Ayton Event - in pictures

Recent ebay aquisition

Very pleased to get this rare item from ebay for only about £4.00. Can't decide if I should get them out the box and painted. Will certainly have a look for more Airfix AWI figures.

Plastic Soldier Company Late War Germans (1/72)

Got these through the post from Drum and Flag this weekend. The first batch are based and undercoated and waiting for my next day off. The poses are almost identical to the Russians, it doesn't matter since they are well thought out. There are no 'waste' poses like you tend to get in other boxes of plastic figures so you end up using everything in the box, which makes it good value.

You also get an instruction sheet for making the figures up, though it's not really needed. This weekend the company launched their Soviet Heavy Weapons set, which I'm very keen to get hold of now and they also do a box of Late War British. They had those in the model shop but by the time I went back with some money they had gone. I'll get them soon though, already have some Ram Kangaroos made up as transport for a Canadian motorized battalion.

Plastic Soldier Company Russians (1/72)

There has been a White Elephant in the room of Db-Variants. A period that never before dared rear its head. Maybe it's the lemsip going to my head this week but I've thought, why not!? Being ill this week and needing a pick me up I had to buy some Plastic Soldier Company Russians in Summer Dress (1/72) without any real plan as to what to do with them. I began thinking of how to base them and knew I didnt really want to base them individually, once I looked at the basing options it occured to me that I could base three on a 40mm x 30mm base very easily and this suggested a look of a DbA/M/C/N/ACW base. At that point the plan for a DbWWII game started to form.

In the box of Plastic Soldier Company Russians you get three sprues, each sprue can make three rifle companies, an SMG company and a command stand if you base three figures to a base. So the box can make a battalion of infantry. In theory.

I've yet to work out any DbWWII rules but I can see that (plus) value points can be given in combat for such units as the SMG company when used as shock troops. The 'push back' rule could be very useful with these elements and when tanks are used the usual artillery mechanisms from other Db variants can be adapted and applied.

I can see dedicated WWII wargamers reeling in horror at the limitations that these rules would have on a WWII game but the advantages outweigh them when you are trying to make a fast to play very easy game to get into. There is a lot of scope to turn this into a join in demo game for shows or at times when there may be people wishing to get involved who haven't wargamed before.

Update!

Managed to get my first Soviet batch finished today. So here we have 1 command stand, 3 rifle companies and an SMG 'shock' company. This is basically what you get from 1 sprue, you also get a prone light machine gunner and loader but I didn't have much use for these, not a fan of prone poses as they seem to take up too much base space. (T34's are quick builds from Pegasus and the BA-64B is a resin model from Under the Bed Enterprises)

Brittany Spears

Voici mes Normans. Ce sont les premiers de la boîte que j'ai achetée chez Vapnartak cette année.

 

York Library Viking Day

As Part of the York (Jorvik) Vikikng festival this week I had volunteered us to put on a Viking wargame or two at the Library.

We had free reign of any of the large oak tables in the records/archives room upstairs and much to the bewilderment of other casual library users we staged a number of battled through the afternoon. Mostly Viking vs Saxon. Prior to this we had made a very simple DbA based skirmish rules mechanism to fight 1:1 skirmishes with warbands of around 20 figures per side. Thanks to Alex, Peeler and Richie for helping come up with the rules last Friday! We were aiming for something similar to the Toy Soldier rules we have that would allow complete beginners and children to quickly grasp a basic knowledge of what wargaming is while playing out a 30 minute game.

At this level there was no scenery needed as the game simply focused on the clash of two or three warbands, although we did have a few tress around the edges of the gaming area for effect. We played about 6 games in all, with various kids coming along to join in for a game. Mostly it was a straight Vikings in mail armour attacking un-armoured Saxon Fyrd. It rarely went well for the Saxons, even when trying cleaver flanking moves. The aim is to contact your enemy while remaining in formation (shield wall) but this often failed when a warband went 'berserk' and charged. One game saw both sides doing this with equally devastating results. Mostly the extremely simple rules worked well and allowed for some thought to be given to tactics and manuovre within the battle. There is lots of scope to expand them and archers and cavalry can be added also. I'd also hope to add scenery/scenarios to future games.

As usual with our outings a plesant and laid back affair it was! Apparently the Library is having a Roman day later in the year so we may be back for that one.

Vapnartak 2011

Made it to the annual York Wargames show today. Saw this very interesting game using Schleich/Papo large figures for a medieval style skirmish, designed for 1 on 1 games. Written by members of the Society of Ancients, it uses dominos to factor weapon use and effects of the arms/legs/torso of the figure by using the pips on the domino. Very clever system! I bought their guide to it and will have a play with it someday. Plan on getting some of the figures for the nephews anyway.

I went with a shopping list today and managed to stick to it quite well, I swelled the ranks of my 28mm plastic Dark Age figures by aquiring a set of Gripping Beast Vikings and some mounted Normans, with a few Foundry metal single figures as cheifs. Got a DBA Saxon army (Magista Millitarium) and some single mounted Normans in 15mm from Museum Miniautres, never knew these were based in Driffield! Also bought some nice trees and a hillock from S&A Scenics for the 15mm DBA stuff.

Books: Ancient and Medieval Wargaming by Neil Thomas. I have his book on Napoleonics and it's excellent, this is very useful to for a newbie to the period like me. Also bought and old Osprey book on Vikings, which has some great plates inside for painting references.

I took the photos below at the Gripping Beast display case for reference when I paint up the new plastic boxed sets.

Had a good day but a bit frustrating amongst the crowds. Would have liked to have chatted to the traders a lot more and had space to do more browsing. Next events, York Library 20th Feb, Rydale Folk Museum 26th Feb, Ayton at the end of April and Durham 11th June.