The Big Table Takes a Bow

I'm expecting a visitor tomorrow, so I've set up the newly-extended version of my wargames table for a battle. This will be an expanded (17 x 9 hexes) Commands & Colors: Napoleonics session, which is basically a stretched version of the official scenario for San Marcial (August 1813) from Expansion 1 of the GMT game, and I'll use the Battlelore tweak for the Command Cards to facilitate the bigger battle. [If you are at all interested in this rules tweak, let me know and I'll explain it in a further post.]

The set-up - Spaniards on the left of the picture, Gen Freire with the yellow border

View from behind the French right flank - the Spanish hill at this end is held
by a brigade of voluntarios,  who are classed as militia and thus are subject to triple
retreats. There may be trouble ahead

The pictures show the set-up, ready for tomorrow. The French (mostly Germans and Italians, really) under General Bertrand Clauzel will cross the Bidassoa, which is fordable along its length, and try to knock General Freire's Spanish army off a line of 3 hills. 10 Victory Points for the win, and there is a special rule that the side occupying the greater number of hexes of each of the hills at the end of their turn will gain a temporary VP for each hill held. I'm not using the Guerrilla rule for this game, mostly because I think it's rather a silly rule…

The historical Battle of San Marcial ended with the French abandoning the attack, and thus losing on points. We'll see how it goes.

Scenery – Lilliput Lane!

It feels as though I have always been aware of the Lilliput Lane range of miniature buildings – I regard them as collectibles for oldies with an excess of pocket money and shelf space. Not very interesting, not my kind of thing, overpriced and far too cute for my taste, but certainly very nice if that’s what you like.

Hinton Hunt 20mm ECW soldiers with Lilliput Lane Scottish buildings - not bad?

A few years ago I made a conscious (and not easy) decision to use underscale buildings on my wargame table – my figures are sort of 1/72-ish, which translates to about 20mm, but I use 15mm scale buildings as a matter of policy. They look fine, they take up less space on the battlefield (and are therefore a bit less of an offence against the age-old mismatch of vertical and ground scales in the games) and they are, of course, cheaper than their bigger cousins.

My Peninsular War buildings are of various makes and came from various places – I like resin buildings, and I enjoy painting them myself. I am aware that I have buildings from Eureka, Hovels, JR Miniatures, Battlezone and others I can’t remember. Sometimes the scale slips downwards a bit – some of my buildings, judging by the ease with which the men could pass through the doors, are a bit tight even for 15mm, but it’s amazing how the convenience numbs your sensitivity to this inaccuracy. It is true that an HO or 25mm church would look more natural with the miniature soldiers, but this is more than outweighed by the fact that it would be the size of a fair-sized village on the battlefield.

My standard issue, home-painted 15mm Hovels

When I started on the ECW, I bought in a pile of Hovels Medieval, Northern European and “English Rural” series buildings, and some rather more Germanic things from JR, and I’ve been working my way through the painting of these as time permits. When my interest in this period suddenly performed a lateral arabesque in the direction of Montrose and his chums, I had a need for some Scottish looking buildings, and was surprised when a search on eBay for “Scottish” and “buildings” threw up some examples of Lilliput Lane products. Of course, most of them were unsuitable, and prices were generally very unsuitable indeed, but there were a few very interesting examples on offer.

I am not a convert, I will not blossom into a collector, but there are a number of very useful pieces out there. There are a few problems, apart from price – these items are all sorts of different sizes and scales, and very few sellers bother to put dimensions in the listings; the models themselves are collectible without any attempt to have a constant scale - having said which, Lilliput have recently produced their “Full Steam Ahead” series, which are specifically targeted at (very wealthy) N-Gauge model railway enthusiasts.

The trick is to ignore the new stuff and the listings aimed at serious collectors – there are some real bargains among the clearances of someone’s late grannie’s bits and pieces, especially if, like me, you could not care less about the missing box and deed (certificate of authenticity), and are happy to get out the paints to touch up chips and scratches. In fact, I have been known to drybrush some erstwhile collectible with Khaki Mist #4 to tone down the colours a bit – enough to send genuine LL collectors screaming for therapy.

I am also happy to snip off the happy wedding couple from a rural church scene (or lose them inside a tree), so I am a real heretic in the LL world. It is also necessary, of course, to check on sizes. I have had a couple of minor failures, but they can always be stood on the top of a distant hill, or put back on eBay – how can I lose at these prices?

On the face of it, this would make a decent wargames piece - bad news is
this is a limited edition, so I'd have to sell my own house to buy it. Nah - not
suitable, far too collectible for me...

A complete battlefield covered with LL buildings would be an abhorrence by any standards – the more complicated set-pieces cover too much ground anyway, and do not lend themselves to having soldiers placed as a garrison – but I am now keeping a gentle eye open for suitable bargains on eBay – mixed in with the Hovels and similar they can look impressive, and they give extra interest.

I am currently chasing a nice little windmill which looks just about right to stand on the next hill from my Hovels mill, and there are a number of slightly chipped manor houses which would go well as the centrepiece of a village or a siege scenario. I’m a bit embarrassed about it, to tell the truth, but it’s all good fun.

Hooptedoodle #142 - Not Much Here, Either...

Topic 1: Curtains for All of Us – an Everyday Tale of Mystery

Who lowered the floor, then?

When I first moved to my present home I was still smarting from the financial implications of divorce – I was not exactly starving, but I had to be more careful than I had been used to. In the attic of the oldest part of this house there are two bedrooms which were a loft conversion, probably carried out in about 1975 – years before my time.

These two rooms are connected by a glazed double door, and there is a curtain pole above the door to protect the modesty of the people who sleep there. I duly went to Argos and bought a cheap pair of curtains. They were blue, and – because of the amount of sunlight which comes in through the big roof windows up there in the attic – they very quickly faded to become strange, striped, blue-and-light-grey objects. Not great.

Sometime later, after the Contesse had joined me here, we smartened things up by replacing the old, piebald blue curtains (which are still around, in my dust-sheet box in the garage) with some new, cream ones. These were also from Argos, but how can you go wrong with a cheap pair of curtains?

A quick word here about Argos – they are a fine institution, and I have bought a good number of decent objects from Argos over the years. However – and this is nothing to do with snobbery or anything – there is a specific point about shopping there.

Whereas, if I buy something from Marks & Spencer, or Next, or John Lewis, or a number of other such stores, there is always a vague implication that the minimum quality you can get will always be acceptable, this is not true of Argos, in the same way that it was not true of Woolworths when they were going strong. It is possible to buy an item from Argos which is so cheap that you are left wishing you had spent rather more on it. This particular brand of curtains is of this sort.

The first issue was length. Naturally the cream curtains were not the exact length to suit the double doors, so the Contesse (a very fine wielder of needle and thread, in addition to her other talents) measured one of the curtains, worked out how much to shorten it, and neatly cut and hemmed this amount from the bottom of each.

Bong.

Bong

The reasonable assumption that the paired curtains were the same length to start with proved incorrect. After the hemming and pressing was complete, one of the curtains required a few inches more to be removed to match them up. This was duly carried out, and since then they have done excellent service through the years, gently fading to a lighter shade of cream.

We have recently had the old roof windows replaced, and during the cleaning-up after the builders had gone the curtains were washed and pressed. They are now paler still – a pleasant off-white shade, but interestingly they are different lengths again. One has shrunk to be a few inches shorter than the other. No great problem – maybe it is time to invest in some new curtains again – but we wondered idly whether the original mismatched lengths would have shrunk to be the same if we had left them. It seems unlikely, but it would have been a hell of a piece of planning on the part of the manufacturer. We agree that our next curtains will be

(1) Rather better quality, if possible

(2) Washed and pressed before being cut to length

Something tasteful, understated... 

Topic 2: Places which Do Not Exist

This is a real hotchpotch. I’ve always been fascinated by place names, and also had a very soft spot for the figure of speech (is it a zeugma?) which is exemplified by “he set off, in high spirits and a tweed suit”. Many years ago, an equally daft work colleague (Rattigan) and I used to entertain ourselves (and irritate our workmates) by inventing place names. This started out when, one day, a female colleague said that she had not yet met a man she would care to marry, but “she lived in hope”.

Rattigan felt that it would be splendid if someone did in fact live in, say, a village named Hope, and this led to a fantasy that someone might claim to live in Hope, which alas was only a short distance from another village called Despair. I still shudder to think what the unfortunate folk we worked with made of our guffaws, but this whole topic gained quite a momentum.

Rattigan invented another village named Abject Poverty, inhabited by the less fortunate, and so it went on. I can only claim, in our defence, that the work of our department was pretty tedious otherwise. Names of real places are a wonderful store of history, or common culture, or recollections of communal bad breaks. At the very least, some old names give an insight into how people thought, or how their language sounded, in times which are now largely forgotten.

The subject is worth a long treatise of its own, and I have written something in past blog posts here about the wealth of fine and whimsical names in Northumberland and Durham, and about the development of convincing-but-fictitious ECW-vintage North of England names which stopped short of the music-hall Clagthwaite. I end this with a tale which is merely silly, but it gets us close to the fertile topic of place names which have become rude as the language has changed – a source of endless delight to children from 4 to 104.

Some years ago, our summer holiday involved a drive from Scotland to the ferry terminal at Portsmouth, en route for Brittany. We stopped overnight with friends in Leicestershire to break the journey, and some time the following morning we found ourselves in Northampton, travelling – to the joy of my son – along a highway called Pants Lane. Almost worth the entire cost of the holiday, I’m sure you will agree.

Since then I’ve tried several times to check this out. If you look at maps of Northampton, you will not find Pants Lane. How can this be? – we read it on the street signs in 2008. Is it possible that a bashful or irate community (or their elected leaders) have suppressed the traditional name of the street, rather than celebrating its value as a source of local pride?

What is the mystery of Pants Lane? Is it too awful to tell?

In fact, the answer is disappointingly mundane, though in its way it is a triumph of the human spirit. The road is actually called Bants Lane, but a long and noble tradition ensures that children have always systematically defaced the street signs to produce the preferred version, and the council has yet to find a way to stop them doing it. Similarly, the children of the village of East Linton, near where I live, insist on altering the signs to read Fast Linto; though no-one knows what it means, that is the corrected form. Tradition is a fine thing.

Thought for today. The council can change Chamberlain Street into Mandela Way any time they want, without a great deal of fuss and maybe without even asking anyone if it’s OK. What about the democracy thing? – if the kids of a town alter the street name for long enough, could it ever become, officially, by usage, Pants Lane?

The - er - Diggers

There is an odd relationship between what places are known as, and what their official names are. This finds its most common form in the names of public houses. In Edinburgh there is a famous pub, well known to Hearts football fans, called the Athletic Arms, but it is always referred to as “The Diggers”, and there is an old cemetery across the street from it. There can be no-one left alive who remembers any direct connection between the pub and the men who dug the graves, but it’s part of the lore of the city.

The Tyne Bridge at East Linton

In the aforementioned village of East Linton there is a handsome, but very narrow, bridge over the River Tyne (not the same one as goes through Newcastle), and it is not so very long ago that the main road from Edinburgh to London passed over this very bridge. That part of the village is known, not surprisingly, as Bridgend, and for many years the Bridgend Inn stood close to the bridge. The inn is still there, though now it is the Linton Hotel. What the locals call the pub, though, is the Red Lion, which is the name it bore for a while after it was the Bridgend Inn and before it got its present name. Weird stuff this – do people hang on to old names out of tradition, or out of natural cussedness, or just to confuse visitors?

Hooptedoodle #141 - Nothing to See Here...

The classic wargaming blog non-post - a description of not much progress, and the uninteresting reasons for this. You have been warned.

I’ve been a bit busy this last week or two. I was, in any case, scheduled to be involved covering for my mum’s carer (who has been on holiday for a fortnight), but things have been further confused by a messy little building job here (which, by the nature of such things, slipped a week or so, so as to maximise the clash with the other distractions) and – most seriously – by my wife’s mother being admitted to hospital with a stroke; she seems to be making some progress, but it will be a lengthy and uncertain period of recovery. For 10 days or so the Contesse has mostly been driving all over the Scottish Borders to make hospital visits, collect clothes, and provide a taxi service to friends and relatives.

So, apart from catching up on my reading of the Lasalle rules between watching football matches on TV at my mum’s house, all wargaming related activity has stopped dead here. I followed and thoroughly enjoyed the World Cup – most exciting, and was sort of aware of Wimbledon and the Tour de France, but it’s all been a bit of a shambles – hearing snippets and seeing newsclips as time permitted.

I thought it was interesting and great fun that the Tour de France started in Yorkshire, and fairly boring that it also had to include London as part of the detour(?) – wouldn’t be a show without Punch, would it, and we can’t have the Provinces making too much of it. Without wishing to appear miserable or unpatriotic, I admit to a small amount of satisfaction over the quick elimination of Britain’s Mr Froome – surely one of the more irritating sporting heroes? – who fell off his bike 3 times in 2 days (or something like that), fortunately without causing himself too much lasting damage. I have been a bit depressed by the shrill melodrama surrounding Team Sky and its line-up of soap queens in the build-up to the event. Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I have followed bicycle road racing for years, and I have a nostalgic, pathetic affection for the days when a domestique was a domestique, road racing was dominated by exotic foreigners and the Tour de France was – well, in France. The picture at the top of this post is of a possible configuration for Mr Froome’s consideration.

It had to happen – some acquaintance took the hysteria surrounding the football World Cup as an opportunity to produce a personal Facebook campaign about the overpaid fairies who play football, pointing out that rugby, on the other hand, is a game played by Real Men. Of course it was all in fun (oh my aching sides), but it isn’t very original and, considering the respective viewing figures worldwide, it is certainly not particularly relevant. It also fails to mention that, at grass roots level, and particularly in the case of the acquaintance who initiated this little  onslaught, rugby is also (arguably) a game played by Real Men who are too heavy and unco-ordinated to play anything more skillful. Anyway, how we larfed.

I heard this morning that the F35 fighter did not appear at Farnborough, which is obviously a bit embarrassing, and is a very sad disappointment for the many enthusiasts who were hoping to see it. I know little or nothing about the plane, though I certainly hope it isn’t another overpaid fairy, but it did occur to me that the Farnborough organisers missed an opportunity – they could have claimed that it was actually there, and was demonstrating its remarkable stealth capability.

Board Extension - Done!

Well it took a bit of fancy timing, with ducking and weaving, watching the World Cup games between coats of paint, but the new 28-inch extension to the battleboards has been duly collected and finished. As an option, I can now play a Commands & Colors game on a 17 hexes x 9 hexes field (over 30% bigger, as they would say in washing powder adverts), or use a similar enhancement in my non-hex plain boards if I deploy them the other way up.

The flank marker is shown as the triple dash marks at the left edge for the normal
13 x 9 game; the single dashes are the flank marker for the 17 x 9 game, with the
three sectors becoming respectively 5, 7 and 5 hexes wide

After 3 coats of the official Crested Moss shade, it became clear that the insert was never going to get to be quite the same colour as the original sections (it's the same paint - it's even the same tin, but the surface texture is slightly different), but it's near enough for jazz. In fact the photos make the difference a little more obvious than it looks when you're in the room with it.

This is just a hurried mock-up to check it works - for a battle, the table stands
in the middle of the room, so there's less space than there appears here

I still have to paint the backside of the new piece, to be honest, but there's no immediate rush for that. My war-games may not be better, but I have the option now of making them bigger.

By the way - in passing - I read that the forthcoming C&C Napoleonics expansion for double-width games is to be called La Grande Battle. What language is this, exactly? I have a good number of American friends, and I know for a fact that as a nation Americans are neither stupid nor ignorant, so why would GMT Games want to try to convince us all otherwise? Why not The Bloody Big Schlacht?

I guess it's a worthy successor to Guard du Corps - Franglais êtranglé strikes again. Come on, GMT - don't blight a good game with a crappy name.

Once More unto the Bleach, Dear Friends

Jock after his second confinement - note matching beard

Jock the Guinea Pig has had a further 6 days in the neat bleach, and his paint will still not come off, though it has changed colour more than somewhat.

Righto – time to move onto further experiments. I have identified a source of Simple Green, as advised, but am greatly impressed by the relative cheapness of Dettol, so that will be the next trial.

Jock has served his time, so will be spared any further suffering. I’ll use one of his mates...

How about Something in a Larger Size, Sir?

Last September I finally took the bull by the wassname and repainted my 40-year-old battleboards. I had some misadventures on the way, but ended up with a much smartened tabletop – one side now having the hexes the correct way round for Commands & Colors (previously I was 90 degrees off, though I could justifiably claim that I was there first), while the other side is now very smart, plain Old School green.

I was so pleased with the results that it started me thinking again of producing an extra section of table, to produce an optional, bigger battlefield. There are a number of drivers for this.

(1) I’ve always fancied a huge tabletop as an occasional variant – the fact that I have nowhere handy to set up such a thing is an issue, of course. I have a secret hankering for a vast battlefield in a marquee in the garden, but that is impractical for a number of reasons. Nice idea though.

(2) I recently read the Black Powder horse and musket rules, which I enjoyed, though it was a bit of a shock when they casually announced that, of course, the game was best played on a table at least 12 feet long. Er – right. Of course, I ignored this, but I kept finding myself thinking, “hmmm, 12 feet long…”

(3) When I repainted the battleboards, I did some thinking and some measuring, and I came up with something, as follows:

My tabletop is 8 feet wide by 5 feet across, cut into 4 sections, each 2 feet x 5 feet, for easy storage and to enable them to be laid out on our (large) dining table, in a dining room whose design, if I am to be honest, was influenced by wargaming needs. The C&C-style hex board is the correct 13 hexes wide by 9 across, and the hexes are 7 inches across the flats. These are big hexes, but they sit well with my 20mm (or so) armies. Since the 4 tabletop sections are symmetrical, the centre line of the table could have a 4-hex-wide fillet inserted, which would give an expanded version of the table which is 28 inches wider, and a revised C&C board of 17 hexes by 9. This would require a couple of MDF hex plates to be painted to allow the C&C flank demarcation line to be shifted one hex in from each end when the long version is in use, but this is a trifling matter.

I estimate that this extended version of the table will still fit in the room, though it will now be necessary to walk around it at one end only – full circumnavigation will not be possible, but – hey – I need the exercise.

At risk of getting really wild, it would be possible to add further, similar slices to the centre of the table in future to produce a Memoir 44 Overlord (or CCA Epic) style giant board – but at this point we really are looking for the marquee in the garden, or a church hall yet to be identified.

Back to the point. The first 28-inch extension fillet is feasible, and I have plenty of paint left over from September. If this is not going to go ahead, I’ll have to come up with some new and better excuses. The most obvious excuse is that the tabletop is made of old-fashioned ½-inch chipboard, which I am not sure is available any more.

That excuse didn’t last long. I phoned my local branch of B&Q, who have masses of 12mm chipboard, and are absolutely itching to use their computer-controlled cutter to produce my new extension for what is really a very small cost.

Well, I don’t have my truck any more, so how will I transport it home? That one didn’t last either; with the back seat folded flat, my car will take a 5 feet x 28 inch panel, no problem.

So I’m going to do it. I measured everything up accurately, and (allowing for inaccuracy in the 1971-vintage cutting of the original boards) I need a perfectly rectangular piece 1531mm x 711mm.

I have a feeling that somehow it can’t be as easy as this, but I’m off to B&Q tomorrow morning to do the deed. There will be a lot of marking up (with my tongue sticking out) and painting and suchlike, but my extension should be coming up shortly.