Chancellorsville and Glory II

If there's one thing I love about boardgames, it's setting them up. I may not get through a whole game, but I do like to get the maps on the table, weight them down for a couple of days to sit flat, leisurely put the counters in place (in consultation with appropriate reference works), and then admire the scene. 

I got Richard Berg's Glory II: Across the Rappahannock about ten years ago, I would guess, when I was in Japan. I set up a couple of one-mapper scenarios, but the whole battle of Chancellorsville is a three-mapper, and I didn't have the dedicated space over there to tackle it. 

The first thing you appreciate is that three maps do the terrain justice. Here we are looking from the west towards Fredericksburg, with the Union forces in the foreground converging on Chancellorsville itself.

Moving east, we see Anderson and company digging in around Zoar Zion Church and waiting for support to come up.

On the heights overlooking Fredericksburg, McLaws stays in prepared positions (for the moment, at least).  

Further south, Early observes Sedgwick and his command across the river. 

It is 7:15am on May 1st, 1863: Hooker is at Chancellorsville, the Federals are massing, and the action is about to commence. Shelby Foote provides commentary and atmosphere; we are all set.

With the prospect of playing this out solo in front of me, I re-read the Foote account and traced it out on the map. I planned to come downstairs the next night and start the game.

But I didn't. 

And that is all we got to.

A week later, I still have not started. Back into its box it goes.

It was a nice project to a certain extent, but I'm a touch concerned, looking at the vast numbers of boardgames on my shelves, how little I actually play them. I wonder if this is what my relationship to the meatier boardgames has come to: are they now just a tool to visualise action, rather than to play it out? 

Or maybe I just need to start pulling chits and rolling dice rather than opening my phone!

Shogun

I'm not a huge TV watcher, but a mate told me I had to watch the new Shogun series, so I did. I now join the vast majority and recommend it highly. Sanada Hiroyuki (as producer) has got it spot on.

It widens and narrows its scope superbly. Great job. 

 

Review: Forged in Battle 15mm Later Seleucid Elephants

 (This review was originally written for Slingshot, the Society of Ancients' Journal, after a review pack of elephants was passed my way. For whatever reason, the review was never published. I happened upon it while going through some old files and thought I would post it here)

Forged in Battle 15mm LATER SELEUCID ELEPHANTS (code MS05) review.

Contents

The pack comes in ten pieces: two identical elephant models with attached towers – the towers are filled in, not hollow – two elephant heads, one with armoured trunk, one without; two identical mahouts in tunic wearing crested Attic helmets (though there may be variations – the website image shows a differently-attired mahout in what appears to be tunic and headband), and six crew figures modelled from the torso up, to be attached to the top surface of the tower. The crew figures are comprised of two archers, two javelinmen and two pike-bearers. They are in various combinations of linen armour, breastplate, and tunic, and wear Boiotian, Attic or Phrygian helmets. In my pack the two sarissa bearers are in different poses, but the archers and javelinmen are not.

Assembly

The pieces required a bit of filing to fit, but that is to be expected. The head of the elephant is attached to the body by means of a male/female joint, but the mahouts had to be filed thinner, their legs positioned carefully and glued to the front of the tower to allow the heads and bodies to meet. I used epoxy putty to fill in the gaps and ensure a strong bond.

The towers are cramped and I could only fit two crewmen per tower, but others may have better skills and more patience at fitting the third figures in than me. I also attached pikes before checking the crew positioning, which resulted in one pike being angled too steeply and the figure thus unusable. Lesson learned.

Modelling

After assembly it became apparent that there was a modelling oversight: the left-hand side of the elephant has the covering cloth right up to the elephant's front shoulder, but the right-hand side does not, so that when viewing from the left the mahout is sitting on the cloth, but from the right he isn't. Ideally you would want to use putty or green stuff to give the impression that the coverings meet, and do it before the mahout is attached. Unfortunately, I didn't notice this until too late, so I have used paint to try to do the same job. Otherwise, the sculpting is crisp, the details are good, and the proportions are attractive.

In terms of dimensions, the elephants are taller and slimmer than the other Seleucid or Indian elephants in my 15mm collection but they are still within the possible size range of the breed so they make for good variety.

Comparison with Chariot elephants (two in centre)

There are no straps across the elephants' rear ends, so people wanting those will need to add them in with putty or paint.

Comparison from the rear

Summary

They are a little tricky to put together, but they look grand. The folds in the cloth, the elephant armour, and the ridges on the elephant skin are very nice to work with and respond well to dry-brushing and washes. They are a very good addition to the current 15mm Successor elephant options, and the sculptor should be commended for going for a slightly different look. These models will work alongside Chariot elephants, for example, and the army will look much the better for their presence. I would certainly recommend this set and am now considering putting in a Christmas order with Forged in Battle, even though I shouldn't really be buying up even more lead…

Easter activities

Well, the Society of Ancients Battle Day has come and gone, and I didn't get to do an Ilipa refight after all. With SP busy with work and my not having cultivated enough other interested parties we will have to do it belatedly.

I did get to take the family over the Takaka Hill to Golden Bay for a couple of nights though, which was a great success. We stayed with my aunt and her partner, who was born in America and is an American Civil War buff. As I knew of his ACW interest I put a copy of Battlecry in the car, and on the second night asked if he wanted to try a game. He did. It turns out that he used to own a couple of America Heritage games in his younger days.

He took to the game quite quickly, and we got through two scenarios in about four hours.

I have a couple of copies of Battlecry (one given to me by Pat Hirtle; another that came with some other games I bought from a fellow online), so I have given him the one I took over.

Hopefully he enjoys it, and we might be able to get a game or two in when he's over this side of the hill on business. 

Hope Easter has been restful for you all!

Testing out Memoir 44

Over the last few weeks SP and I have caught up for a couple of nights yarning and gaming with Memoir 44. I'd picked up a secondhand copy within NZ through a facebook page connection and ordered some expansions from Amazon following an introduction to it during a fleeting visit to Japan.

We tried out the Pegasus Bridge scenario (won both times won by the Allies) last week and Hellfire Pass (both times won by the Allies) tonight.

Hellfire pass, from the German side

Pegasus Bridge from the perspective of the Allies

It's simple but effective and we think we can probably get our young lads interested in a game as well. It may turn out to be a good purchase for that alone.

I'd initially thought I might be put off by the out of scale miniatures the game uses, but in fact they remind me of the maps I used to pore over in the Purnell History of the Second World War zines my grandfather collected.

The scenarios require some pleasing strategising, but as with all the C&C family of games there is plenty of potential for things to go awry. Overall I'm pleased I bought into it, and there is a lot of scope for ongoing play.

It's not going to replace heavier games in my collection but will probably get more play.

We also gave Twilight Struggle a go, but that is for another post. 

Society of Ancients Battle Day: Ilipa preparations.

As February draws to a close thoughts naturally proceed to the Society of Ancients' battle day, which this year is Ilipa, a battle I have all the necessary figures for, and which will be held on the weekend of March 23rd/24th.

I have been a sympathetic participant in several other battle days, these being the refights of Pharsalus in 2016 and Paraitakene in 2018. I also did a solo boardgame version of Bosworth in 2021, but it hardly counts. I had grand plans to do Mantinea in 2023. Unfortunately, I got into a funk and didn't get the figures painted.

The general idea for battle days at my end is to get together with likeminded individuals and play the same battle as the Society chaps, on more or less the same date, and see about submitting a report on it to the Society's journal Slingshot. Can we manage all of that this year? I'm not sure, but it's worth a try.

Ilipa. 

I have a bit of a soft spot for both commanders, the brilliant Scipio and the hapless Hasdrubal. Of course, Hasdrubal's haplessness was largely down to his having to face Scipio every other battle. He seemed to do mostly all right otherwise, was an organiser a union would be proud of (he raised new armies after massive defeats and got Syphax to commit to the Carthaginian cause), while to further commend him he was the father of the magnificent Sophonisba.

How to do the battle.

My best battle day effort by far was the Pharsalus game. Six players, myself as umpire, bespoke rules, and a report for Slingshot. I won't be able to do all of that this year, but would like to get as close as I can.

I've been thinking of using either Commands & Colors: Ancients or Simon Miller's To the Strongest! for the rules. My table layout means that for the former I would need to adjust the scenario to fit suit my space limitations (the wargaming equivalent of converting iambic pentameter to trochaic tetrameter...); for the latter I could just about use the superb James Roach's scenario as it is. My favourite rules, Lost Battles, could be used at a pinch, but they are are not an easy ride for first-time gamers.

Much depends on how many players I can muster. My offsider SP will be away for a few weeks in 'Nam (cue various Rambo-era jokes) fulfilling work commitments. This means that we will not be able to play on the designated weekend, but I think we can get away with that. Between now and then I will try to drum up another few participants and decide how best to so things.

It's good to have a little project on the go.

On wargames campaigns (after Polemarch)

The excellent blogger Polemarch has recently put up a couple of thought-provoking posts on campaigns. The first talks about types of campaigns, concluding that they are often better in the idea than the execution; the second offers further reasoning about why that might be. 

In the ancients era that I usually game and with the types of large set-piece battles I most enjoy, campaigns tend to not have much value. In this era, campaigning was (with one or two notable exceptions) essentially about bringing one's enemy to battle in circumstances least advantageous to them. The battle was had. If the winner was the home team, the invaders were dispersed and the game, so to speak, was up; if the invader was victorious, terms would be reached and the thing was over (unless of course you were fighting the Achaemenid Persians or the Romans, who would [eventually, or fairly immediately, respectively] raise another army and make you do it all again).  

The interest then in this era is to try to get battlefield advantage. That is not usually best expressed by manoeuvrings over a campaign map, but by some sort of pre-battle system which modifies morale, numbers, terrain, deployment or leadership to the benefit of one or the other side.

If one is to do this, it is quite useful (as indeed it is for just about any circumstance!) to read Caesar to see the kinds of things he considered important when choosing if or when to give battle. 

To me it seems that ancients campaigns work best at either the grand strategic or the tactical level. You can follow the fortunes of nations over years or decades, where competing powers look to prise provinces or regions from one another, or you can follow the fortunes of smaller entities raiding or subduing neighbours in lower intensity local conflicts.

I tried a solo campaign of the latter type set in tribal Iberia. I put quite a bit of time into it, but it simply wasn't exciting enough. It turned out I'd rather refight Zama for the tenth time than try to sustain interest in endless minor encounters between similarly equipped neighbours over local concerns.

For the former type, you can't beat boardgames. If you want to replay the Punic and Macedonian wars, it's far better to do it in a boardgame in one sitting than to stretch it out with questionable bespoke rules to take up three months' worth of miniatures battles, trying to involve players whose chance of winning was, after the first week, only slightly better than nil.

I remember that the time I was most excited about campaigns was back in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle days, when I was young, had oodles of time, and thought that defending a pass against a tidal wave of Orcs was the perfect way to spend a Sunday (and the week before it mulling over army choices!).

The difference here is the difference: you could have Orcs, Goblins, Elves, Dwarves, various humans, all with different characteristics and fighting styles, and all within a realm's distance of one another without doing violence to backstory. Celtiberian tribal dominion versus Celtiberian tribal dominion does not offer quite the same opportunites for variety.

For me, if I want to get six people involved in a game, there are two choices: a boardgame, or a multi-command set-piece battle.

But it's good to be open to being convinced otherwise!