If I could turn back time...

JWH, in his Heretical Gaming blog, recently put up a post - inspired by the late great Peter Young - on the advice he would give to a wargamer just starting out. It is a post worth reading and as an added bonus leads naturally to a person wanting to put up something of their own on the same topic.  

So what would I tell a younger person starting out on their wargaming adventures?

1) Do what you enjoy. Obvious, but harder to keep to than you'd think. There are times when a person buys into something for some other reason: because it's good value; because you feel you should; because you make a plan with another gamer or group; because it might be good for a rainy day. You really don't want to waste time and energy into armies or periods or rules that you won't enjoy. Life is too short.

2) Build both sides. Wargaming is often a solitary activity, so don't be reliant on others. People move; people get busy. Keep your independence. Make sure that you can use those figures solo.

3) Expand on what you have. Easy when you play ancients or WWII, but it applies to other periods too. Why build Romans and Britons in 2mm when you already have part of what you need in 15mm? If you have Carthaginians, you're not far off being able to field an army of Spanish, Gauls, or Numidians. Have Marian Romans? Build a few more units of legionaries and you'll be able to play out Roman civil wars till the end of your days. But see point 1 - choose your expansions wisely!

4) Make wargaming friends who know more than you. I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance early on of a couple of grizzled wargame veterans. They show you the standard, give you good practical advice, and help remove mental obstacles. Invaluable.  

5) Get things while you can. You have to be sensible (well, maybe not all of us!), but work on the principle of get what you need when it's available. Vendors close down, lines disappear, prices go up, and personal circumstances change. If you can afford to get what you need now, do it. You can paint at your leisure, but you may not be able to pick up 240 Macedonian phalangites from that manufacturer at that price ever again...

6) Push yourself to paint hard while your eyes are good. Once they go, you'll wish you had painted more when it was easy!

7) Invest in making your table look good. You can have the loveliest armies in the world, but they only look as good as the terrain they are situated in.

8) Be as consistent as you can with your basing and painting styles. Try to do things in such a way that what you produce now will work with what you will produce in ten years.  

9) Find some board games you like. They are easy to set up (provided you have some space around the home) and they offer a different perspective. You can game when you don't feel inspired, they are portable, and they are a great way to introduce non-gaming friends to the hobby. 

10) Take things seriously, but not too much. You need a certain amount of fire and motivation to get projects underway and finished, but we're only playing with toy soldiers. It's not worth making enemies over and some of those rants a person can go off on don't always look so righteous five years down the track!

11) It's a big hobby. You will have times when you're on for certain aspects of it and times when you're not. Make the most of it all - writing, blogging, rules-writing, painting, researching, playing, youtubing, terrain-building, podcasting, and whatever else. Enjoy the variety and don't stress when you're having a fallow period.

12) Be aware that your gaming will go through different phases. Life will intrude. You will have times when there are funds to use and times when there are not. Use the former to help you get through the latter!

13) Have a big idea to work towards. 

14) Have fun!

Thanks for the inspiration JWH (and many others at different times), and anyone reading please feel free to add comments or link below to your own takes on this.

Cheers, and hobby on!

Magister Militum

When I decided to take up wargaming seriously as a hobby I started by buying two 15mm army packs, Romans and Carthaginians, from Richard at Magister Militum in the UK. Naturally, those two army packs were soon supplemented by additional figures, and the collection expanded by other armies. It quickly became necessary to purchase from other ranges and manufacturers too, but the figures that began it all for me were those Chariot Miniatures from Magister Militum.

I don't imagine I am the only person in the world who got their introduction to the delights of miniature wargaming in this way.

At that time of course you didn't order by filling an online shopping cart: you looked at the catalogue, emailed the company with the packs you wanted, waited for them to confirm with a price and shipping estimate and a means of payment. If I remember rightly, I might even have had to call Richard up from Japan to give him my credit card details over the phone.

At any rate, there was contact with a human, there were pleases and thank yous, and all those other little interactions that you almost forget were commonplace before shopping carts and secure online payment systems.  

It is therefore with some sadness that I see Magister Militum is closing up shop and putting their ranges on the market. 

I'd like to quickly take the opportunity to thank Richard and all the other folk who may have worked at MM, and hope that life after MM treats them well.

For those to whom MM closing up is new news, I think you still have a couple of days to get a last order in.

I guess the most appropriate thing to do at my end is get those Romans and Carthaginians out on the table for another game....

State of the wargame nation

It's been quite some time since I've posted here. We've been through a busy period of house renovations, kids developing social lives, work secondment opportunities and various other things. Earlier in the year I was invited to join a band, so we've been working quite hard learning songs and getting match fit for shows. Things are rolling now - we made our live debut last weekend - and it has been a lot of fun. The last time I played in a live band (apart from attending the odd open mic night) was 1998. I'd reconciled myself to the fact that it may never happen again, so it was a VERY good feeling to get back up on stage in front of a crowd and blast out a few tunes.

We hope to be able to get three hours' worth of material together to allow us to start gigging regularly. There is still some work to be done to get to that stage, but the challenge has been set!

Hobby activity has mostly been confined to looking at my shelves and deciding it's too late to play a game or browsing local boardgame options and making the occasional purchase. So far this year I've picked up Seastrike, Undaunted: Stalingrad, Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 minutes (if you're thinking of getting it, don't bother), Twilight Struggle, and Mare Nostrum. It's an eclectic mix; overseas shipping being prohibitatively expensive means I'm confined to opportunistic nabbing of things that are already in the country. Caesar is a bit of a dog, but the others all look promising. 

In regards to figure gaming, I haven't done any painting since 2019, and I also fell out of love with the Society of Ancients. As this was the avenue I tended to use to present 'serious' hobby pieces, I don't currently have any motivation to put together that sort of structured hobby writing for public consumption. The figures already painted are always there waiting to be used, but whether I will make any further dents in the lead mountain or get back to being the kind of contributor on matters ancient that I used to be is a bit doubtful.

It's been a bit of a depressing period hobby-wise, but you never know when that will change.

So there we are; that's about the state of it. Hope all others in the blogosphere are doing well!

Edgehill with Pat

Following a couple of weeks of preparations, old Japan mate Pat H and myself got together online last Thursday using VASSAL for the board and Discord for chat to start a playthrough of the Musket and Pike scenario of Edgehill. 

For those that may not know Musket and Pike, it is a series of hex and counter boardgames put out by GMT focusing on battles of the English Civil War / Thirty Years War era. It was originated by Ben Hull, but has an obvious progenitor in the Berg/Herman Great Battles of History series. Like the GBoH series before it, it is a grand tactical treatment of each battle, with a specific map, named counters, and various scenario options for each battle.

The system tracks morale, attrition and formation at the unit level, while command and control rules require orders to be set at the wing level and communication traced between commanders and the commanded.

Command counters have special functions which allow units they are stacked with or in some cases are adjacent to to perform orders (rally, reform, etc) which their wing stance (charge, make ready, etc) may not ordinarily allow. 

It is one of those systems that I thought would allow a battle to be worked through over a a week or so of casual after-dinner play. Unfortunately, to this point I have not yet been motivated enough learnt the rules well enough to manage this. Hopefully this Edgehill game with Pat will change that. 

But on to the game. The scenario sees the Royalists (Pat being an inveterate Royalist I had to be very careful not to mention Harry or Megan in the course of the evening - it could have got nasty!) with charge orders itching to have at the Parliamentarian menace. As commander of the said menace, I got to sit back and watch as Rupert surged forward on my left. 

His initial activation saw all right wing cavalry, dragoons and musketeers forward. Pat then rolled for a continuation and was successful, leading to controlled carnage as his wing engaged with mine. A remarkable run of luck with my reactive shooting saw Pat's wing take considerable casualties in the charge, but ended with my commander driven off the field. 

Battle map after two activations of Rupert's wing.

It remains to be seen how we can come back from this. On the positive side, we were not routed in our entirely, and all of Rupert's units have suffered some kind of attrition. 

It has been enjoyable. It took about 90 minutes of play to get to this point in the game, but I expect things will speed up. The advatange of rules which are so procedural is that once you get those procedures down, things start to take care of themselves. The disadvantage of course it that it takes a bit of time to familiarise oneself with those procedures. 

It seems though that we are well on our way.

Undaunted once more

SP and I reconvened for another game of Undaunted Normandy last night. It was scenario 12, the last of the originals, so we have worked our way through the box. The Germans snuck it. But when asking SP what he would have done differently I realised that I'd not seen the Allied control marker on the zone I took to win, and that I had declared a victory prematurely. Red faces all round!

Never mind, the game was secondary to the chat anyway. 

The game itself continues to shine. As an indication of how much I am enjoying it, I have a few ideas for house rules...

Rumours of war(gaming) and the kindness of strangers

It's been a long time since I've rock n rolled, as the song goes. While a neat little intro, it's not strictly correct: I have played a few games, but nothing worth blogging about.

Sadly, that seems to have been the case for most things at the moment - not worth blogging about.

But that has all changed today. Two things happened. First, I caught up with my old mate SP, who assures me he is keen to get a game underway as soon as we can; the other is that a kind denizen of boardgamegeek has gone to considerable trouble to look out and send me the rules for a vintage game I bought recently that arrived sans booklet.

It would be very rude to get it to table given the lengths the fellow went to to scan the paperwork, so playing it has become mission number 1. 

While speaking of kindness, I should also mention a first class instance of it from the folks at the Plastic Soldier Company. I ordered some plastic Carthaginians from them a few months ago but the pack arrived two figures short. I emailed to let them know about it and they promptly sent me replacements along with an extra figure or two for good measure. 

They are damned good too, being of the Corvus Belli 15mm range.

So there we are. I hope 2023 will treat all readers well (or if not well, at least a good deal better than it's treated Jeff Beck), and that your dice roll what you wish for a decent portion of the time.

Notions of (Phil Sabin's) Empire

Faced tonight with a sudden hankering to play a game, I trotted downstairs, surveyed the shelves, and settled upon Phil Sabin's Empire. As something that takes an epic subject, could be set up without too much rules review and can be got through in an hour, it was the obvious choice.

Covering the period 350-150 BC, the game takes in the Mediterranean world (stretching as far east as India) and its Persian, Macedonian, Carthaginian and Roman inhabitants. Each of the twenty game turns starts with a rebellion roll which turns one occupied territory neutral, and then the four powers get to take a turn attempting to expand. Usually a power gets one attack per turn, but in a great captain turn they will get five (so they best make the most of it).

There is not a lot to the game tactically: you are pretty much at the mercy of the dice. To successfully conquer a territory on Empire's point-to-point game map a power needs to roll 4 or better on a d6. There are modifiers at play, and with certain territories worth more for victory point purposes, it is usually clear what the best attack is, and then you have to hope the die (or dice when attacking across a sea route) will cooperate.

It's all very straightforward - even bearing in mind a couple of special rules - and with two victory turns (VPs are counted on turns ten and twenty), everyone knows what they are aiming at.

Opening situation: Carthage blue (3 territories), Rome red (1 territory), Macedon yellow (1 territory) Persia green (8 territories).

In our game Macedonia started gloriously, winning Graecia on turn one and then watching Alexander wreak absolute havoc on turns two and three, wiping out the Persians and being on the doorsteps of both India and Aegyptus.

Alexander's conquests.

Neither Carthage nor Rome could make much headway in the first century of play, but Persia / Parthia reclaimed its homeland just before the first victory turn was up, and with both Carthage and Persia receiving handicap assistance, the scores at 250 BC were recorded as Rome 5, Macedon 13, Persia 14 and Carthage 16.

Carthage and Rome squabbled over Gallia until Hannibal's entrance saw Rome's influence temporarily squashed. Two turns of great captains for Rome began promisingly, but perverse sea assault rolls and some untimely revolts meant Roman expansion was stopped at Sicily, Iberia and Macedonia. 

All game Alexander's successors held on grimly to his conquests in Asia, but the Parthians (the Persian replacements) began to reclaim some of the eastern territories. 

Parthians reconquer some of the ancestral homelands.

Carthage and Rome continued to squabble ineffectually over Iberia, and at game end, the points were tallied thus: Rome 12, Persia / Parthia 20, and Carthage and Macedon tied for first place on 21. 

Board at game end, 150BC.

It was a nice little historical interlude, and left me with one or two ideas for future play.