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.

Hooptedoodle #122a - a more fitting tribute to the 1980s

Following on from my attempted non-rant about Margaret Thatcher Day, someone reminded me of this clip.

I was never a big fan of Spitting Image, to be honest - there were some funny bits, but they aimed low and dumbed it down to promote the viewing figures, and - for me - the inherent paradox of satire looms overall:

If you mock everything, and do not stand for anything yourself, then your criticism carries no weight; if you invariably poke fun at the Establishment, then that is just what we expect you to do - it becomes meaningless - a sort of Establishment job.

MSFoy   2014

Whatever, here is Sting's own parody version of his hit record, over the credits at the end of the last show in the first series (1984) - I  found it powerful at the time, despite the trivial context, and I think I still do. In amongst all the silliness - in both world affairs and the smaller world of rubber puppets - here is something sincere. That was the Eighties, my friends, and it wasn't all bad, but there's some old friends in the gallery…

Hooptedoodle #122 - Donkey Award - Peter Bone Day

Well, goodness me. At first I really thought it was a dry run for April Fool's Day, and then I began to suspect that it was a rumour created by the Scottish Nationalist Party to produce a panic rush towards a "yes" vote for independence, but - no - it was a fact.

This very day, 28th February 2014, a second reading has rejected a Private Member's Bill introduced last June into the British Parliament. This was the work of Mr Peter Bone (illustrated, above), and was a  move to have the national August Bank Holiday in the UK renamed Margaret Thatcher Day. Mr Bone is the Conservative Member for Wellingborough, in Northamptonshire, and he appears (not for the first time) to have got it rather badly wrong.

I refuse to make any political observation here, other than to note that he seems to have rather over-estimated public enthusiasm for the idea. The Bill has received remarkably little publicity, yet an online petition opposing the idea received some 124,000 signatures, of which 7,000 arrived today, in anticipation of the second reading.

If you are going to do something really daft, perfect timing is essential, and this must be close to that.

Some questions occur to me:

(a) where do they find these specimens?

(b) who, in God's name, votes for them?

At Long Last – proper British Peninsular War dragoons

Le Marchant's Brigade - fresh from the painter

I am delighted to introduce the official version of Le Marchant’s Heavy Brigade, circa Spring 1812. As I have mentioned on a number of occasions here previously, I have been looking for figures in the correct uniform in this scale since about 1975. For a while I considered the Hinton Hunt dragoons, but I could never have collected enough anyway, and I excused myself on the grounds that they would be a bit small for my heavy brigade. I rejected Qualiticast for exactly the same reasons. I also had a serious look at the Minifigs S-Range bicorne dragoons, but the uniform is a little early for my purposes. Another, better option was the Falcata boxed set (now OOP) of KGL dragoons, which are perfect apart from the fore-&-aft bicorne hat fitted with chinscales, which was a local eccentricity of the KGL. Briefly, there was also the NapoleoN version of the KGL boys, which were lovely figures, but - like everyone else - I was snoozing during the short time they were available.

3rd Dragoons

4th Dragoons

5th Dragoon Guards

My final version, therefore, is a hybrid – Falcata men with S-Range heads, on Falcata campaign-order horses. This has been an extended labour of love, and it is only fitting that I commissioned Lee to paint them to his usual high standard, so I am really very pleased indeed to have them ready and in The Cupboard.

My previous (post-1812, helmeted) regiments have moved into the Allied Odd-Bods box, while I decide what to do with them. They served as stopgaps for 40 years, so some respect is due.

British Sappers & Miners

For a while now, I have been looking for some fellows to do sapping and mining work for the British army in my Peninsular War siege games. I already have some nicely authentic French sapeurs armed with pickaxes and shovels, and garbed in cuirasses and helments – these are from the LW and Strelets sets, and were kindly donated by Clive when he came to do some siege testing a couple of years ago.

It might appear to be an obvious subject for a plastic set, but no-one has done a British equivalent to date, so I have been keeping an eye open for conversion possibilities to balance things up. I have a few odd figures – also left by Clive – from the HaT British Marines and Sailors set, and even a couple from the Orion English Pirates set, who can serve well enough as men stripped down for serious digging. To these I have now added some men from Art Miniaturen’s nice set of Austrian engineers, plus a couple from the Finescale Factory set of French pontonniers (which I believe is now back in production, and available from SHQ), and a pair of officers from Falcata.

It occurred to me that an undressed man of any nationality is pretty much the same, so the possibility of these becoming Spanish by simply substituting a couple of specifically Spanish officers into the line-up is already noted. There is one of the Austrians that I attempted to fudge into a pre-1812 Royal Artificer who would need to be hidden or replaced as well.

Ideally I would have used officers with spyglasses or something more obviously specialized (I had ideas of modifying a British ensign so that he was holding a pole, but gave up on that one), but ended up with a couple of chaps lining things up with their swords – presumably with the intention of guarding their men while work goes on, or at least of pre-empting any possibility of disagreement about the task in hand.

As with their French opposite numbers, the men are individually mounted on 20mm discs, backed with magnets so they may stay on their movement trays, and the bases themselves are painted in the official house shade of Siege Mud which is used for siege equipment and engineering.

I’m a little bothered that the man with the wheelbarrow is easily recognizable as Hamish, with whom I played in a band for many years, but he doesn’t seem to be bothered so I won’t consider the matter further.

Another ticked box for the siege games – the British may now dig holes and tunnels whenever they like. Next big gap is some decent trenches and earthworks. Don’t go holding your breath.

Topsy Turvy Wargames – why not?

This will be another of my more ruminating posts – asking a pile of questions, and offering very little in the way of answers. There’s something I can’t quite put my finger on – definitely some idea which is just out of reach. You might well be able to explain it to me, or even convince me that the matter can be safely forgotten about. This is not going to be a competent review of the Huzzah! wargames rules, though it might encourage you to have a look at them.

There were quite a few starting points this time – some probably more obviously significant than others:

(1) I was telling someone about one of my favourite daft moments in a military book – in Frederick E Smith’s screenplay paperback of Waterloo (from the 1970 Bondarchuk movie) there is an episode during the Battle of Ligny where Smith states that “suddenly a shot rang out”, and – of course – Blücher’s horse is hit, and the old bugger is pinned underneath. History notwithstanding, think about it for a moment – suddenly a shot rang out? – and, presumably, it broke the complete silence in which the Battle of Ligny had been enacted prior to that point? Yes, this is silly, but somehow it encapsulates what we expect military dramas to say – more significantly, there is maybe something here which reflects the way we think of battles.

Certainly, my wargames are a bit like this. Because of the tricks we play with time and activation to make the game playable, the tabletop action consists of a series of isolated volleys, separated by periods of measuring and calculation (and whatever else it is you do during your games). Sad person that I am, I sometimes play a background soundtrack of a horse-&-musket battle during my wargames, which is fun, but it is very obvious that the activity on the audio is not very like my battle, which seems much more like a series of shots suddenly ringing out, as it were, in an otherwise silent and mathematical context, in a style which Frederick E Smith would recognize immediately.

(2) In a comment about a recent blog post, I mentioned that I suspected that – certainly at the time of the ECW – the proportion of people killed by an aimed shot intended for them was small. If someone dispatched you while holding the other end of a sword, or if he fired at short range to stop you attacking him, then there was some personal malice involved, but otherwise casualties must have been men who were hit by a passing ball – if there are enough bullets flying about, someone is definitely going to get hurt. It’s like running with scissors – you just know it’s going to happen.

(3) I remembered a minor (low wattage) lightbulb moment I had a couple of years ago when working on Grand Tactical rules; I realized that the tedium of answering the same, repetitious questions about the tactical situation of an artillery target fired on by more than one battery in the same turn could be simplified by considering the total effect on the target unit in one go, rather than as a series of separate shots from the firers. In other words, turn the thing back to front and think about it from the target’s viewpoint. Topsy Turvy, in fact.

(4) As part of an ongoing pastime I have of reading wargames rules, I recently came back to Huzzah!, published by Oozlum Games, which is a ruleset I have never really played with, but which interests me greatly. It is, so to speak, back-to-front in that it focuses on the risks to, and demoralization of, a unit in a combat situation rather than studying individual volleys and the reaction to them.

(5) (This is the last one, I promise) – I was reading someone else’s ECW rules, and was surprised at how effective musketry at long range (100 to 200 paces) was. I can see that someone coming within 200 paces of a musket-armed unit is getting into a stressful situation, but somehow the risk doesn’t seem to me to be simply that of being hit by an aimed volley at such long range.

OK – that’s all the inputs. This left me thinking: what is it that a musket armed ECW unit does to an enemy unit 200 paces away? I think what they do mostly is they frighten them. The potential damage and pain that is implied is more significant than the loss occasioned by the aimed balls at this range. How the recipient unit reacts to this is dependant on a familiar list of things such as their training, fatigue level and so on – the Morale shopping list.

The important point here is that a battlefield is an appalling place, filled with noise, horror and flying metal. Any unit coming within firing range of the enemy is, first and foremost, entering a very dangerous place – an area of high risk. The Huzzah! approach seems appropriate. A commander’s view of one his regiments is not how many have been killed, it is are they still in action, and can they still hurt the enemy? Inability to hurt the enemy any longer could certainly be explained by their all being struck down, but I think there is a general agreement now that what mostly happened was that the effects (physical and mental) of being in a very dangerous and stressful place for a period reduced the effectiveness of a unit to a point where they no longer contributed to the army’s effort.

My battlefield soundtrack seems to portray complete mayhem – a whole pile of firing going on throughout – yet we know that units would try to conserve their ammunition, and that there would be little point in firing blind at distant targets. The Topsy-Turvy approach (courtesy of Huzzah!) is that we consider the situation of a unit which is such-and-such a distance from various threats, and is thus stressed by the sum of the various hazards – as currently experienced and also the expectation of what could happen next. There is a whole pile of lethal material flying about – the nearer you are to the source of the firing, the more discouraging (and damaging) this will be.

The emphasis shifts to examining each unit’s exposure – how far are they from each potential threat? Never mind the individual firers and their activity, assume they will be keeping busy, making things unpleasant, and consider instead the state of each unit exposed to fire.

I have no draft rules to sum this up, and no firm ideas yet, other than an itch which needs scratching, though you might be interested to read the Huzzah! rules.

Topsy Turvy. Interesting. Maybe?