Barrage 2026

 

The HAWKs held Barrage on the 18th and 19th of September this year.  I was a little startled to look at our name tags for the convention and realize that this was Barrage 30! We had about 200 people attend, and about 60 events, so it was a good convention.  Local conventions like Barrage are, in my experience, a good place to play some games, and we had a wide variety of scales and periods on offer.

I chose to run a 40mm Not Quite Seven Year’s War game this year, using the Charge! rules as is most often the case.  For our HAWKs game day back in May I got caught short on preparations and used an old favorite scenario, and some of the players pointed out that this may have provided an advantage to those who had played the specific scenario before.  So, for Barrage I wanted to use a scenario that I had never used before.  I settled in with my C.S. Grant scenario books, Scenarios for Wargames and Scenarios for All Ages, to see what I could find that would be practical for a convention game.  I eventually settled on Scenario #12, “Fighting Across the River”, from Scenarios for All Ages (aka “The Red Book”).

I finally decided to sign up to run a game rather late this year, so I ended up running it on Friday afternoon.  My elder son came up on Saturday for the day, but was unavailable to help me set up, and I am afraid that it now takes me quite a while to do this on my own, not to mention the difficulties inherent in transporting as many boxes as I had.  Better planning in the future will mitigate some of this.  Anyway, I eventually got it all set up and then had time for some lunch.

A couple of years ago the HAWKs decided to simplify our lives a bit, and we replaced a HAWKs-run hot dog stand with a variety of food trucks.  This year we had a truck called “Deli-ish” on Friday, and their specialty, the Reuben, happens to be one of my favorite sadnwiches.  This isn’t their first time with us, and I hope that it won’t be the last, either.

Then it was time to run the game.  As written, the scenario involves a smaller force attempting to delay the advance of a larger using a shallow (i.e. fordable along its length) river to aid in the defense.  I assigned the forces of the Pragmatic Coalition (i.e. mine) to be the attackers and the forces of North Polenburg (Chris Palmer’s) to be the defenders.  The attackers had approximately a 2:1 advantage over the defenders, and I mentioned that I had not played this scenario before, so I wasn’t sure if any adjustements would be necessary to make the situation more balanced. 

Wachovian infantry assault one of the bridges

As things played out, it might have been helpful to give the defenders a couple of hasty redoubts. They needed something to keep from being shot up by the attackers well before the attacking columns attempted to ford the rivers.  So I’m not sure how satisfactory a game it was for the defenders, and perhaps I should avoid springing a new scenario on people at a convention.

The Regiment von Nordhafen in the attack

Wachovian hussars charge the North Polenburg Hawks Regiment

Nevertheless, I enjoyed to opportunity to see these troops on the table.  While I didn’t announce it as such, Chris Palmer and I played the very first NQSYW game in late August 1996, so this game was in honor of the 30th anniversary of the start of the conflict.  

It’s probably time for another reenactment of that first battle…

I had the opportunity to play in an interesting Native American skirmish on Saturday, run by Jesse Scarborough, using his “Warriors of the Woods” rules.  This depicts skirmishes between tribees foguht out in a style very different than that of the European conflicts of the period.  I almost bought the rules (and will probably do so at Fall In), but I was pulled out of the game just before the end to participate in a discussion with the crew from Little Wars TV, about running Barrage.  I’ve linked in the YouTube video for the curious.

As I mentioned, my elder son came up for the day, and had signed up to run a couple of games of his Proxia19th century imagi-nations.  Regrettably, by the late hour at which he was running, finding players willing to take a change on something new was difficult. 

I ended up faced off against another HAWK in a reprise of a game that my son and I had played back in July, with an 1848-style insurgent force against the regular army of an occupying power (e.g. Italians vs. Austrians).  As usual we used the Neil Thomas rules from Wargaming 19th Century Europe.

After a tense battle in which both players were convinced that all was lost at least once and maybe twice, the remnants of the rebel army held their objectives at nightfall.  I went away from this game determined to get back to work on my own 19th century game, to be built with Schneider 40mm home casting molds.  (Forces sufficient to make two armies suitable for Neil Thomas’s One Hour Wargames have been cast, but not one brushstroke of paint has yet been applied … )

Overall, it was a fun weekend for gaming, and I could probably have squeezed in a 4th game by a little better management of my schedule.  

Outside of the gaming, it was a good weekend for the flea market.  I’ll come back to this subject in a future post, but one of the reasons why there’s been a long gap in posting this time is that my wife and I have been busy with arranging for a new house.  We should be moving some time in November, and the offer on the new home was accepted just before Barrage.  This means that I am spending some time seriously thinking about the size of the wargaming collection, and trying to get some of it moved on to new homes before the move.  Barrage came just a little too soon after the move became real so I couldn’t get everything that I would want to shed organized, but I was still able to rehome several large boxes of scenery, which will be some help come November.  I was on my best behavior and did not turn around and buy anything new with the money gained that way, except for the recently-issued campaign book for Midgard.  I still haven’t had time to read that …