Getting Re-Organized

 I have not been doing well with my resolution to blog more, but, here we go …

The HAWKs have been busy painting 54mm plastic American War of Independence figures for the annual Armies for Kids give-away event at Historicon, now just a few weeks away.  We are giving away six army sets, each consisting of 6 American units, 6 British units, plus a gun and crew and a mounted officer for each side.  Units are just four men, so every kid is due to get about 55 painted figures this year, including one Indian unit in each British set. We usually get together as a group for the painting, but I wanted to give the Indians a little extra attention so I volunteered to do the 24 of them as homework.  I also had extra spray paint and volunteered to do the six 4’x6’ground cloths.  

The Indians; project organizer will do the basing

As of Friday, I finished this task up after much procrastination. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I am procrastinating on a particular task (e.g. painting) I usually will fill time with something completely unrelated (e.g. bicycling), because I feel too guilty about almost doing what I am putting off.  

Three ground cloths starting with tan felt

Three ground cloths starting with green felt

The ground cloths, by the way, turned out to be more of a challenge than I had expected, and I can tell that I am getting old, as my forearms were sore and fatigued the next morning after a couple of hours with a succession of spray cans. Nevertheless, by Friday morning everything had been dropped off to the Armies for Kids coordinator and I was free to paint whatever I felt like without guilt.

I noted to the painting group assembled on Friday that I have been spending too much time watching hobby videos on YouTube rather than actually doing hobby activities. (There’s probably a blog post in that …) One of the channels I subscribe to is the Medieval Wargamer, and he posted a video last week debating the perennial topic of whether this hobby is getting to be too expensive.  (That’s probably a post by itself too … ) I was reminded that Uncle Atom of Tabletop Minions had posted a video back in 2023, and I had taken up the $100 challenge, deciding to build a medieval skimish project starting with an Italeri 6108 “Medieval Tournement” (sic) set. 

The figures I’d finished in 2023

I had only finished 9 of the figures, but had left another batch on tongue depressors in various stages of painting. 

The next batch, left in progress

In an uncharacteristic fit of organization, I had sequestered all of the materials for the project including the paints, brushes, and bases, in an 11-liter Really Useful Box. I remembered that I had put the “in progress” tongue depressors into the RUB later, but not all at the same time.

The sorted project box

Enjoying the lack of guilt over the Armies for Kids I pulled out the Tournament project box yesterday and decided that it would be prudent to count the miniatures and make sure that I had actually gotten everything stowed away properly back in 2023.  According to my blog post (linked above), I was looking for 55 foot figures and 20 cavalry figures, and I could only find 51 of the foot figures.  Three hours later, after moving and looking into every RUB full of half-completed miniatures in my basement, counting four times, and comparing the sprues from the box with an intact set of sprues twice, I concluded …drumroll please…that I had miscounted or mistyped back in my 2023 blog post, and the real answer really was that I had 51 foot and 20 horse.  So, the good news was that all figures were present and accounted for, but that bad news was that I had run out of energy for the day to actually do some painting.  Oh well, better luck today…

French and Indian War

I'm behind on blogging, as usual, but I've gotten the 40mm French and Indian War stuff out today for a trial game using A Fistful of Lead Bigger Battles.

2025 Year in Review

 I retired as of the 1st of January 2025, so I have been fortunate enough to have some extra time on my hands this year, as planned.  My wargaming goal going into the year was not to turn down any offer of a game unless absolutely necessary.  The HAWKs have had a regular retirees group for some years now, and I was happy to be part of it, starting with the first meeting in January. I’ve also gotten games days with my sons, and made it to a few conventions this year.  As a result, as of the 15th of December, I’ve logged 67 game sessions this year, with only a slender chance of getting any more in before the 1st of January.  That is a new record, and has been the best part of the hobby year.

A Fantastic Battles Game with My “Myzantine” Forces

As gleaned from my log, which I keep on paper in a notebook, being somewhat old school, here is a complete list of those games, arranged by frequency:

Miniatures Games of 2025

9 x Combat Patrol (7 20mm WWII, 2 25mm WWI)

6 x DBA (20mm)

5 x Fantastic Battles (4 6mm*, 1 25mm*)

4 x Dragon Rampant (3 20mm*, 1 25mm*)

4 x Look Sarge, No Charts (10mm WWI)

4 x 15mm Napoleonics home rules (3 different sets)

3 x To the Strongest (10mm ancients)

3 x Fistful of Lead (F&IW, 2 40mm*, 1 25mm)

2 x Fantasy home rules (1 25mm, 1 wooden “crafties”)

2 x Charge! (40mm NQSYW*)

2 x Square Bashing (25mm WWI)

2 x Chain of Command (20mm WWII)

2 x Medieval home rules (54mm*)

2 x Neil Thomas 19th Century Europe (20mm)

2 x Chosen Men (25mm Napoleonics)

1 x Rebels and Patriots (40mm NQSYW*)

1 x Turnip 28

1 x WWI home rules (10mm)

1 x British colonial home rules (25mm)

1 x Vauban’s Wars (15mm SYW siege)

1 x Don’t Give Up the Ship (Napoleonic Naval)

1 x Fistful of Lead Bigger Battles (25mm British colonials)

1 x This is Not a Test (25mm post-apocalyptic)

1 x Star Schlock (25mm SF)

1 x Thalassa (1/300 ancient naval)

1 x Battletech Alpha Strike (1/300 SF)

1 x De Bellis Fantasiae (20mm fantasy)

1 x Lion Rampant (54mm medieval*)

1 x Blood and Swash (25mm early American)

1 x Tanks for the Apocalypse (20mm post-apocalyptic)

——-

67 games

30 (+) different sets of rules

*17 games involving my own figures; 50 not involving my figures

Someone asked me recently on a hobby Discord what I typically play.  This year, there really was no “typically” about it.  Due to my acceptance of whatever was on offer, the most frequently played game was Combat Patrol, one of the many games designed by club member Buck Surdu. I played it both in the standard WWII version and modified for WWI. I personally only have one 20th century project in my collection at this time, a 6mm Spanish Civil War set which, according to my records, has not been used in a game since April 2005, over 20 years ago.  Due to club interests, I suppose I do end up playing a lot of WWI and WWII, but I enjoy the opportunity to play something without having to build up a collection myself.

Only 17 games involved any of my own figures this year using figures from 6 projects.  By my count, I have 16 projects that have “playable” levels of figures. I would have to say that my figure collection was a bit underused this year.

With 30+ sets of rules played this year (the uncertainty being how to count the home rules Napoleonics) it has been difficult to gain proficiency with any new sets of rules, and I have a stack of rules that haven’t been tried yet, particularly Hobgoblin and Midgard for some fantasy mass battles.

Some 40mm Prince August Infantry for the Not Quite Seven Years War

It has been a bad year for painting overall. I have scarcely picked up a brush since I finished a few Prince August semi-flats for the NQSYW in September. Other than that, I finished about 10 stands of various 6mm troops for Fantastic Battles and a handful of 25mm fantasy figures (also Prince August home cast).

I have been wanting to get back into blogging more regularly, and I can’t really say that this year was a success.  It took until September to actually buckle down and write something, and I did not match that pace for the rest of the year.  However, I did do some blogging, and I had three times as many posts as last year, so perhaps we’ll call that a draw.

I have usually done some solo gaming in the course of a year, and I have a solo campaign in progress, although it has been stalled since I played out the Battle of Newkeep in January of 2022. I know why the solo campaign is pending: I am stalled on building some buildings I want for the next scenario. However, I have not done a single solo game this year. I could have tried either of the new fantasy rules mentioned above solo, or done any number of other one-shots.  I would suppose that the availability of opponents this year has reduced my craving for more games, at least a bit.

Overall, though, it’s been a really good year for the hobby, even if some areas could be improved.

I haven’t actually written down my goals for 2026 yet, and I hope to blog a bit when I do. There are several ideas on my mind. March 2026 is the 50th anniversary of my involvement with Dungeons & Dragons, and I would really like to dust off the original rules for some retro-gaming. August will be

the 30th anniversary of the first NQSYW game, which is an occasion I will certainly wish to mark. I also want to play some games with some vintage rules. I haven’t had Knights and Magick (Heritage Models, 1980, review minus pictures here) on the table in a few years. We have always played K&M as 

“miniatures agnostic”, but a couple of years ago I thought that it might be fun to see if I couldn’t assemble a couple of forces using contemporary Heritage figures (currently available from Classic Miniatures), either vintage or new castings, and I have acquired more miniatures for this recently. I acquired a set of

Warhammer (1st edition) rules during the pandemic which I still haven’t tried, despite the recent release of a video series on the topic. I’ve been accumulating Citadel Dark Ages figures to provide a couple of appropriate armies, just for fun.  Never having been a Games Workshop fan, the Dark Ages figures and the early Citadel ranges such as Fantasy Adventurers and Fiend Factory, which were licensed to Ral Partha for production in the US, are the only Citadel minis in my collection, so I decided I’d try to build on that a bit.  And…if I’m going to dig into Warhammer, it might be fun to break out Warhammer Ancient Battles for a Dark Ages game or two. More to follow on those ideas…

Meanwhile, I wish all of you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Barrage 2025 After Action Report

 The HAWKs staged Barrage XXIX (really, 29?) on 26 and 27 September, at the Havre de Grace Community Center.  Things suddenly got busy after that, so this has taken me longer to write up and post than I had hoped.  I have been finding that things have expanded to fill most of my available time in retirement, so I’m not sure how I used to find time to go to work and still get anything else done. But here we are … 

Since we became a 2 day convention a few years ago, we now set the hall up on Thursday night.  We generally have about 20 tables set up for gaming in the main room, and there’s also a side room that gets used for an Art de la Guerre tournament on Saturdays.  I believe there were about 50 scheduled events and we had about 190 attendees overall.  

I had the opportunity to play in one game on Friday, a session of an ancient naval game using the Thalassa rules and some 1/300 scale 3-d printed ships, hosted by Walt Leach and a couple of his friends.

A convention is always a nice opportunity to play some games I wouldn’t have time to prepare myself.

Both of my sons came up from the Washington D.C. area on Saturday and helped me run a 40mm Not Quite Seven Years War game with Charge!. Once we had it set up we had a little time to spare, so Norman set up a quick game of DBA using his most recently completed armies, and William and I played it out.

For the NQSYW game this year I dipped into my standard resource, C.S. Grant’s Scenarios for Wargames, and selected Scenario 15: Reinforcements in the Defense (On the Table), a scenario I have used many times before.

The attacking force was provided by the Pragmatic Coalition (forces belonging to myself, Norman, and William) and the defenders by the Northern Alliance (forces belonging to Chris Palmer and Duncan Adams). 

The defenders occupied a large hill, seen here in the far center of the photo, and the attackers need to clear it before reinforcements arrive. As is common in this scneario, both side’s cavalry ended up in a scuffle in the clear area on the near side of the hill (from the point of view of the photo above).

The Pragmatic assault eventually carried the hill, but not without ferocious casualties. 

Everyone agree that the Pragmatic Coalition would not be able to hold the hill against the counterattack from the Alliance reinforcements which had deployed:

I did get a chance to add my most recently completed unit to the Alliance defenders, seen here shortly before they broke:

A few musketeers of the North Polenburg Queen Jennifer Regiment have become intermingled with them in the swirl of the battle.  Overall, it was an unusual run of this scenario; the forces on the hill held out longer than expected, and my sons and I were discussing the possibility of doing a little mathemtical modeling to see how unusual that was, but we haven’t done it yet.

I had good luck with the flea market this year.  I sold almost everything in the three boxes of stuff I brought, and went home with a few books and a couple of small bags of Airfix figures to add to projects befopre actual and potential. 

Now it’s time to prepare for Cold Barrage in March …

All Based and Ready to Go (NQSYW and 54mm Fantasy)

 It has taken a few days since my return from visiting my father to finish up what I had painted, and I also had three more of the NQSYW figures which needed basing.

That brings a Charge! company up to full strength, so I will need to find a way to get it on the table this Saturday.

I also finished the one witch.

Next up on the painting table will be a few more 54mm fantasy figures.  I’m trying not to look too far ahead, so I won’t predict what might be after that.

Some NQSYW (and other) Painting

Please pardon the cluttered table picture!  I have been visiting my father on a regular basis this past year, and I usually try to bring along some sort of hobby project I can work on in the down time.  This trip I brought along the travel paint set and some NQSYW figures for the red-coated army of the Archbishopric of Schlüsselbrett.  When we picked up the redcoats in the Annexation in 2011 there were a few figures with yellow facings that didn’t amount to a complete Charge! company, so I eventually cast up the rest of the needed figures and have worked on them very intermittantly for the last several years.  (More libations for the Muse Clio would be in order, I suppose … ) I was down to the last four I had in progress, so that’s what I brought, figuring that finishing them wasn’t too ambitious.

So, while my father was off to his volunteer gig at the Henry Ford Museum I buckled down and knocked these out. I should have time to get all the basing done to allow the company to appear on the table at Barrage next week.

After playing A Fistful of Lead last week I was also inspired to bring along a few 54mm fantasy figures.  (I have the magic/fantasy expansion for those rules.) I finished off one sorceress, from the old Toys R Us Mythical Warriors play set. (Less the basing, as I didn’t bring the basing or final varnish materials with me…)

During my last burst of inspiration for 54mm fantasy I picked up a bunch of Marx recasts (knights, Vikings, and Robin Hood), so I have plenty of possible figures to paint.  With a bit of help from the Muses, perhaps I can get an initial game on the table some time this winter.

 

Geezer Game

Today's Geezer Game is a 10mm WWI battle, from 1914. The Germans and British clash near Ypres. Rules in use are "Look Sarge, No Charts", with WWII modified to support the WWI scenario.