Prize Giveaway at "Don't Throw a 1"

Congratulations to Ray at one of my favourite blogs, Don't Throw a 1, where he has reached 250,000 hits. To celebrate this, he is offering a giveaway prize of some painting, which is certainly worth checking out, so go and have a look at once!

White Mountain - 30 Years War Rules

Just a quickie (matron). This may all be well-known, but it is new to me. I came across a hex-&-command-card game for the 30 Years War (and, by implication, the English Civil War) called White Mountain. This is available for free download from Anubis Studios. It is very obviously a close relative of Commands & Colors, and appears to be played on a CCA board. The download includes rules (4 pages), QuickRef, text explanations of the cards (you have to make your own) and some pretty snazzy looking stickers to put on wooden blocks.

I had a quick squint last night - a little more of the philosophy behind the game would have helped, but there may be some of that on Anubis' pleasantly wacky website. At first glance, there are a number of interesting features in the game - units accumulate "disruption" points as well as losses, direction of facing is used to identify flank and rear attacks, command appears to be only at unit level. Some of it looks pretty clever, though it is possible that some of the simple elegance (elegant simplicity?) of C&C has been lost among the bells and whistles. The move sequence, for example, includes a number of options which I was still thinking about when I dozed off last night.

This has not compromised my devotion to Victory without Quarter, I hasten to add, but it is free(!), and may give an appetizer for Richard Borg's mooted prototype ECW Commands & Colors game, which I am definitely watching out for.

Having got a few decks clear, I hope to start painting my first ECW units this coming weekend, so am looking forward to that. A couple of fairly generic units of foot to start - one of Royalist blewcoats and some whitecoat Parliamentarians, I think. I have bought in a small stock of florist's wire for cheapo pikes, but I hear a rumour that they also make brown florist's wire, so am looking around for that. Painting wire is not hard, but it's dead boring.

Anyway - thought I'd mention White Mountain.

Hooptedoodle #56 - Levi

I’ve finished the Magnetic Sabots project, and hope to write up the Solo Campaign notes for Wellington’s last two weeks in charge in a day or two. Today’s more-than-usually-pointless Hooptedoodle is just a yarn – something I’ve been thinking about this week.

It’s probably a time-of-life thing. Sometimes I remember someone, or some event, that I haven’t thought about in many years. Mostly my recollection is crystal clear, but increasingly I find that it seems like some of the things actually happened to someone else or – occasionally – they seem so improbable that I wonder whether maybe I just read about them or dreamed them up. Tales from a bygone age.

A couple of weeks ago I did a stand-in job with a jazz group, and was delighted to meet up with my old mate Finn the piano player. We chatted about this and that, and then he said, “Did you know Levi died?”.

Wow. Levi – hadn’t thought about him for ages, yet for a short period of my youth he was the person I hated most in the whole world.

The first time I got married, both my wife and I were 22. I was a year out of university, an actuarial student, and she had a decent job in a bank. We had both had more than enough of student squats and shared bed-sits, and we rented a lovely little basement flat in a Georgian property in Edinburgh’s West End. It was more than we could strictly afford, but we felt that the comfortable surroundings would ease the shock of being newly-wed.

Levi was our landlord – he lived upstairs. I first met him when I went to sign the lease. My recollection is of a grey man – grey hair, grey face, grey suit, grey tie – in (probably) early middle age. He showed me into his sitting room, which was immediately above the flat and actually occupied the same area as the entire flat. You could have had a reasonable game of football in there, with spectators. It was furnished with exquisite taste – the whole place looked like something out of a lifestyle magazine. Levi himself was not very impressive, but he spoke like Earl Mountbatten. He lived with his mother – a surprisingly jovial, astoundingly Glaswegian lady whom we only saw once in the 2 years we lived there. We used to make up mysterious tales about how she was kept in a cupboard downstairs – certainly she was not much in evidence.

We called him Mr Toad, because he looked and dressed rather like the character from The Wind in the Willows. Levi would tell me elaborate stories about the people he knew and did deals with. He described himself, with practised vagueness, as “a sort of property developer, and a would-be patron of the arts”. He used to say things like, “Of course, I’m very friendly with the Steiners...”, which impressed me not at all since I had never heard of them, nor any of the other names he dropped.

The problem was that we only had the front half of the basement. Our half and his half were connected by a locked door, for which he had the only key. I installed my future wife in the flat in May, and I was to join her there after we were married in October. Immediately, I started getting panicky phone calls – someone had been in the flat, tidying up her clothes. Someone had walked through our flat and left through our front door, at 1am. Levi phoned me, too, to express his displeasure over the fact that my intended had moved a vase from the desk to the dresser – he had moved it back.

I went to see him, and said that the reason we paid him rent was because we were depriving him of the use of part of his property, so I would be obliged if he would stay out of the place. I told him that I intended to fit a bolt on my side of the connecting door, and henceforth it would only be opened by agreement between us. He went crazy. For a few minutes, he ceased being a grey man and became an extremely crimson man.

If I read the lease, he said, I would find that he was entitled to all reasonable access, and in any case the official fire-escape route for his basement passed through the flat, so this was a legal matter. What he didn’t say, of course, was that he paid considerably less in council rates since the flat was not actually separate, and no tax at all since the flat did not exist as a rentable entity. A couple of nights later, he showed some dinner guests and some people from a catering company out through our flat at about midnight, and I phoned the police the next day. The police said this was just a disagreement between a landlord and tenant, and they didn’t wish to become involved. I said my wife was frightened to be in the flat alone. That did it.

The police were round to see him next day, and then came to brief me. They gave me some useful ideas about things I could say to him which might carry some weight. So I rehearsed a bit, and I went to see him, and told him that it would be a most awful thing if I came across him or some of his guests in my flat one night, failed to recognise them and caused them serious bodily harm – of which I was quite capable.

We had no further trouble with the connecting door. Levi and I exchanged very few words during the two years before we left to buy a place of our own. I occasionally saw him in his big picture window, glaring at me as I came and went. I still imagine him like that – a grey man with the light behind him. He must have lived to a good age. Apparently he was still alone when he died.

Solo Campaign - The Poll - Know Your Candidate

Banastre Tarleton, circa 1790

This follows from an email I had from Ludovico, asking me who is this General Banister, and also from the Old Metal Detector’s last comment to the previous post, which rightly draws attention to the general confusion between the real Tarleton and the fictional Colonel Tavington (from The Patriot).

For anyone who really wants to know a little more about Tarleton, can I point you to a rather good, brief, pleasantly gossipy biographical note here. It hits on the main themes, the mixture of fact and legend in his reputation from the AWI, and his military isolation after he fell out with the Duke of York and Wellesley. In fact, BT appears to have fallen out with a great many people – he was an outspoken Whig, and the possessor of a sardonic and deadly wit. Anyone who invariably referred to Wellington as ‘The Sepoy General’ needed an element of – how would you say it? – bottle. His promotion to full General and his appointment as Governor of Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1812 were worthless tokens for someone with his ability and experience

I fear that I misspelled his name – he was Banastre Tarleton. I was also guilty of prematurely giving Rowland Hill a knighthood. To preserve balance between the leading candidates, I had a brief look for an interesting bio for Hill, but am alarmed to see that, apart from his military career, his life seems to have been almost entirely free of anything interesting. Not to be defeated, I’m still working on it.

If you haven’t cast a vote in the poll on the right, I’d be very pleased if you would consider doing so. You won’t win a digital camera, but you might help the British Army to defeat the French in Spain and change history forever. That’s not an offer you get every day, is it?

Solo Campaign - Situations Vacant - Poll

I need to appoint a successor to Wellington - I'd welcome votes in the little poll on the right, or comments or other nominations. All help and insight welcome. I reserve the right to ignore everything and make some daft, random appointment if I feel it's appropriate - the traditions of British government have to be observed. How about the Prince Regent as C-in-C, for example? Someone suggested the Duke of Brunswick. Someone even suggested Bernadotte, but I'll come up with some detail regulation to exclude him.

Avec Mes Sabots – the attraction of magnets

This follows on from the Magnetic Spaniards post from earlier this month. So impressed was I by the sturdiness of wargame units fitted with magnetic sheet (stuck underneath the bases) standing on steel paper (fitted, and painted, on top of the "sabots") that I have immediately set about a whole new project (distraction) to extend this system to my entire Napoleonic collection.

This little sub-project breaks at least 3 well-established rules from Foy’s Book of Wargames Lifemanship for Boys, viz:

• do not change your bases, and especially do not change your basing standard for an existing army – this is the road to heartache and depression
• do not allow any fleeting idea to fire up a project which  diverts time and effort away from something you really wanted to do
• if your collection contains something which you have had for a great many years, think carefully before you throw it out or replace it

However, I have convinced myself that it is worthwhile on all counts, so am going ahead. Thus far, I’ve done all the Nationalist Spanish, and am now about half-way through the French army. To illustrate what is involved, consider this example - I have my line infantry units mounted as 4 bases of 6 figures measuring 50x45mm standing on a 110x110 sabot, which sit well with my 7" hexes. Neat patches of mag sheet, cut to size with scissors, fitted to the existing bases, and a 100x90 footprint patch of steel paper on the sabot, painted in the baseboard/tabletop colour, requires a small investment in materials and time, but greatly simplifies handling both on and off the battlefield.

Naturally, any self-respecting hobby project has to sprout arms and legs, and in this case the add-on task is to replace the tattier specimens of sabot. Most of my troops have been rebased within the last 7 years or so, so the bases are very good, but the sabots are variable - recent ones are good MDF, but the older ones are horrible curly cardboard, and it would be foolish indeed to put steel paper onto these. So I ordered up some custom sizes of laser-cut MDF from the excellent East Riding Miniatures (which arrived within 24 hours, as always) and am taking the opportunity to replace any sub-standard sabots I come across while I am fitting the magnets.

My sabot sizes? I have 4 standard sizes:

Type A   (line infantry)        110 deep  x 110 wide

Type B   (skirmish units)     110 x 90

Type C   (light cavalry)       110 x 160

Type D   (heavy cavalry)    110 x 135

Each of these gives me 5mm spare on either side of the troops’ bases, to make it easier to pick up units by the sabot. There are other odd sizes, but I just cut those myself as required. Why no artillery sabots? – I don’t use sabots for artillery, and all the artillery has already been fitted with magnets in order to store them in box files.

In pricing this little “improvement” project, I am not going to include the cost of the replacement sabots, on the grounds that this is something that needed doing anyway – thus I estimate that the cost of the magnetic materials, including wastage, works out at rather less than £0.75 per unit on average, which seems very reasonable.

Because I promised to do it, I’ve featured a picture of some Sideways Frenchmen formed into line on the fridge door. OK - I've done it now - I do not wish to talk about it again.

Tips and things I’ve learned so far – not much, really:

• you can easily mark the paper side of the steel paper with a pencil, but the mag sheet has to be marked out on the shiny plastic backing sheet, which is resistant to most known forms of writing medium. A very thin Sharpie marking pen does the job, but you have to keep wiping the ruler clean. Holding the ruler still on the slippy sheet is tricky, too, but a steel ruler will attach itself nicely (aha!).
• the scissors get badly gunked up with the adhesive, so it’s necessary to clean up with Sticky Stuff Remover or isopropyl alcohol or similar every couple of hours
• only observed practical downside of sturdily mounting figures on the sabots is that if you catch them by accident they will not tip gently in the traditional forgiving way, so watch out for those bayonets – if you have to wave your arms around while explaining a point of the rules, take care!
• the magnetic sheet is glossy and slippery – if I put magnet-fitted bases on a non-steel-paper sabot, they are even less stable than they were, so this is an all-or-nothing effort 

And, finally, Avec Mes Sabots is the chorus line from an ancient French song, which I seem to have learned in my early childhood. Here you can join in and sing along – it’s through the Square Window, boys and girls.

Home Brewed Flags - More Spanish Units

Here's another of my occasional posts featuring home-made flags produced with PaintShop Pro - as ever, it's stuff I've been working on for myself. If these are any use to you, please be my guest. Right click on the image - open the link (bigger version) in a separate window and save.

If you print the entire image so that it is 120mm high, the flags will be the correct size for 1/72 or 20mm. These are deliberately far lower resolution than, and therefore inferior quality to, my previous efforts, but I found that at 20mm scale you can hardly tell the difference, so these are from Cheap'n'Nasty Productions Inc - not recommended for 54mm armies.

A few of these are specific units, as identified, some are pleasing generic things I borrowed and tweaked, some may even be from the wrong century - it's OK - Cheap'n'Nasty have a certain standard to maintain...

If you like them, you're welcome to use them. As ever, the tasteful green background is just to make it easier to cut them out!