Seven Years War

After enjoying a couple of good games on Sunday Simon asked me to give him another game of War and Conquest, more a learning game than a match to the death, so I was quite happy with that. I went with two Romano-British forces both with Allies, the armies were a mirror of each other and were kept basic, no fancy stuff like elephants, chariots, cataphracts etc.Parking at the club has now fallen foul of the modern equivalent of belt and braces, the building in whose grounds I have parked for what, over three years, maybe four now has girls staying in it, so in order to keep them safe bollards have been erected to stop cars parking, it seems strange that no one has mentioned that possible monsters on foot will have no problems but hey, what do I know.Back to the good stuff. Simon lined up with some infantry way out on his right then nearer the centre his cavalry, Milites, Picts, Comitatus and Franks, I put my cavalry on my left then two units of Milites, Saxons, Welsh and Comitatus. It wasn't going to be a fancy

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So after the Giant army I went the opposite way and returned to some 10mm Seven Years Wars.  As part of my Seven Years War collection I'm building the Russian army for the battle of Zorndoff.So lots of red uniforms.....and quite a few cossacks.Here are a few pictures of the batch I painted 9 Generals 9 Horse Grenadiers40 Grenadiers120 Musketeers Sorry for the bad pics, IPad.

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Not a lot to blab about today, I didn't attend the club this week as I decided to get on with some bits and pieces which had been building up, not so much wargaming but those things which get you nagged at by a certain person. Rob was running a Cruel Seas game and I have to admit although I love the small ships it is not something I would run out to play, so I gave it a miss. I managed the small jobs and banked the brownie points for use later.I never learn and have jumped into Chain of Command with both feet, luckily I have all the troops I need so it is the peripherals which are costing me, a bit like cream cakes, I don't need the stuff but I want it. So I got some Allied and German dice with pretty symbols for the six to use as command dice to save them getting mixed up with the 'killing' dice, not that I have done this so far but hey they have symbols on them. I actually have a set of 2nd Panzer dice which came all the way from Australia but no, they wouldn't do and no, I cannot explain it.Next up was Too

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Club night and I was joining yet another new game bought by our club magpie Stuart, who actually brought two, but we only played one, Battlestar Galactica. This game is produced by the same people who now own Wings of Glory (aka Wings of War) and it involves small model spaceships in dogfights where no one can hear you scream. Can I just say here that some of the players know more about these spaceships than is healthy, you know who you are, I couldn't tell a Viper MkI from a Mars Bar, I could but you get the idea.Anyway on to the game, it is far more complex than Wings and in our 'training' game I got the impression I needed a degree to fly the thing, you have a small control box and you have to take in speed, kinetic energy, heading, height and other stuff, the cards are also way different from the one dimensional WWI cards and give all sorts of manoeuvers, speed and difficulty on the one card. It became apparent that the space equivalent of the hand brake turn is the way to go. You play two cards at a time

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As you know I have gone back and took another look at Chain of Command, also, as usual I have jumped in with two feet. I sorted out patrol makers and tactical markers last week, I have also searched out a QRS and other information pertaining to playing the game and stats on the weapons, all printed and laminated of course, oh, and I also bought the rules. Like a madman I am also on the cusp of buying some Russian campaigns although I do not even have Russians, I already have one.When playing Stuart last week I managed eventually to plonk some smoke down, we had to use some small cotton wool tufts which we had to imagine were 3" in diameter. This of course wouldn't do for Casa Anderson, I sent off for some cushion material, not expensive but I was a bit surprised at the size of the bag, at the same time I got some 3" round bases from Warbases. I have a can of spray carpet glue and simply sprayed the bases with this and stuck a handful of the cushion material on, another spray and I whacked on some more, you ca

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I am not superstitious but I am beginning to wonder when my inherent military genius will enable me to climb out of the trench of defeat or at best a draw. I was humbled at the weekend at Risk by Mrs A jubilantly conquering Australia, South America, Africa etc. and leaving me with a ragged rearguard in Kamchatka, a Scotswoman quite happy to put the boot into a man who is down and she is from the genteel side of the country.No matter, I have completed the next of my SYW troops, another battery each for the French and British, I got a Front Rank piece but in future I will stick with Eagle Miniatures as they are very nice castings, I also got a small ammunition wagon for a small vignette and it will be primed today. I am a bit stuck for artillery crews because they will obviously all begin to look the same as I only use Front Rank at the moment, I shall have to use some ingenuity if I can find some. Foundry are too big and others are too small while other SYW manufacturers simply do not do gunners. I did look at

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Some of you out there are going to roll your eyes to the heavens in a mo, I am thinking of giving Chain of Command another shot, there I have said it. Why, well I am not sure, I watched a couple of videos the other night and what went on looked a lot easier and less horrendous than all my other attempts to like this game. Now I could just have been utterly useless and stunned by my previous attempts and I will admit to not being the best WWII player around, but I am a wargamer of some experience and the situations I found myself in were terrible and not a lot of fun. They were also multiplayer games and like Bolt Action at the end of the day these are designed for 1v1 play, maybe that was a problem, maybe not.I also cannot get away from the fact that I think the Patrol Phase is one of the best mechanisms I have ever not used, in fact I am surprised it has not been adapted for other periods, maybe with a bit of tweaking but it must have potential. When, now I have to read the rules first then either sort out a

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Saga campaign game again at the club, one of my two defending games, Saxons had invaded the empire and I had to sort them out, they had obviously heard of the fabled wealth of Byzantium and came to grab their share.Once the preliminaries were out of the way we had five turns to play, in a line I had Hearthguard, Warriors, Warlord, Hearthguard and archers, I cannot not take archers as far as I know, I had decided this time to plonk them in some terrain which helped their defence if attacked. The Saxons (Dan) put most of his men on my left and at when it looked like his hearthguard might suffer from some archery (yeah right) he turned these towards his right as well. So I moved the archers forward as you would do, but this was a mistake, back came the Hearthguard at the trot and smashed into the archers, shades of Manzikert again.Byzantines But this time the archers did not die in droves, well they did but enough remained to fall back, this opened up some opportunities for me, I ran my cavalry into the Sax

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I finished my second French cavalry unit last week, the Apchon Dragoons, a nice red coat with light blue facings, this gives me two cavalry squadrons for each side now. It was time to order up the next batch of SYW figures and I drew back from the Grenadiers I wanted to get two more cavalry units, one each. Now I am not a big fan of painting cavalry and have reduced the squadrons from twelve to eight figures so I came up with a brilliant idea, you get two cavalry flags for the one regiment from GMB and if you just continue to add different squadrons you end up with a lot of flags left over, so why not build two squadrons instead of one. Now the really clever part is that if I ever do need a large unit of cavalry I can combine two eights for sixteen, voila!The not so clever bit comes next, instead of ordering basically the same figures I made a mistake and ordered up a new set for the British, these will not fit as the 10th Dragoons second squadron so I had to order up another set of flags as this lot will be

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Right, what with one thing and another it has taken me ages to get the grenadier battalion finished. I had thought of doing one stand from each of the regiments I had already done or was planning to do but decided this was too labour intensive. I therefore split the battalion into grenadiers from only two regiments, ironically two which I do not have.Anyway I chose the 55th (green) and the 23rd (blue) regiments, the latter being the Welch Fusileers I am not planning at the moment to add either of these to my forces. Quite a bit of lace work and I just noticed on the photographs that one guy has slipped through with a bare left sleeve, need to get that done asap. I am pleased with the look and after one more British cavalry regiment I will have to make up my mind to do more British or move on to the Hanoverians etc.Complete battalion.23rd.55thI have quickly managed to get my 75mm howitzer done, it was not a complicated paint job, I tried to reduce the camo colours to show they had faded but it is hard to do wi

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Another bunch of Scots for the Seven Years War with more to be added later, I had a look at the Perry AWI Highlanders and think they would do for a couple of battalions and fit well with my Front Rank figures. There is also one more Scots battalion I can add to the French. So the long term plan for the rest of the year which has just come to me, is the Highland battalions for the British, Scots and Irish for the French along with another artillery battery and cavalry regiment for each and we will see where I am after that.You really have to fit the uniform to the figures with SYW, and I think the only thing with these troops was the missing shoulder tab, which I could have painted on but didn't and the cuffs which I did paint properly with the blue slash. I get all my information from the Kronoskaf site which I take to be correct in most details and is a fantastic research site for wargamers, I even gave them some money.I have got the Bolt Action bug again and having got the Tiger I cheap I decided as you kno

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My Vapnartak post got more comments than anything else I have done, at the end of the day any show is what you make of it, I always enjoyed the wargames but I am harking back to my days at the McClellan Galleries in Glasgow or Claymore in the building across from the Museum of Scotland, back when CND picketed we armchair generals. I can get everything I want online so the wargaming side is more important to me, but I think I am barking up the wrong tree there. The issue of being ignored is another matter entirely but I will let that rest, maybe it is me, my classic good looks tend to scare people.Anyway, I have finished the Rubicon Tiger 1 I treated myself to. The kit was pretty easy to build and had options for early, mid and late war, I am not a rivet counter here and would be quite happy to pay a couple of quid less than get road wheels and such I have to throw in the bin. The only thing I was not entirely happy with was the tracks, to my eyes they were just not very detailed, and the bottom layer which th

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It has taken me a couple of days to get around to this report thanks to the incompetent doctors at my local surgery, I have had an infection which has made my life miserable for almost four weeks now, they said it was gone, I said it hadn't, so a week without medication and it got worse. Then they give me penicillin despite what I suspect was a big red warning across the screen as I am allergic to it, thankfully I noticed it before I took any. The sorry saga continues.Due to the above I toyed with the idea of not going to the club, but Stuart and Rob had brought 'Cruel Seas' for me to try and I couldn't let them down. As you know this game seems to be sweeping the board in popularity at the moment, you can't walk the streets now without searching for torpedo wakes. I do not have the game and will not be getting it, three people at the club have it and I have my Seven Years War project to throw money at. Despite not getting the game I have been following developments as it is produced by Warlord Games, it woul

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I won't bore you with the details of my ills over the festive season, suffice to say I am 95% back to normal and I already have three bookings at the Docs to kick the year off. I have now finished my French cavalry, I did not manage to base them last year so they are the first to be completed this year. They are the Royal Roussillon regiment dressed in a nice blue with red trimmings, they were supposed to wear a cuirasse but trying to get figures to correspond to all the uniform variations is impossible, thankfully it does say that they wore their tan waistcoat over the cuirasse at times so that was fine by me. I am now going to cut my cavalry regiments down to eight figures, I may still do the odd twelve man but I want to cut down on painting and expense.I bit the bullet and ordered up my next four infantry battalions, this should keep me painting until Easter as I am away for most of March. I have the 51st Foot and Grenadiers for the British also Grenadiers for the French and how could I resist the Royal Ec

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Just a very quick update, only one unit of Russian Cuirassiers, Prince Fedorovich.Again the standard Russian Cuirassier uniform.

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