked up later, the attendance may have been a bit disappointing. Nice little show - there were a number of appropriately themed games, including some in which visitors might take part. I think there were about 7 trade stands, and maybe the same number of demonstrations, so there was a pleasant intimacy about the proceedings.

I liked this 10mm version of Flodden, presented by the Glasgow Wargames people, who
 - as always - were affable and enthusiastic and patiently informative

Some of the 10mm unsung heroes of Flodden

It was good to get a chance to speak to Graham Cummings, who was there selling his wonderful Crann Tara miniatures range (wow - these are seriously beautiful figures), and I was also very impressed by a new, Edinburgh-based venture, Supreme Littleness, which is Michael Scott's laser-cut MDF service. I've been sort of half-looking at MDF buildings for a while, and though they get quite a good press, I have not been convinced. Well, I think I am now. Michael does all sorts of interesting fortifications and buildings, in various scales down to 3mm - I was surprised at the scope really. He was inviting suggestions for new products and expansions to his range, and I intend to get back to him with some requests for 15mm scale earthworks, which he doesn't do at the moment. Here's my picture of some of the bits and pieces - from bases and game markers to medieval towers - which he had on show. I recommend a squint at his website (linked above). The 3mm village pieces are especially good.

Supreme Littleness - for those who have yet to be convinced about MDF...

It was also good to meet up with my shadowy friend Goya - I knew he was arriving when his security men and handlers came in to check that the CCTV was switched off. He brought along some impressive examples of his painting and conversion work to show me, and - just to give a glimpse of how the other half lives - I learned that he has found that the wire from champagne corks is perfect for fabricating replacement bayonets and sword blades in 20mm scale. The important point here is that Goya is teetotal - we may picture him ordering cases of Bollinger, so that he can pour the evil stuff down the sink and furnish enough sabre blades for his light dragoons project. Now that, you have to admit, is classy.

I took very few photos in Prestonpans, not least because I wasn't really speaking to my camera at the time, my confidence having been shaken somewhat by Wednesday's problems.

I got home to find that the postie had delivered my last two fortress components - a couple more gates, on which I have now daubed paint in the house style, so that they may take their place in the FORTS box.

One on the left is from JR Miniatures, the other is by Kallistra

And, finally, some more pics from Wednesday evening...

The Covenanters get a pretty clear run at the hill, if they can just get through that
pesky stream...

...and the capture of East Boldon didn't take long - more wet feet

General view, from the Royalist side, with the Scots getting their assault organised

Last effort from the King's horse, with Sir Chas Lucas about to be laid low for his trouble

Another general view, Scots on the left, just before the end