Cult Of Games XLBS: Wargames Lost In Time?
October 25, 2020 by avernos
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It’s the XLBS Show…….Happy Sunday CoGs!
Congrats to the Golden Button winners. Well done!
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@warzan I’ve been slowly working on my British Victorian Army. Building up a full company in 28mm and hoping to grow it larger. I’ve been using the rules from The Men Who Would Be Kings: Colonial Wargaming Rules (Osprey Wargames) @avernos uses these rules or a version of. For reference material, I’ve been collecting up books about the British Army of that time. One book is, ‘Khaki & Red : Soldiers of the Queen in India and Africa’ Donald Featherstone has written quite a few books covering the Victorian Army.
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On a side note, I think I’m going to order some minis from that ‘Antediluvian Miniatures’ site. Those minis would be great for an RPG based on ‘The Land that Time Forgot’ and ‘The People that Time Forgot’. Some of those minis have to be directly inspired by ‘At the Earth’s Core’. All are favorite ‘B’ movies from my childhood! All featuring the great Doug McClure! What an actor and all-around swell guy!
Wow awesome stuff.
So this period has been rattling around in my head since filming. And I have discovered that both the Royal Irish Regiment and the Royal Irish Fusiliers were in Egypt in 1882.
This holds a little bit of a place in my heart as the both amalgamated to create the Royal Irish Rangers which I was part of as a Cadet in my youth 🙂
I also love the fact that the Egyptians of the period were running around in red fezzes!
So I may go ‘partial punk’ on this and have a skirmish battle over an ancient Egyptian temple. No actual monsters and curses but the belief that they could be there (so playing around with fear and moral).
Could be fun! And I’m even thinking of staying with 28mm for this one lol
Welcome back to 28mm @warzan 😃👍
I’ve been slowly scrounging units to face off with my Queen’s finest.
I’ve been planning out a ‘SOLO Long Run Campaign’ that will see my Company travel through part of Zululand and then head over to India.
I am naming all my troops and creating a background for each. It’s going to hurt like hell when I lose one, and that’s the effect I’m aiming for. All the replacement troops will have names and backgrounds as well.
I’ve been writing in a journal as the commanding officer. From the formalities of Company life, to be boredom no action, and then the patrol reports where random encounters will happen and then propel the Company into larger actions.
It’s been fun getting it all ready. Those troops in red are no longer just figures, now their my boys.
That is such a wonderful idea~! I love that
Perry miniatures Sudan range covers the Egypt campaign as well with lots of Egyptian troops. You could do some nice scenarios capturing the guns at Tel el Kebir or railway lines in the desert. Fuzzy wuzzies where the Bejar tribesmen of the Sudan fighting for the mahdi
@warzan Giant ants are reqired, it’s historically accurate…………….
Way back in the day one of the old Wargames Mongrels ‘Baddawg’ used to run a campaign set in Sudan full of British Redcoats, intrepid Explorers, Forces of the Mahdi and the aforementioned Gaint Ants, that he had brought as job lot from Walmart, which was bit of a coincidence as I did the same from a Pound shop in Bilston.
He use to do reports from his band of intrepid explorers as they flew above the Sudan in a Balloon.
Sadly he died a few years back, he was a Vietnam vet was an MP on convoys, spent a lot of time in VA hospitals though think it was him shacking up with two very fit ladies just before his death that got him.
You can get (particularly this time of the year) costume plastic ants (I got some last year) which are a bit smaller than above but will do for 28mm
Though if you go the 15mm route the supply should be easier (probably 3d printeable easier as well0, I brought A pile of multi bugs packs as they had worms on them which I was going to use for cheap razor worms for Dropship Commander .
Just looking and !st Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers were at the Battle of Tel El Kabir, wont go into detail
think you will have fun reading about that one.
Ben, have a listen to the ‘Revolutions’ podcast by Mike Duncan. He does a great overview of the ECW, takes his time but it doesn’t go on forever either. Great stuff!
Oh and the Polish By Fire and Sword game will be releasing an ECW expansion somewhere in the future. That’s in 15mm, so great for mass battles.
I will make sure to have a listen to that – cheers for the advice 🙂
Would it be cheaper to buy the round tower in Antrim and move Gerry into it if he’s going to be a guru?
Would he have to learn to hover of the ground, and develop a third eye?
Nice show guys
3 musketeers is all set during the slightly longer and (per capita the bloodiest war Europe has ever seen) 30 years wars and the internal French struggle against the Huguenots
Didnt Redoubt minatures do a whole range of 28 minis for it including coaches?
Vaguely remember being interested but wasn’t overstruck on figures on close up.
Happy Sunday COGs
The eras of battle that I have not looked at would be the Roman succession wars between rival emperors of east and west roman empires and or the samurai clan/shogun battles of feudal Japan ( Lloyd have a samurai army built,just needs paint,it has horses too…I feel your pain Will get around to it some day.)
Playing a fair amount of WWII at the moment and looking into the history of the Polish invasion by Germany and Russia is fascinating. We let the Polish down big time in my opinion.The misses is a wealth of knowledge on the eastern history around the Korean/ Vietnam conflict so have that to keep us occupied too.
Too many projects,Too little time!
In terms of what we in Europe call the far East there is also the massive empires in Siam and the constant warfare again involving China
For India there is also the whole Ashoka period
Happy Sunday CoGs 😀 .
The Lardies Sharp Practice or Ospreys Chosen Men might appeal @brennon ? As far as smaller scale Napoleonic battles go.
I am very tempted by both of those for sure!
I love SP the most,but seeing as we’re not going anywhere for the foreseeable future ( i really,really miss gaming at my flgc,trying solo isn’t the same ),i need to give Chosen Men another read through.
@brennon Suppose it depends what scale your looking at( as in size of units ) many years ago which probably won’t suprise you we did a demo game of above at WMMMS with each player only having two figures.
We wrote our own rules using 3 d 20 , probably a bit complicated for today even if I could find my copy.
During the game we had to Teenagers playing , on who had two Riflemen and one two Light Infantry and the played ,each supporting the other ala proper light infantry tactics, and slaughtered everyone.
Happy Sunday!
P.s. where did God get the second ‘e’ from when she turned ‘react’ into ‘create’ by moving the ‘c’ in mysterious ways? Even gods have to abide by countdown anagram rules, plus are you sure they spoke English?
There was a fascinating collection of medals on Flog-it* this week that included medals for Egypt and Sudan, from very late Victorian that inspired me to dig out my Times Atlas of History. That’s the thing, it’s not just period, it’s setting too.
I guess Lance Corporal Jones was meant to have been in his mid-sixties during WW2, so would have been a young squaddie sent off to such exotic places at the end of the C 19th. He’d probably have done his bit in WW1, but it’s telling that his reminiscences were from that earlier campaign.
The EIC was abolished in 1858 after they screwed up and the British Government took over the administration of India.
The Khyber pass was on the border between what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. The British withdrew from Afghanistan in 1842 through the pass and set-up a blockade at that pinch-point. The withdrawal is a fascinating setting, not a glorious episode in British history.
* A BBC antiques auction show
Dynasty Warriors is a blast from the past.I had one of them for the PS1,it was absolutely mental,mowing waves of minions down to get at the leaders and then building up your hero gauges to unleash special moves on them.
This is why I don’t understand why it hasn’t been turned into some kind of tabletop game?!
Those antediluvian miniatures were from the film ‘Warlords of Atlantis‘. Cheers for the heads up on these as a friend and myself were talking about doing summit along these lines and I was wondering where we would get the miniatures from.
Love that film ( i love all of Doug McClures monster movies to be fair ) and those mini’s look great.
I absolutely loved this week’s discussion! I had only just suggested to Warren that OTT should look into the Great Wargame Survey.
According to the survey the most popular 6 wargame genres with respondents in order were; WWII, 40K, Sci Fi (not 40K), Fantasy (not AoS), Napoleonics and Ancients.
Just as aside the only remaining private army in Europe is the Duke of Atholl’s Highlanders. I have no idea the size or nature of the regiment, I just know the Duke parades the regiment every year.
The period that I would love to game in (that I don’t) is the Late Roman Empire. After the defeat at Adrianople (378AD) the Roman legions were permanently gone. Barbarian armies assaulted the empire from every direction and there were constant civil wars. Especially in a campaign setting the desperate fighting for control of the empire as it fragments and tears itself apart would be amazeballs! Warhammer historical brought out a source book (which I have) but I never got a chance to play in this period.
For ECW skirmishes have a look at Donnybrook as a set of rules.
I will give that a spy!
@Warzan For cavemen look at Steve Barber Models and for a skirmish set of rules there is a game called Tusk! originally from Irregular Miniatures.
ECW is interesting but the Thirty Years War much more so
Yay the XL show.
@warzan You could try these http://irregularwars.blogspot.com/p/palaeo-diet.html
I’m currently waiting on orders from Warlord for Black Powder rules and the Liberty & Death set for American War of Independence. Its something i know little about, but used to play that period at my old club several years ago.
I’ve been digging into the history of China and there’s some fascinating periods of conflict. Te most obvious for many is the Boxer Rebellion 1900, because it involves several of the superpowers of that period.
Another interesting 20th century period is from 1900-1930 China which saw the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the rise and fall of Republic China, then the Chaos of the Warlords. On top of that the Japanese where causing problems, like the invasion of Manchuria.
For me I’m interested in the Three Kingdom period but as yet I haven’t looked at getting any miniatures. I do have some Qin period (Terracotta) minis but I don’t have any plans to game the period of the Qin Dynasty.
For anyone wanting to game the Victorian period there are the Opium wars, where we literally went to war with China because they tried to stop Britain selling opium in China. It was becoming a huge issue within China and people becoming addicted.
More great projects.
Corona Cromwell?
On the New Zealand side of things check this video out.
The Storming of Gate Pah – the defeat of the British by Maori warriors – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6QhW5S8Gk4
This is really interesting piece of history, fun scenario that you could fight out. Wargames Atlantic seem to have Maori wars boxes in mind, but sadly they didn’t figure highly in a poll and might be a way off before they get around to them.
Ben, ECW was fought all over the UK, but my favorite theatre was Scotland. Pluses for you, smaller forces, less or no horse units, a dozen battles and skirmishes with epic marches and amazing back stories, a great potential for campaign elements, motives behind the fighting and the allegiances of the clans and regions they were fighting through all making it not just your average Pike and Shotte conflict. I even started writing a Bernard Cornwell style novel thrusting a fictional veteran mercenary solider into the spark that started a year of fighting and a resurgence of the Royalist’s fortunes in Scotland. Sadly the victories would eventually just be a footnote in history and the Royalist leader The Earl of Montrose being sold out by Charles, I after all his tireless and miraculous efforts, gives the era a dramatic and romantically tragic ending. One force was fairly colorful with tartan and banners and an Irish contingent that would look slightly different from the rest of the Royalists and an easier to paint enemy on the side of the Covenanters (Parliamentary side / allies in Scotland) which were mostly in a standard blue bonneted, hodden grey type uniform as a nice aesthetic contrast looking at on the table. The Scots fought in the 30 years war in their thousands and many of the veterans of those campaigns brought their skills back home on both sides of the conflict. Osprey sell some nice books on the era. My favourite as a nod to a potential cool battle to fight out on the table would be Auldearn 1645 https://ospreypublishing.com/auldearn-1645, because it was a victory from the jaws of defeat story. With boggy terrain, initially an asymmetrical balance to the fighting and swift reorganizing of battle lines making it more interesting than the basic… march at each other, press of pike, musket fire, horse fights enemy horse on the flanks, one set of horse win and flank the other army, one army routs.
Much prefer the term ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ which you see being used more and more, much better reflects the broad scope of the conflicts in question.
Agreed. The Civil War we were taught, if taught at all, was so sanitised and 2 dimensional. Roundheads, Cavaliers. Royalists were bad and tyrannical, the Parliament were on the side of democracy. The Royalists lost at Naseby and Charles lost his head.
There is so much grey in that summary. Ironically in that grey area is where all the colour and juicy history is. The way the war intertwined with the conflicts and political actions before it and the way it changed everything after that point really hasn’t been given the focus it deserves in schools, but has been a real joy to discover as an adult.
What about in Spain when the Muslim’s had big chunks of the country until the Christians pushed them out guy’s.
Alexander the great that mad weekend he got drunk an was after a curry?