Qualiticast - just a glimpse of the unknown

I'm not sure why, but Qualiticast, the British manufacturer of 20mm wargame figures, has been a mystery to me. There is a brief summary on VINTAGE20MIL, which suggests they were sort of compatible, size-wise, with (presumably) Hinton Hunt, but there's no listing and no pictures. There is some discussion of Qualiticast on TMP, mostly about the Romans, and mostly repetition of urban myths - i.e. the figures are a little bigger than Newline, the Napoleonics are "unimpressive" and so on. Somebody produced a useful side-by-side photo of Qualiticast Napoleonics and 1/72 plastics, to give a size comparison, but that's about all the evidence I've been able to find. It seems very odd that all these years of involvement in Napoleonic wargaming have left me unaware of one of the makers I might have been very interested in, but no matter. The mystery has remained.

Well, today I received my very first Qualiticast Napoleonic figures. I am now a fan. I suggest that they are far from unimpressive. Just so there is no doubt, let me state that they are well proportioned, very nicely sculpted, and average about 23-24mm from soles to scalp. The figures I received today were part of a mixed eBay lot of Spanish guerrillas - a mixture of Qualiticast and Kennington. The Kenningtons are a very close match - the figures are about 1mm shorter (maybe less) and very slightly coarser in quality than the Qualiticast, but it's close, and it required some time poring over catalogue listings to work out which was which. They would be good with Hinton Hunts, though the castings are a little slimmer and more elegant than HH, and they would mix well with the HaT plastic guerrillas, for example. My eyes are opened - I shall watch with interest for more. They are currently out of production, and I am unaware of anyone who has stocks, but I did come up with a catalogue list, though I don't think it's complete.

Mixed guerrillas - the 3 on the left are Qualiticast (L to R NIS5, NIS1, NIS4), the rest Kennington (L to R SGA2, SGA5, SGA3) - you get the idea. The guy in the top hat is a little masterpiece, if his sword is a little long for true beauty.

Taking Stock

A lot of plates spinning at the moment. Sometimes in blogs you can witness people changing their minds, or you read of a proposed project which stalls, or of which you hear no more. That's absolutely fine - blogs should have that sort of daily journal role, with all the swings and changes which feature in our real lives, but it can also be rather a public way of failing to do something. That would worry me a bit, so I thought I’d do a personal checklist of where I’m up to. If you wish to share my checklist, then welcome aboard, but this is really for my own benefit!

My current projects which have started and which I've mentioned, but are currently somewhere in flight (or not) include the following.

Army Complete

Well, yes - I've arrived at the supposed destination, with some tidying up to be done, but during the journey it occurred to me that I could extend the line a bit. Some existing units are to be replaced (mostly for aesthetic reasons), I'm still working gently on an Allied siege train, and I have decided to add two further brigades to the armies - the French are to get the (fictitious) Vorpommern brigade, and the Allies are to get some Spanish militia and guerrillas to fight alongside the line troops. And then, of course, there is the small matter of providing more limbers for the artillery.

My Spanish Troops

The post on the Nationalist forces has appeared – I intend to do another two, one on King Joseph’s troops (and that one is waiting only for a couple of command figures to be painted for one of the units, so as not to spoil the team photo), and one on my new/proposed militia and irregulars, which will be a little while since there is much fettling and painting to be done to get them finished.

Vorpommern

This project has not disappeared. The first unit – the foot artillery company Stadt Stralsund – is at the painter as I write this, and should be back soon. I have figures reserved for the grenadiers, the jaegers and the 2 line battalions, though they are Scruby 25mm, and I spend alternate days worrying about how they can be painted effectively, given the almost complete lack of detail on the castings. I had cavalry put aside for them – also Scruby – but I really have decided that they are too awful to use, so the Vorpommern cavalry will be extra regiments of French-style chasseurs a cheval, which gives the slightly pathetic advantage that I can also use them as Frenchmen if required. Painting will proceed in due course.

The Grand Tactical Game (MEP)

Well, it exists, and I got through the Los Arapiles test with ideas for some changes. Further progress has been shelved while I get more experience with the Commands & Colors rules. Apart from anything else, there are mechanisms in CCN which are similar to, but simpler than, those in MEP, so there may be a little judicious cross-pollination coming up.

The Band of the Old Guard

This Minifigs S-range item has been sitting about for many years, waiting to be finished. Like all non-combat units, it keeps getting pushed down the painting queue. I finally got an official-issue drum major, and have bravely sent them off to the painter to be prepared as the band of King Joseph’s Spanish Royal Guard. No, I don’t know how they were uniformed, but I doubt if anyone else does either, so they are going to look very like the French Guard band out of Funcken! They will exist primarily for parades and other ceremonial fol-de-rols. I have abandoned the idea of a special morale bonus for neighbouring friendly troops.

The George F Nafziger Collection of OOBs

George F Nafziger

I had a very pleasant exchange of emails recently with Rasmus, from Portugal, on the subject of Spanish OOBs, and it reminded me that I do get occasional queries from various enthusiasts wondering about where to find good, detailed information about the various armies of history. My Salamanca OOB article for the Grand Tactical Game raised a number of requests for sources, for example.

I always direct people to the George F Nafziger collection, which - incredibly - is now freely available to the public online. I say incredibly because previously these things were available only by applying to Mr Nafziger himself, and cost a few dollars a page.

Anyway, the place to look is on the website of the US Army Combined Arms Center, which sets out an enormous list of files, in pdf form, which you can read or download.

The names of the files are coded, and to make sense of them you need the index. The index itself is rather hard to follow - the Napoleonic period, for example, appears in several different places. The best way to use this index is to download the complete thing (it's another pdf) and do automated searches on it for key words (e.g. "Prussian") to find the various relevant entries. Thus, for example, the index will tell you that 808GSAH is the Spanish Army at Baylen, which you can find in the main list and open up. 

This is a real treasure house. Mr Nafziger is to be heartily complimented, not only on his achievement in collating the information in the first place, but also on his magnificent generosity in donating the information for public view. To those who are familiar with this resource, and its whereabouts online, I apologise for the old news, but to anyone else I have to say that I cannot recommend this library highly enough.

Gotcha! - retail therapy for nerds

In the last two weeks, some very unexpected things have happened here.

I managed to win a lot on eBay which includes enough NapoleoN Miniatures British light dragoons - in authentic Peninsula-style Tarleton helmet - to make up a full unit when added to what I already have in my spares box. Very pleased with this - they can join the painting queue, and will eventually become the 14 LD, replacing my present late Phoenix Model Developments unit, which is splendid (Tim Richards mastered the figures, and I painted these back in the days when my eyesight was up to the job), but dressed for Waterloo. Also (sadly) they come from the days when scale creep was starting to make PMD a bit overscale. It doesn't matter a lot for most of the range, but the Light Dragoon figure (BN25) is definitely a whopper.

Whoppers. The soon-to-be-replaced 14th Light Dragoons - PMD figures. Their brigadier, Viktor von Alten, looks rather puny in comparison in the foreground.

Then, of course, I somehow managed to achieve the trick of accidentally buying back my own book - again on eBay - after it had been in orbit for a dozen years or more. I was hoping to dine out on this tale for some time, but, strangely, people I have told the story to in the pub invariably respond with an even more astounding story about how their Auntie Jean once met herself while on holiday in Tibet, so I have to assume that the impossible is, in fact, commonplace.

Now I have another unexpected triumph to relish. Somehow, my worldwide network of dodgy contacts has managed to trace two boxes of the out-of-production and unobtainable Falcata Spanish Lancers, and these have now arrived safely in the post from Vigo. If this event appears underwhelming, bear in mind that I have never seen any evidence that this set ever made it into production, so I never expected to see such a thing. They also will join the painting queue. There are two "uniforms" in the set, thus - if I ignore the falling man in each box - I should be able to form two units of lancers (one will be Julian Sanchez' Lanceros de Castilla, the other is a much more irregular unit in sombreros). With the leftovers, if I arm them with swords and blunderbusses and generally paint them all the shades of brown in the rainbow, I have the option of producing some mounted guerrilleros. The lancers, by the way, come without lances, so I will have to provide brass wire ones.

Naturally, being a miserable person, I am not tempted to rush out and buy a lottery ticket on the strength of this unaccustomed run of luck, and I am only casually keeping an eye open for meteorites or falling pianos, but it does make you wonder. If someone now comes up with 4 packs of NapoleoN Miniatures British heavy dragoons (in bicorns), plus maybe a couple of their Spanish generals, I will be as near to a happy bunny as makes no difference.

Calloo, callay.

Custom Wargame Dice

Here's an early preview of my new Two-in-One custom dice for wargamers. To be honest, we're still having some teething problems with them.

They are very comfortable in the hand, and are specially designed for those gamers who don't like to get results too quickly. They also have obvious appeal for devotees of Little Wars-style games, since they are ideal for throwing at the enemy's troops.

Commands & Colors: Napoleonics - More On-the-Job Training

Russians & Prussians down the right hand side. Terrain is based on the Rolica scenario. I wouldn't drink from that river.

This weekend I finally played my first CCN games with an opponent. Clive - the Old Metal Detector himself - kindly came up to the Land of Mud to help with the action. I even got to see his umbrella, which he brought along.

The CCN game is now sufficiently well established for there to be a good number of players with more experience and better understanding than I have, so there is not a great deal of point in my revealing my findings in great detail, but we did learn a few things.

We fought three battles which were closely based on the first 2 scenarios in the CCN book. I say closely based because:

(1) My hex table has the hexes rotated 60 degrees from the CCN board, and has slightly different proportions. None of this is a big problem, but I am now giving some serious thought to painting CCN-oriented hexes on the reverse side of my war boards, complete with painted-out part-hexes on the edges of the table (don't hold your breath).

(2) Clive brought some lovely vintage Russians and Prussians - mostly Hinton Hunt and Der Kriegspieler - to fight my French army. In the absence of an official GMT national chart for these armies, we defaulted to making their characteristics the same as those for the French.

To finish 3 battles in a day, still able to speak and walk about, is a rare event indeed at my house. We learned a lot, almost all of which is certainly well known to many other players already. The main things were:

(1) The game makes a whole lot more sense with two players. It is an excellent game, though I do not think it is the only game I will ever wish to play.

(2) For players with little experience of CCN, defending is far easier. We decided that attacking needs very good co-ordination of troops (and thus shepherding of suitable cards). In particular, bringing artillery up to support attacks needs a lot of skill.

(3) The limited activation of units, about which I had misgivings, works well. Luck with the fall of the cards helps a lot, but the turns are crisp and logical, and the game seems inherently sensible as you play it through.

(4) It does matter where you place your generals - if you are sloppy about this, a leader may get in the way of one of your fighting units, and he might even be eliminated by enemy attack.

(5) The game works well with miniatures - we had no problems with the rules, though inexperience required us to do a lot of reading of the fine detail of Bonus Combats and so forth. It is vital to make best use of the terrain, and to use troop types to their strengths.

Retrospective edit: Clive now has a couple of very nice slideshows of his photos of these games posted here or here.

A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to the Probability Well

Following comments on a recent posting, I decided to obtain a copy of David Gates' The Spanish Ulcer to replace the one which I sold some years ago, before I had had a chance to read it. I guess I don't really need any more books on the Peninsular War, but this one is well thought of.

I had a scratch around online - there were some used paperbacks for sale here and there, and it was obvious from the price of good hardback copies that the book is in some demand. I was delighted to obtain a decent hardback copy on eBay at a very reasonable price. It arrived this morning, posted from Wigtown, in the bottom left corner of Scotland.

It is an excellent copy - it smells faintly of cigarette smoke, but not upsettingly so. On the front endpaper is my name, dated August 1986.

I sold a large part of my book collection - in the days before eBay - to a dealer in Kelso, in the Scottish Borders. The seller who sold it to me this week says it came from a military collection in East Kilbride, so it has circulated around southern and central Scotland for over a decade. Scotland is not a heavily populated country, but when you consider the events that led up to my decision to purchase, this is still a fairly long shot.

Anyway, it's back, and I am pleased to see it. Thanks to all who contributed to the discussion which brought this about.