CCN - a belated afterthought

This post is primarily one for us CCN nerds, so may be of even less interest than usual to anyone who is not an enthusiast...

Back in July, I did a short write-up of an encounter battle fought using Commands & Colors (CCN) rules. The scenario was a bit of an experiment, and gave an entertaining, if lengthy, game. I am thinking about running another such game, so have been re-reading the scenario add-on rules from that occasion, and I can see the need for a small-but-significant change.

In the original, after an initial deployment allowance on the first turn, the scenario rules required units and leaders to come onto the field only as cued by the play of the CCN Command Cards, which works fine (though it makes the game very challenging). This section of the scenario rules stated:

First move (French first) – place up to 4 units/leaders on the field, anywhere up to 5 hexes from your own baseline, but not within 2 hexes of the enemy.

Thereafter – units may only be brought onto the table as a result of activation by Command Card play. Leaders may not arrive already attached to a unit. Infantry may not arrive in square.

With the benefit of hindsight (and 3 months later, this is real history), the bit about Leaders not being attached on arrival was a bad mistake. Given a limited allocation of arrivals, since the Command Cards seldom do one any favours, we should not have been surprised to find that, given a straight choice between bringing on a Leader or a fighting unit, a stressed general would almost invariably go for a unit. The Leaders thus arrived late or never, and the lack of them distorted the game a little.

In future plays of this type of scenario, I'll change it so that Leaders are allowed to arrive already attached to units, which means they move free, without the expenditure of a separate order (as a passenger, almost!) until such time as they get a specific order to leave the unit. This simplifies the game a little, but should give a little more sense to the action.

More Generals

I am very partial to the Miniature Figurines 20mm OPC celebrity figures. I don't have many, but they are fine chaps. The casting detail is a bit approximate, but they are vigorous, pleasing sculpts, and - apart from potential bending of the rear ankles (fetlocks?) of Ney's rearing horse, they are robust and very practical. Clive very kindly sent me Thomas Picton, whom I have rebased and who has now replaced my (later) S-Range version.

Sir Thomas

Since I had the tools and the brushes out, I also painted up the Napoleon figure from the same MF20 series - this came through eBay a little while ago, and had so many coats of paint that I failed to recognise who it was (how embarrassing is that?). After some sessions in the bleach, he has now been painted as Joseph Napoleon. This is only slightly outrageous - I am happy to assume that there was an uncanny family resemblance, and there is a mounted Joseph in Strelets set 048 which looks pretty much like a smartly dressed Napoleon. For preference, I would have liked my new Joseph to have epaulettes, but he is the King, for goodness sake, so he can wear what he likes. I had also thought of giving him a new head, with a less identifiable hat, but I don't much like hacking about with rare old figures, so he obviously gets his headgear from the family supplier. His sidekick is another eBay recruit - pretty much as I got it - just a wash and some varnish. This figure is Hinton Hunt's Marshal Soult (FN357), but it is not painted in Soult's colonel-general's uniform colours, so in my army this is some illustrious member of Joe's staff - maybe Marshal Jourdan, or General Hugo, if it matters.

King Joseph with support - "So let's get this straight - the cavalry are the ones on the horses?"

In passing, you will note my colour coding for generals' bases - division commanders have a white border, and army commanders are in a 2-man group with a border in the "national" colour - thus Wellington and his ADC have a red border, French army commanders blue (as shown), and I am pondering what to do with the forthcoming Spanish C-in-C - yellow? The borders are really just to help in spotting the fellows on a busy battlefield but, like a lot of features of my collection, this simple convention has become a house rule in its own right!

I have a number of generals being worked on at the moment. The arrival of a mounted Joseph is a slight embarrassment, since I was also contemplating having a Joseph on foot (also Napoleon, though this time a Qualiticast one), standing with his carriage - anyone got a 20mm scale chamber pot for Vitoria? I'm sure that Musket Miniatures must make one - they make everything else.

I also have a lovely set of French staff (on foot), by Qualiticast, to be painted. This is down the queue a bit. I had a painted French staff group before, and they never got on the battlefield, so in some irritation I sold them after about 10 years. Groundhog Day coming up.

Speaking of generals, I like the look of the new Zvezda Set 8080 - French Napoleonic HQ Staff. If I could find a use for them (and - let's face it - if I didn't have such an unreasonable reluctance to use plastics), I would buy the set just for the ADC mounting his horse.

Unky and the Sniper

Great Uncle Alf, my mum's uncle, has been dead for 40 years at the very least. My recollection of him is just snatches - I remember he was a life-long chain-smoker, which meant that whenever he laughed everything collapsed into an evil, bubbling spasm of coughing. I also recall that he still rode an old double-knocker Norton at an age when most of his contemporaries just sat by the fire. He talked a lot, but didn't say much - mostly nervous guffaws and small stuff. My cousin and I, as young lads, knew that he had had a pretty hard time in WW2, and we used to ply him with sherry at the family Christmas get-togethers at my Nan's, to get him to tell us about his adventures. Again, there wasn't much, but there were occasional glimpses of Hell which seemed to contrast strangely with Unky's normal role as an elderly buffoon, and they fascinated us.

A fitter with Liverpool Corporation Trams before the war, Unky seems to have been an Army Staff driver in France early in the War, but later was in the REME. We got some fragmented tales about removing the remains of the crews of disabled tanks with a hosepipe, which produced appropriate standing-up of the hair (we were about 12, after all). He also told a few eye-witness stories of the evacuation from Dunkirk, which didn't seem to correspond with the John Mills movie - we got a few details about officers using their pistols to commandeer boats, British soldiers shooting at each other in the general panic to get off the beach - things like that. Unky and his great mate Sefty finally managed to board a small steam cruiser, which was immediately hit by a bomb (from a Stuka, he said), and sank in minutes - but they simply stepped onto another small boat which was alongside and were taken back to England without further incident. Unky used to tell these stories without any emotion at all - I believe that he did not have the imagination to tell us much apart from the truth. The most emotional he would get was reminiscing about the generals' staff cars being burned at Dunkirk to avoid them falling into enemy hands - as a born mechanic, Unky was far more upset by the demise of classy cars than by the butchery of the troops - or so it seemed.

This all came to mind because I have been reading a book about snipers. Unky had a sniper story. After D-Day, his unit was camped for a while near the edge of a small wood in France, and a German sniper in the wood caused them a lot of problems. They all used to fire back, blindly, whenever shots came in, but they were mechanics, and didn't really know what they were doing (Unky's own words), and after a while the sniper would start up again. After a couple of days, the company cook was killed - and this was just too much. Since a mass advance into the wood might have been a bit like a duck shoot, it was decided that a couple of volunteers should go around to the far side of the wood, and prowl through, trying to spot the sniper and take him by surprise. Though he could not remember how it came to pass, Unky found to his astonishment that he was one of the volunteers, and spent an interesting hour creeping through the wood, praying that he would not find anything. He said that he had a very clear idea of what kind of a physical specimen the sniper was likely to be - capable of breaking him in half with his bare hands - and what an ill-matched struggle might result from this adventure. As he said, "I was walking through the wood, stumbling over things, and I felt as if I had great big target rings painted on my f***ing back!".

He found nothing, and there was no further firing, so the next day they did send a big gang in, and they found the sniper, dead, in some bushes. Presumably some lucky return shot had hit him - he had obviously been dead when Unky went in, but, of course, he wasn't to know. He just spent the rest of his life mentioning it occasionally at Christmas, if we kept the sherry coming.

Poor old Unky. I still get a shudder when I think about it.

Beauties & Beasts

I've been putting together some mixed bataillons de marche, and I was rummaging through the spares boxes - reaching layers that usually don't see the light, and I was also thinking of the very pleasant email I received from Jean-Marc recently, in which he noted his disappointment at my lack of enthusiasm for ROS 25mm figures - he being a big user of their 6mm chaps.

So this is simply a small collection of pictures of odd figures which caught my eye - not particularly significant or collectible, but some of them are examples of things which I like very much (sometimes for reasons I would be pressed to explain) and some are things which are somehow classical in their - well, simplicity, shall we say. I criticise nothing here - these are just a tiny sprinkling of the rich variety of wargames figures which have been available to us over the years.

Scruby OPC infantry colonel

Scruby infantry drummer - you can be a sculptor too

Qualiticast Rifles Officer - you can't do this, though

NapoleoN Light Dragoon officer

Minifigs 20mm Brunswicker - why is this such a satisfying figure?

ROS 25mm - the French were the ugliest

And, lastly, simply because they were well received when glimpsed in a recent wargame pic, here's a proper view of the Phoenix Model Developments Royal Horse Artillery. Guns are Hinchliffe 20mm, and the mounted officer is the notorious Minifigs BNC20, which sold in surprising numbers because a bunch of optimists like me hoped (vainly) that they might convert into Light Dragoons. Painting is by the great Jez Farminer, slumming it a bit to conform to my house style!

Posh New Dice from Canada

Arrived in the mail today - new wooden replacement dice for Commands & Colors: Napoleonics, supplied by Valley Games, of Canada. No, I really didn't need them, but since I was slightly disappointed by the quality of the build-it-yourself dice which come with the game (though I am sure there is nothing wrong with them) I felt I was sort of obliged to get some of these.

Very nice - something pleasing about wooden dice. They are also rather smaller and lighter than the original issue, which may be good news for bayonets. In any case - let's come clean here - I am a bit weird about dice anyway. Love the things.

My picture doesn't really do them justice - I should have dusted them before photographing them, or put them in a less sunny location. Bit of a failure, really.

Stochelo

I got a little gentle grief through email about the downbeat nature of the Tom Waits track, so here's the wonderful Stochelo Rosenberg to brighten things up a bit.



The blog is still sleeping, by the way. Hush.

Blog on Hold

Very short non-post to explain that I'm having a bad attack of Real Life, and this blog will be quiet - probably for a few weeks. Nothing dramatic - it does not (necessarily) mean that I have died - I am in the process of selling my business, so will be preoccupied until further notice.

This has nothing to do with Liverpool FC getting hammered by Tottenham yesterday.