Joy of Six 2026

 Made it to Joy of Six this year, and for once it doesn't clash with COW. WD Display Team (North) put on 633 Squadron, and as I've missed every other run of it this year, I was glad to be able to help out. The venue is close to where I live, so a short 25 minute walk into town. 

The welcome team at the entrance. I encountered a couple of slightly lost people who were obviously wargamers wandering the streets of Sheffield on the way and directed them to the venue. The Sheffield Hallam campus is quite  big and confusing.

Getting one of the halls ready. This show is very different to eg Partisan as it is mainly games with just a few traders.

Very quick Battle of Lens. Huge bases with lots and lots of figures on each, the Baccus demo/participation game. 

Operation Daquet, 1991. The French participation in Gulf War One in 1991. That feels a very, very long time ago now and rather exciting at the time.

I spent an awful lot of time peering at the NATO toys trying to work out what they were before I actually read the game blurb which explained they were French!

Battle of Santiago de Cuba. The Spanish were run by the umpires while the players took the US fleet.

This one was very clever 'Urban Warfare through the Ages' with three boards set up adjacent each covering city combat in different eras.

This lovely Norman era table was set up near the WD stand. I cant remember which battle it was, but the terrain just looked amazing although it was a simple furry cloth over some hills with various bits of scatter terrain.

Sheffield and Rotherham Wargamers put on this rather grand sci fi game.

A beautiful city and some Mechs. I think this stuff is mostly Brigade Models?

The troops line up for battle.

This was also near our table, Gaines Mill (ACW) participation.

The troops deployed, the Union are heavily outnumbered and defending so the players (generally) took the Confederates.

South London Warlords put on this fabulous Marne 1914 game.

The French artillery deployed to confound the Boche.

Froeschwiller/Worth. Another lovely table, custom made this time. It reminded me of Bruce Weigles setups for '1870' (he came to Triples some years ago and put on some games there).

Unlike "1870", the troops are on quite  big bases. These are just skirmish formations, everything else is out of sight for now.

Richard Crawley/Cold war Commanders Calais 1940 game. I just love the custom French style place signs. The scenario is from the Tac:WW2 Blitzkrieg scenario book, I helped playtest a couple of them with Richard.

The toys all laid out on OB sheets. Elements are platoons and manouvre units companies and battalions, rather like Command Decision. iirc 3rd RTR vs 1st Panzer Division outside Calais.

If you look carefully you can see flames and smoke coming out of the German engineers flamethrowers. Figures and vehicles a mix of Heroics and Scotia.

The Ilkley Irregulars put on Borodino using Bloody Big Battles. One of the Tuesday Irregulars (Tim C) played this. Like the the real thing, a rather bloody slog!

Greek City State warfare.

The Battles with MDF team put on a huge demonstration of their 6mm MDF figures, which look very grand en masse.

More of a close up. They do look a bit wooden (sorry!) close up, but to my mind I actually prefer the look of these to the very artificial looking Epic strips which are shoulder-shoulder.

It was only fairly late in the day that I discovered another entire room full of games and stands.

Baccus, as main sponsors of the show, had a huge stand, as well as running the raffle and doing basing demonstrations.

Rapier Miniatures were in attendance and it gave me a chance to have a really good look at their stuff close up. Lovely figures, excellent value for money but very much epic scale '6mm', similar in size and proportions to Baccus. They still have printed catalogues though, which get a big thumbs up from me.

The WD stand for 633 Squadron.

All set up and ready to go. This is the highly portable version of the game using a 1/300th Mosquito. John managed to bring all this down in his rucksack. I added my RAF Officers side cap for period colour.

We managed to run the game 24 times during the day, it was busy in the morning and late afternoon with a bit of a lull around lunchtime.

The bombers reach their target. 23 of 24 missions were successful (the failed one needed anything but a '1' for his last plane and duly rolled disastrously). One very skilful/lucky pilot managed to reach the target with all nine aircraft! That had never happened before. 

I managed to not spend any money on toys during the day at all, although there are some manufacturers whose websites I will be visiting. I need some more 6mm aircraft and I feel a distinct lack of armoured trains... Despite that I came away with a 2mm Mosque (thank you Richard C), a pack of paint pens (thank you John A) and half a dozen dice (thank you South London Warlords and congratulations on the VC).

That was a geat show, nice to be back again. As I said earlier it has a very different vibe to Partisan, Fiasco etc and well worth a trip if you fancy something a bit different for a change.

 

Panzer Replacements - HQ Company

 Next up for the new 15mm early war German armour is the replacement panzer 'battalion HQ company', as before, all the models are from battlefield 3D.

A recce Panzer II and a command Panzer III.

This is a Pz IIIe command tank with a bedrail aerial. I've wanted one of these for years and even contemplated trying to convert one, but coming up with a workable design for the aerial (in 0.5mm brass) defeated me. This one is based on the Pz IIIe model I showed in a previous post, but has the turret moulded in place. The aerial is quite fine so I stiffened it up with some PVA. Otherwise, the tracks are separate.

I went for an open hatch option (much easier than trying to cut down the Zvezda cupolas and adding hatch covers!) as it is a command tank, and loaded up the rear deck with stowage - some cases and an oil drum, all Skytrex. Loading the deck up seems to have been a popular past-time with command tanks.

I gave it HQ markings in red and white but didn't bother with balkan crosses as they are virtually inaccessible behind the  additional aerial rails (beautifully printed as always on a resin 3D print with nice separation). If you look carefully you can see that even the grab handles on the turret top have gaps under them.

I did this in grey/brown camo based on the famous colour photo of one of these crossing a river in Russia in 1941, you can see bits of the camo on the mudguards etc. I expect it will get used as a normal gun tank in early war games, and it can join my very old SDD Panzerbefehlswagen 1 as a dedicated command vehicle as required. 

The 'recce platoon' is a Panzer IIa, and what a beautiful little model it is. A two piece print, hull+turret. The 20mm cannon is a fair bit smaller than on the II F, I wonder if it was just mounted differently with more of the weapon inside the turret, or if it really was shorter?

It is a fair bit smaller than the Pz II F, and from the back looks more like a Panzer I. I did this one in grey/brown too and for both vehicles did pinwashes on some of the details after the main paint job.

You can see the lovely track and other detail on the side. It has a very pre-war feel to it, the Pz II F looks far more modern. It reminds me a bit of a Renault 35. As the hull sides are so low it was common to put all the markings on the turret, so I put the crosses and turret numbers on there. Strictly it should be a solid cross for a very early vehicle, but I don't have any solid decals and I didn't fancy painting them.  

Here it is next to one of my (QRF) Panzer Is, you can see how small the Pz IIa is but still a bit bigger than the Pz 1. Having done these new vehicles I'm minded to go over the Panzer Is again with a new paint job. I'm not planning on replacing those at the moment.

Air War solo training flights

 After our foray to Korea with SPIs 'Air War', there was some talk of another go, this time over Sinai in 1956 (Meteors vs Mysteres). As I had little clue what was going on in the last game, I thought I'd better practice a bit!

I added to the stuff I'd printed out for the last game with a full set of (printed) rules for flight and cannon combat as well as the data cards for Mysteres and Meteors. I also made up a battle board with four of the geomorphic air combat sheets and made some generic counters (red 1-4 and blue 1-4) plus some control counters for things like banking. 

My initial plan was to treat Blue 1 as a target drone flying across the map at 15,000 feet at constant speed 3, while Red 1 was at 16,500 feet and could practice manouvering around it and maybe set up an attack run. These are  both Mysteres which are actually pretty good early jets, very manouverable and relatively fast.

I'm just using little blue dice to track most things on the aircraft control sheets. You can just make out the aircraft attitude counters I made on the bottom right tracks - a very clever 2D display which shows both the degree of aircraft bank as well as the angle of dive or climb, including 'pull outs' and 'pull throughs' ie the top or bottom of a loop or split S.

One complication is that the movement point track has three markers on it - throttle, current MP and energy from dives. I'm just using three dice with 1,2 and 3 respectively showing, but I should probably make some specific counters for those (T,M,E or something).

Anyway, my plan of doing some gentle manouvres with Red 1 while Blue 1 chugged along steadily soon went out of the window. Blue 1 accelerated and made a hard turn to starboard (these old jets don't accelerate very fast!) which lost it both speed and altitude but put some distance between it and Red 1. Red 1 meanwhile banked to port then went into an inverted power dive which lost lots of altitude but gained lots and lots of speed and energy while heading in directly the opposite direction to Blue 1.

Blue 1 had completed a turn to port at low speed (they turn much better slowly) and was now facing Red 1. Red 1 meanwhile executed a Split S and roll and ended up facing Blue 1, albeit at much lower altitude. I'd accumulated a ton of energy in the dive, and I planned to use it to climb back up. My brain exploded at that point and I couldn't face the next few turns required for both sides to get lined up in what would almost inevitably be a head on pass with a very low probability of hitting anything. I had however learned a huge amount about the turn sequence and how manouvring worked. I needed to come back to it again and practice some more stuff. I'd really like to figure out how to do an Immelman and a barrel roll, but mainly to get a better feel of how to anticipate the position, altitude and speed of the aircraft as otherwise neither a turning fight nor boom and zoom are going to be possible. 

A few days later I set the game again with a couple of aircraft with the aim of working through more manouvres. In the interim I'd made up some custom counters to track throttle, energy and movement points as they all share the same track, and I'd colour coded and numbered the aircraft attitude counters to match the planes so I could tell which track related to which plane easily. We started off with Blue 1 and Red 1 (B1, R1) cruising along at throttle 3, MP 3. B1 at altitude 70, R1 at 75. (or 'medium low' - it affects acceleration, turn speeds etc).

This time I left B1 to just fly straight, accelerating to maximum speed but keeping straight and level. R1 wanted to try a loop (or 'wing over' as the rules have it). To execute a wingover you need to go into a type 1 (shallow) climb, then two turns in a type 2 (steep) climb, enter a pull through (ie vertical and pull the stick back) and finally the wing over which leaves you inverted and but reversed 180 degrees. It is quite a handy manouvre to practice as if you get into a pull-through, you can do an Immelman from there and choose how many points of turn (up to six) and roll you do - ideal to bounce an unsuspecting enemy. That is five moves or 12.5 seconds of real time.

Anyway, these old 1950s jets proved to be rather hard to loop in. I discovered I wasn't going fast enough to actually enter a type 2 climb! So had to level out, hit the throttle for a few turns to speed up (acceleration isn't instant as the turns are so short), and then try again. Of course what I should have done was dive first.... anyway 

I finally got to the top of the loop, meanwhile B1 had managed to fly off the far end of the board and come back on again at the bottom, barrelling along at 5 MP. At the top of the loop, I realised to my horror that my airspeed was about the reach 0 but managed to avoid stalling. Having survived, I executed the wingover and ended up inverted with an airspeed of 1, but eleven altitude levels above B1 (iirc each level is 250 feet?). 

As B1 was close by, I though I'd try and execute a pursuit.

This doesn't look too promising does it! It took me a couple of moves to turn 180 degrees by banking at 90 degrees and pulling hard Gs. I lost a bit of airspeed and altitude pulling such a tight turn but was still well above B1. Time to dive and get some energy. Diving both increased my speed to the airframes maximum, 6 (just below the speed of sound), gained energy, reduced the height difference and l

closed the gap.

It took a few turns but eventually I caught B1, and loosed off a rather hopeless medium range cannon shot which missed.

By now I'd accumulated masses of energy, so was able to pull off some very fancy manouvres. I rolled left to line up exactly with B1, my dive had actually made me undershoot the altitidude, but I was able to level off, burn some more energy to pull up a couple more altitude levels and then boost my speed using yet more energy to set up a perfect shot (above). I believe diving then pulling up right on the enemy's tailpipe is called a Yo Yo.

Point blank range with four cannon, Impossible to miss. KABOOM! goes B1.

I called it a day there as my head hurt once more, but I felt I'd got on top of the manouvre system at least. I think the main lesson was that these underpowered jets really can't do the same looping manouvres as prop planes and turning was the way to go in a cannon fight. The boost from accumulated (dive) energy from the very last engagement was a revelation however as it allowed extra manouvres at the last minute to set up really good shots.

OK, feel a bit better prepared for our next team outing now. I'm really not sure why I'm demonstrating this level of obsession with mastering a dead air warfare system from 45+ years ago. An intellectual challenge to be beaten, or something.