On Charge!

I still haven't had time to pull pictures together for a full St. Michel report.  Here's one brief story from the weekend:

My son brought one of his gaming college friends along for his first time at the convention.  Having heard from my son beforehand about the NQSYW and having been press-ganged immediately upon arrival into filling out Scenario 3, he asked afterward about why he hadn't seen too many other Charge! games going on.  My son's reply: "Dad and Ross are like people who take their antique car out for a ride now and then."  I must admit that I'm so used to doing these games that I don't think of Old School Gaming in quite that way, although a famous gamer wandered by in the middle of things and opined that "Charge! projects are like the weather; everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything."

Upon reflection, I don't recall seeing many (if any) other Charge! games at our conventions.  Perhaps I should wonder why we don't have emulators?

Cold Wars/Fire and Stone

Cold Wars is over and, sadly, the troops have been sent back to winter quarters after a most entertaining week.  I'll write up something on the St. Michel campaign from my perspective shortly.  My most interesting acquisition at the con was a copy of Christopher Duffy's Fire and Stone on siege warfare.  It includes what amounts to a siege supplement for Charge!, and Ross and I are now considering what it would take to do an NQSYW formal siege of a fortress in 40mm.  Our Haddington 1549 game in 2004 had the fortress, but it was incidental to the game, so this would take things to the next level...

Sawmill Village/Chance encounter

Ross and I were looking for a quick scenario today which would require us to refamiliarize ourselves with the building rules in Charge!, as we expect to be needing them this weekend. The scenario chosen was #41 from CS Grant's Scenarios for Wargames, "Chance Encounter" (also known as Sawmill Village, as described in The War Game Companion), I chose to use my freshly painted dragoon squadron as one of my units, and was amazed as they won a two-turn melee with a squadron of the Rosmark Yellow Hussars (seen here at the start), and then proceeded to win a second melee with the Yellow Hussar's second squadron, despite being down on dice due to a need to rally.

The victorious dragoons are seen here at the moment of victory. Unfortunately, that was the highpoint of the game, as the remainder of my troops were sacrificed in a fruitless attempt to break into the town against determined Rosmarker (er, Rosish) resistance. Ten turns were played in about two hours, reminding me why I like Old School games...

On to Cold Wars and the first Not Quite Raid on St. Michel scenario tomorrow!

Pre-Cold Wars

Ross Macfarlane arrived yesterday evening for the now-traditional pre-Cold Wars visit. While we have not yet had an opportunity to put a game on the table, the day was spent comfortably finishing off a couple of units destined for the weekend's games. I have a squadron of Schoeffen-Buschhagen dragoons finally completed, and Ross has been working on a batch of Rosmark militia intended to defend against the coming S-B incursion.

Not Quite Seven Years War

It is difficult for me to remember back to the beginning of the Not Quite Seven Years War. Around 1991, I ran across the Prince August 40mm semi-flat “Irish Wild Geese” molds in a local hobby outlet, while shopping for Prince August fantasy molds for a (quite) different project. I had recently started reading MWAN and had run across references to Charge! projects encouraged by the Seven Years War Association. I considered the positives -- inexpensive figures from casting, both sides from one set of molds, bigger than 25mm -- and I considered my new son in his stroller with visions of playing games with him someday, and bought the molds. I expanded fairly rapidly from a few test molds to a set including horse, foot, and guns, with frills like command figures and limbers. I also acquired my own copy of Charge! in the Athena reprint edition. However, under the pressure of other projects, and of adding a second son to the family’s order of battle, things stalled after producing a few sample units.

The formation of the HAWKs occasioned the next burst of activity. Chris Palmer (Gaslight, Look Sarge, No Charts, etc.) was also a homecasting enthusiast, and had a great project going on with the other set of 40mm 18th century molds, for the French and Indian War using the Nuernberger Meisterzinn multi-part molds. One of the main attractions of a club is the opportunity for contagious enthusiasms, and it didn’t take long for Chris and I to start adding units to each others’ project. The presence of an opposing force brought the opportunity for gaming within reach, and on a fateful day in 1995, the opening shots of the Not Quite Seven Years War were fired.

The first skirmish, dubbed the Battle of the Tollbooth, was quite modest. As per the original plan, Charge! was used for the rules, although, as has often been the case since, we used the company/squadron as the basic unit, rather than the regiment. My forces, representing the Kingdom of Schoeffen-Buschhagen, consisted of one squadron of cavalry, two and a half infantry companies, and a gun, while Chris, whose forces were yet to be named as “North Polenbergers”, had a squadron, two companies, and two guns. Luckily for me, we hadn’t yet become familiar with the subtleties of the Charge! rules and I avoided most of the effects of the artillery disparity when Chris kept moving his guns. (A gun in Charge! is considerably more powerful than a company of infantry.)

The Battle of the Tollbooth was followed by several years of intermittent games at home and creation of new units. Interest among other club members resulted in the expansion of the war to new countries, most represented by just a handful of units. The total force available became large enough by 1999 that we tried a campaign, which produced a few interesting battles but eventually stalled as the referee (me) became unable to keep up with the paperwork. Nevertheless, the campaign had two long-term positive effects on the project. The first was that the incentive of seeing the troops on the table resulted in a lot of painting. The second was that new players, including Ross Macfarlane, were recruited. Ross will have to tell his own story about this sometime, but, from my point of view, he started off by wishing to have a figure (which became a vignette) to represent his presence on the table, and ended up building the largest force in the project (to date) as he actually executed something like my original personal vision of the project, by creating a force that could be divided for games at home.

Following the campaign, we started running games at the HMGS-East conventions, and the “annual big game” has provided enough stimulus that the total order of battle continues to grow.

At Cold Wars in 2009 the big game was a Lobositz scenario. We had over 1000 figures representing the work of twelve contributors on the table. I am particularly happy to note that both of my sons were among those contributors, so that element of my initial vision has been realized. It took a little longer than I had expected, but what doesn’t?

As I write this, the future looks good for this project. A game at the HAWKs Barrage XIV convention on the 23rd of January 2010 featured new units, and there are more on the painting tables of the HAWKs. I still have hopes of completing my own second army. The rise of the Old School movement in the hobby has created an environment in which the NQSYW is considered almost mainstream, so I anticipate being able to continue to fill games at conventions, and maintaining the inspiration has become a lot easier with the new publishing programs we’re seeing out of England and the proliferation of imagi-nation blogs.

On the other table

We still have yesterday's Morschauser game on the wargames table, so we ended up setting up a small game on the dining room table after supper today. William has been a fan of Rattrap Games skirmish rules (especially Gloire), so we set up a little test scenario from the Broadsword Adventure rule book. It's generally intended to be suitable for Conan-style games involving a handful of figures on each side. Here you see our hastily improvised slaver force about to descend on a native village. The leader is a Mithril Haradrim of some sort, and his minions are Foundry Darkest Africa tribesmen.Here's a view of the whole set up. One of the two heroes can be barely seen on the far side of the table behind the white hut. Huts and jungle material were borrowed from my Darkest Africa collection.

It was moderately amusing, but one figure per player can be frustrating; Norman's figure was locked in combat for most of the game. This is also the first time we've played these rules at home, so the main result was to leave William and me resolved to go back and read the rules more thoroughly.

A Complete Change of Pace

I have been following Bob Cordery's adventures with How to Play War Games in Miniature by Joseph Morschauser (copyright 1962) since before Christmas. I had put together the suggested forces for the Modern period version of the rules about ten years ago, using Matchbox military vehicles, readily available at the time, and 1/72 scale plastic figures from ESCI. I wrote up a few little extensions to the rules for aircraft and cover, consistent with the basic flavor of the rules.

Seen below are some of the elements of the task force from the Republic of Green Land, who were facing off against their traditional enemies from the Democratic People's Republic of Brown Land. My older son, Norman, set up the battlefield. He also built the bridge himself, when he was a good deal younger than he is now.

It was agreed that the scenario would be a meeting engagement between 700 point task forces, which would attempt to control a bridge. Both players entered the table on the same side of the river, at opposite ends. Below you can see the advance elements of the Brown force making their way through the town. Buildings are card models from Fiddler's Green, for the most part, and have been stored quite haphazardly for the past ten years.

Here the Brown forces have cleared the town and are confronted by the lead Green elements, commanded by my skating son, William. The river is a no-longer-available piece from Scenic Effects. Roads were laid in quickly with gaffer's tape. There was some dismay when players were reminded that scout cars had no antitank capability, being deemd to be machine gun armed only. Bradleys visible beyond the road represented the brown armored force, and made short work of the Green armor, which was outnumbered 2:1.

Here, toward the end of the game, most of the table can be seen. We agreed that we would play until one force suffered 50% casualties measure in stands rather than points, or until somebody had infantry on the bridge without enemy present for three turns. Each side had chosen a combined arms force of about 40 Basic Units. As I expected, given the somewhat sanguinary and rudimentary nature of the rules, the break point was reached before control of the bridge had been established by either side.
Below, Brown infantry at the end of the game advances to seize the bridge.
It took a little less than two hours to choose forces and play about 8 turns to a conclusion, so it was nice and snappy from that point of view. Norman's comment was that it needs a little more period flavor, and some additional terrain effects would slow the game down a bit and perhaps provide some additional need for maneuver. He also felt that combat was pretty random and needed some further differentiation between weapon and target types. There had been some speculation by Bob Cordery that the armor overrun rule would be too unbalancing; in this game things went about as I had recalled, with nobody using the rule. Infantry in groups outnumbering tanks would leave an overrunning tank to be quickly destroyed by the limited antitank capability of the rifle stands, in the opinion of both commanders. (I had the back end of the Green forces, and didn't have the opportunity to consider an overrun before our morale collapsed.) Since it's all laid out, I might consider a solo game before we clear the table, and see if we might not have done a little better.

All in all, though, it was fun to dust this one off for an idle afternoon.