Little World Wars playtest

 We've had a few 54mm WW2 outings over the years, and Tim has been working on various revisions to get the 'feel' right. The latest version is tentatively titled 'Little World Wars' and I went over to playtest it, following a remote session with Russell.

It is pitched at a similar scale to Little Cold Wars, with each vehicle or gun representing a platoon, but the infantry are modelled as six figure companies or 2/3 figure weapons platoons, rather than the four figure platoons of LCW.

Battlefield from the east. The Russians set up around the crossroads nearest the camera, and need to clear the village on the far side of the table of Germans.

The Soviet hordes. A reinforced Rifle Battalion (four rifle companies) supported by a company of T34s plus various heavy weapons and offtable artillery. The T34s are 1/48th (or possibly 1/56th?) scale plastic models.

The German infantry, three panzergrenadier companies, plus some heavy weapons and a very obvious Tank Hunter platoon armed with Panzerschrecks.

Closer view of the Russian infantry, the ATR, MG and mortar platoons on the right, Battalion HQ top right and four companies of six figures each on the left. Mostly plastic figures from a range of manufacturers.

The German vehicle fleet, some lovely Tamiya(?) 1/48th scale Horch Cars, lorries and a Kubelwagen, suported by a dodgy Chinese plastic SP 20mm AA halftrack and a very passable Panzer IV. Star of the show is the stunning Corgi Panther, a metal diecast.

The Russians set up in the village. There is a diminutive BA64 in the lead. I wasn't sure about the weapon ranges so I set up rather conservatively behind the ridge.

The German forward defence with two rifle companies and two MG platoons, supported by the Pz IV platoon.

I spent a few turns shaking the Russian infantry out into assault waves. The moves were only 4", so this took a while, deliberately short as the table is small. The 76mm Infantry gun busily shelled the Germans while this was going on, and the tanks lurked.

There was a bit of a traffic jam in town with all the trucks and Bren Carriers of the support company cluttering things up. It kept the female traffic control NCO quite busy! Each company is dealt a card and activates in card order, so it is very easy to get some horrendous traffic jams if the units activate in the 'wrong' order.

Urrah! Unfortunately both the BA64 and one of the T34s was knocked out in short order. The infantry shrugged off the enemy small arms fire however.

The Russian covering fire had caused some losses, and the T34s had even managed to knock our the Pz IV. Tank gunnery was by Nerf Gun against various sized targets. The Panther was well forward by now.

Only one T34 left at this point, which very wisely hunkered down hull down supporting the infantry. The company on the top right are very close to the rail line now, and the carriers with the battalion MG and ATR platoons are in close support.

The 76mm gun is down to one crew figure by now though and withdraws, drawn by the truck. 

The Russians are into the first hedgerow, and outflanking the handful of Germans to their left. The chap on his own is due to a neat mechanism - when infantry become casualties, you can attempt to reorganise them, and possibly they recover, or are removed permanently. The chance of recovery is improved by the presence of a medic. This is very similar to the casualty check in Stargrunt II, and is a mechanism I really like.

The last Russian tank is knocked out, but it has done its job as the infantry are very close to their first objective now. The MG platoon was extremely effective in laying down withering covering fire, as was the battalion mortar platoon.

The Germans are looking distinctly ragged now.

Sadly the card sequence let me down. The rear company activated first and moved up behind the lead company, and before they could play their 7 of clubs, the German mortars activated and dropped a stonk right in the middle of the bunch up troops. Six guys down. Ouch!

The Russians are well into the hedgerows now and the remaining Germans bug out back to the village. By this stage though, the Russians have lost over half their infantry and all their AFVs, so they don't really have the strength to clear the town.

We called it a day at that point. The Germans are back in the town, but the Russians need reinforcements to continue the attack.

That was lots of fun, and Tim had already run this scenario with Russell so had plenty of feedback. My main suggestions were that infantry moves were perhaps a bit short and that the spotting rules could be simplified considerably, possibly just restricted to units which start the game stationary. I hadn't realised at the time, but Tim obviously also thought artillery and mortar fire was a bit too accurate based on some of the future revisions. 

As I said in the intro, this is a scale of unit representation I like in WW2 as battalion to brigade level allows for genuine combined arms forces, and avoids some of the artificiality of very tactical games where a platoon is magically reinforced by a single tank, some random machine gunners and some Army level artillery assets.

15mm BA 64 armoured cars

 I picked up a trio of BA 64s second hand at the recent Steel Warriors show. They used to belong to Frank, a stalwart of the club, who died suddenly earlier this year.

Here they are chugging along. The only other Soviet armoured cars I have are early war ones, and while my late war recce troops have carriers, Valentines and motorcycles, they don't have any suitable armoured cars, so these are ideal.

I don't know who the manufacturer is, although I assume Battlefront. They appear to be resin or plastic, not metal, and come with either ATRs or MGs as armament.  

They are nice little models, and very diminutive compared to my BA-10s. They were done in a very dark green, so I went over them with a heavy drybrush of Russian camo green (Vallejo 894) to lighten them a bit. The commanders were in black uniforms as well, so I re-did them in khaki. Otherwise they didn't need much painting.

I dirtied them up a bit with a light tan drybrush, which picked up the edges on the angular armour and other details nicely and highlighted the weapons in boltgun metal. Otherwise it was just a matter of basing them.

As I had the Russian Green out, I also repainted one of the old lorries Tim has donated to me. This one is a Zvezda Gaz AA. I managed to break one of the front wheels off getting it off its old base (stuck down with hot glue!). Otherwise it was just the same treatment as the armoured cars albeit with added glass.

These are lovely models which take a drybrush very well.

I usually do the canvas tilts khaki, (VJ English Uniform) but I didn't shake the bottle up enough and it came out a shiny light green as the pigment hadn't mixed properly. I hate dropper bottles, give me a proper pot of paint any day. I've still got one old pot of Humbrol acrylic from 1997.

Anyway, I couldn't be bothered to do anything about it, so I let to dry and just gave it a heavy drybrush of tan, which ended up looking OK. 

One more truck to add to the collection. You can never have too many.

Conference of Wargamers 2023

 The Conference of Wargamers (COW) has for many years been hosted at Knuston Hall in Northamptonshire, sadly the hall has now closed and is up for sale. In 2021, the conference was hosted (at quite short notice) at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham, but this year we moved to a new venue in Buckinghamshire, Missenden Abbey.

The Abbey was founded in the 12th century, and has been extensively added to since then, although some parts of the original building survive. It is now a University conference centre and event/wedding centre, and ideal for our purposes with plenty of rooms for games, good on-site accommodation and fairly centrally located in England.

There are also lovely grounds and gardens to walk about in. Or possibly host lawn games...

I put on a couple of sessions, took part in a number of games and observed a number of others. I'll probably report on a number of the games as (short) separate posts, but a few highlights. 

The Conference opened with a large plenary game involving all the attendees and covering the opening days of the Weimar Republic in 1918/1919.

As might be expected, decadance and violence went hand in hand as the various factions vied for power. I was cast as Karl Leibknecht, leader of the Spartacists, I can't think why. As our brave street fighters were crushed by right wing Freikorps, it soon became apparent that Germany wasn't ready for world revolution, so we made our escape to Paris with 11 Billion Reichsmarks and enough weapons and ammo to start a small war. Better than ending up floating face down in a canal anyway.

I ran my venerable 'Good Morning, Good Morning' (WW1 in Three Turns) game on Friday night. It is a quick single player game covering divisional level trench assaults on the western front in 1916, 1917 and 1918. It first came to COW in 2001 but I have tweaked it a bit since then.

Mark F, one of our regular remote gaming group, put on  a big naval campaign game using a mish-mash of Nimitz and the old AHGC 'Battle at Sea' (?) WW1 naval rules.

Tim G, another Sheffield regular, put on a session with his 'Little World Wars' 54mm WW2 game. I was roped in to command the Support Company. The first outing for his 54mm British.

I took part in a great session playing Toms' The Information Game' - a military training game around modern (as in current) intelligence gathering and assessment. It has aspects of cyber and data management, so a bit coals to Newcastle for me, but very interesting to see how to game these non kinetic activities. I think we've found the target (finally).  

Graham ran an intro session for his new RCW rules ' It Rolls for Ivan', featuring lots of cavalry and a huge armoured train with lots of flags.

John C put on a game around mid 2022 operations in Ukraine using the current Fort Leavenworth tactical microarmour rules. A Russian company(+) vs a Ukrainian platoon(+). The rules 'bear a very strong resemblance' to Fistful of TOWs, albeit with weapons effectiveness data based on current intelligence. 

Along with his naval game, Mark F put on a Vietnam session, featuring the Australians. 

And Dave Burden put on one of the products of his PhD work on wargaming urban warfare, WW2 street fighting with 'Rubble Town'.

I took part in one of Russells ever cheery nuclear war planning games in the 'Wintex-75' series, set in the mid 1970s. This time we were the BBC editorial team tasked with coming up for the programming for the post attack 72 hour TV broadcasting loop, which involved a lot of cutting up of copies of the Radio Times. I was head of childrens programming, and managed to fit in Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley. We also managed to slip in an episode of 'Survivors', albeit the cheery Xmas edition, as well as repeats of the 1966 World Cup.

I ran my One Hour WW2 variant, with the Leshnov 1941 scenario. Here 12th Tank Division bravely assaults Leshnov.

Although sadly things didn't go quite as well for the rest of 8th Mechanised Corps as they were pocketed by 11th Panzer Division.

Finally I went along to Chris Ks session presenting the latest version of NQM. I'd already had a bit of a preview when I went down to Wellingborough to visit him. I was very pleased to see my suggestion of ammo depletion on a '6' had made it into the rules, so much more satisfactory for the firing player than depletion on a '1', and it has some vague real world justification that all those hits are because you've used up your ammo. I claim no great originality as the rule was originally in Victory Games excellent 'Hells Highway'.

Chris demonstrated the game with a few turns of a Soviet Army level assault vs a position defended by a Panzer Corps in 1943. It ended up involving every player in the room (well over a dozen people).

That was a great weekend, very enjoyable and a fabulous new venue which I hope we will return to in the future. As always it was great to catch up with people, and also to watch and play lots of interesting games.

 

Spike Island

 John B put on another outing to De Valeras Ireland in the 1940s. This game covered the contingency plan the British formulated to sieze back the Treaty Ports ceded to Eire in 1938 in order to aid the Battle of the Atlantic. The game covered the situation from April 1941 after the assumed British military operation, until December 1941, the point at which the USA entered the war.

For those unaware, after the Irish Civil War, Britain retained three naval bases in the Irish Free State (shown on the map above) These were returned to Ireland in 1938, but as the Battle of the Atlantic turned against Britain in 1941, the Royal Navy desperately needed the bases in Ireland to extend coverage of the Atlantic convoys. Our previous game covered the diplomatic efforts to open the bases up while De Valera intransigently, insisted on strict neutrality, even though those convoys were keeping Ireland supplied too.

In this scenario, Churchill has lost patience, and Commandos have recaptured the ports. 

The game was run as a matrix game, I was Harold MacMillan, Minister for Ireland, Pete was Montgomery, in charge of the port garrisons (49 West Riding Div),  John was De Valeria, Russell the IRA and Tim the Archbishop of Ireland. A sixth player would have been the Ulster Unionists.

I was tasked with reaching a rapprochement with the Irish government and preventing an escalation of hostilities. We started off by dangling various inducements - extra food convoys, joint garrisoning of the ports etc but these were all rejected out of hand and although the Irish were in no state to confront the UK militarily, De Valera let all the IRA internees out of prison and before you knew it, the Irish Civil War had resumed.

Oh dear. Hostilities escalated very rapidly indeed, and eventually the USA told Churchill to withdraw, which we did, instead occupying Iceland in a joint US-UK venture. I was heroically wounded having survived an IRA assassination attempt, and resigned my post, hoping for a quiet death in some doomed operation to redeem my reputation.

What a catastrophe, I reckon that put the Good Friday Agreement back by two centuries. At least we got to look at this very pretty 1940s map of Ireland.

I'm very glad Churchill didn't go ahead with his reckless scheme in 1941, and my most heartfelt sympathy goes out to those politicians who have had to deal with the Irish situation in the last 100 years. I really don't know how Mo Mowlam did it.

Even more old trucks

 While at the 'Steel Warriors' show, Tim handed me yet another box of old 15mm (ish) trucks to play with.

The latest batch. How many old trucks does Tim have?

A Zvezda Opel Blitz. I have some of these already but another one is always welcome.

And a Zvezda Gaz AA. I also have quite a few of these, although Tim has done a better job on the wierd bonnet moulding than I have.

I metal Citroen staff car. Peter Pig I think.

This rather wonderful diecast horse box! I'll think about converting it into an ambulance or a command vehicle.

Cream of the crop is this stunning Lesney diecast Scammel recovery truck.

What a fabulous model, I was actually thinking of getting a 3D print of one of these, so this has saved me the bother. I've already got a 6mm one in my Eighth Army Corps Assets pile. 

I just need to prise them all off their old bases and repaint them, so watch this space.