Playing Around With 6mm

 In the current age of the world, my nice gaming table has a 3’x5’ playing surface.  While we have had some fun games using 40mm Not Quite Seven Years War figures on it, it has occurred to me (more than once) that it might make sense to use some smaller figures, at least some of the time.  Since I had the troops out for the FP3X3PW digression, my thoughts turned to 6mm fantasy.

My 6mm fantasy/ancients collection is based for De Bellis Antiquitatis and Hordes of the Things.  Across all the DBA/HotT armies, I’ve got about 200 bases of troops.  That turns out to be enough to field two armies each with two ranks of stands from table edge to table edge, which ought to be (more than!) enough to give this a try.  The only question is “What rules should I use?”…

One of the candidates is Fantastic Battles by Nic Wright. It does anticipate that you will have some individually based heroes, wizards and rogues to lead your armies, and some other candidate rules probably do as well. Since I recently got some fantasy reinforcements from Irregular, I thought it might be fun to paint up a few individuals.  

So, yesterday’s project was a group of four wizards, an ogre, and a large demon (tap to enlarge):

I have some knights and such to use as leaders and heroes, so I’ll give them a try next. I apparently still have the brush control to do this, but it would be nicer to be able to brace my arms at a higher level and not hunch over the painting desk.

And now for something completely different … “FP3X3PW”

 TL;DR : A wargame to play on an airline tray table…jump down to the pictures if you don’t need the background…

Last weekend was a good one for gaming.  There was a meeting of the HAWKs on Friday night.  I played in a WWI 1914 battle with Duncan Adam’s collection of 28mm WWI miniatures using the Square Bashing rules for a gridded game.

On Saturday I drove down to the Washington area to play some games with my sons.  We had a couple of rounds of DBA in an ongoing tournament of most of our existing 1/72 scale armies, followed by a 19th century imagi-nations game using Norman’s Proxia armies and Neil Thomas’s rules from his book Wargaming Nineteenth Century Europe 1815-1878. He noted that this was our fifth game with these rules, so I am starting to have a grasp of what my forces should be trying to do.  We played scenario 41, “The Dominant Hill” from C.S. Grant’s Scenarios for Wargames (a.k.a. The Green Book).

On Sunday, one of the other HAWKs members hosted a monthly Saga day at Critical Hit Games in Abingdon, Maryland, so I took my pair of freshly painted Normans to try them out along with the rest of my Norman warband. (It needs another batch of cavalry and enough archers to fill out a batch to really shine, I think … )

Four sets of rules in three days is almost a convention level of play, so I felt that the month had gotten off to a very good start.

However, that’s not really the topic of today’s post.  In the usual convoluted way in which the Muses work, two weeks ago I was reading the Nordic Weasel Games Discord discussions, and conversation turned to Demon Ship, a hot new game from Black Site Studios. It doesn’t really look like anything that would be to my taste, but it was noted that one of its features is that it has a small enough footprint to be playable on an airline tray table.  I like miniaturized things in general (hence this hobby), so I search the web to find out what the dimensions of a tray table might be.  (About 15” by 10”, by the way…) The algorithms decided that I must really want a kid’s folding tray table play organizer. While I had’t realized that such a thing even existed, it did seem like it might be a good idea for keeping miniatures and dice contained, were one actually to wish to play a miniatures game in flight. There followed a rapid group brainstorming session, and one of the other posters suggested that I look at the 3x3 variants of Bob Cordery’s Portable Wargame. Bingo! That mapped neatly onto a set of 3” squares with a reserve zone at either end.  I figured that I could use my existing 6mm DBA/Hordes of the Things troops based on 40mm frontages. I promptly ordered the organizer and the two Portable Wargaming Compendia, all of which arrived over the weekend while I was playing other games.

When I got back from the Saga game I started getting things organized, starting (naturally…) with the organizer:

I dug into my scenery supplies and came up with a piece of sage felt, already somewhat mottled by spray paint, in the approved HAWKs manner.  I cut a piece to size, and marked off the grid:

Since the scenery requirements are fairly minimal, I thought that I could borrow scenery from the 6mm project box along with the troops, at least for long enough to get an idea of what it would look like.

The hills in my 6mm box are a commercial product, purchased at a Historicon when it was still at the Penn Harris…approximately 1989.  They didn’t quite fit neatly within the grid.  I scrounged around the basement looking for more blue felt, to cut a piece for a river which wouldn’t hang over the edges, but I am apparently out of blue felt right now.

I cut a couple of somewhat abstracted hills out of foamcore and covered them with more felt, simply glued in place with white glue. In the absence of blue felt, I dug around in my cupboard and found a roll of disused neoprene stream from Deep Cut Studio.  Since I wasn’t using it for anything at the moment (a little too straight for my taste), I decided that sacrificing 10” of the six feet I had was acceptable. I cut it with some curve to it, about half of the original width.

Conveniently, when Mark Cordone originally proposed the 3x3 grid version of the Portable Wargame, two of his sample armies were Romans and Sassanid Persians, both already painted and among my 6mm collection.  So the next step was to give it a try.

The suggested scenery generation table gave me the river with no other terrain.  It took about four turns and perhaps twenty minutes for the Sassanid army (to the right) to break the Roman left wing.  As played, Roman reserves had one turn to re-establish a presence in their left sector, and failed.  Round one to the Persians…

I’m not sure that a steady diet of this would be satisfying, but as something to stick in my carry-on bag to while away a flight, or to be available in the evenings on an otherwise dull business trip, it seems to be good.

After that, it was time to consider how I was going to render the troops portable.  Most of my troops are on steel bases of one sort or another, and the storage/travel boxes are lined with magnets.  The 6mm troops, however, go way back and are on matteboard.  I considered cutting foam for a while, but decided that it was probably better to dip into my stock of flexible steel bases and go with magnets.  I already had a small plastic box earmarked for a game that was supposed to fit in a carry-on, about 5x8x2 inches, or approximately the size of a reasonable trade paperback book. I added some flex steel to the two buildings borrowed as a built-up area, and the trees were already on steel washers.

Here’s the box, packed with the two armies, the scenery, dice, and damage tokens:

Opening it up, the hills are on top of a piece of foam.  While I didn’t want to try to fit the miniatures into the foam, having some foam as a back-up to help stabilize anything that might come loose seemed prudent.

Once the hills and foam are removed, we reach the troop layer.

While the rules found in the PW Compendia don’t contemplate using too much scenery, I decided that the extra set of trees wasn’t really limiting things too much.  Even if they weren’t there, there isn’t enough room to squeeze in a third army.

In the near term, I would like to type out a quick reference sheet to fit in the box, and I have some metal Roman buildings from Irregular which I could paint to swap for the generic English/fantasy thatched cottages currently in place, and I have seven other armies, both fantasy and historical, which could be magnetized and would be available to choose before a trip.  The two PW compendia include a couple of different takes on PW fantasy, including a 3x3 Hyborian Age version, so I see no reason not to include all the available troops as options.

If the Muses choose to inspire me to paint some additional 6mm troops (or monsters or heroes), well, I also have somewhat limited gaming space at home these days (with my main table being 3x5 feet), so some 6mm mass fantasy combat might be fun.

Meanwhile, all I need is a flight … 

May Painting (mostly Mythical Earth)

 I have been painting this month, for the first time in a few months.  I have also been trying to clean some of the unfinished (and unstarted) projects out of my basement, so I have been doing some thinking about what I am actually most interested in working on and playing.

I have mentioned before that my start in the fantasy miniatures end of the hobby with Minifigs Mythical Earth figures, which are (arguably) the earliest fantasy range cast.  In addition to a few handfuls I have left from the early 1970s, I have been accumulating them diligently since I ran across a small batch for sale at Cold Wars in 2015.  As of today, I have about 280 painted, and another 500 unpainted, including a batch of 40 hobbits which arrived a few weeks ago from England.  Anyway, there are enough to play some games already, something I should schedule in the not-too-distant future.  As I consider what I want to do in fantasy, it’s pretty clear that I want to indulge this nostalgia project, and finally have the armies (and games) that I visualized as a kid back in 1975.  I posted some pictures of this month’s first project to the Lead Adventure Forum, and someone sent me a link to Rick Priestly’s blog Notitia Metallicum, where, coincidentally, he is also working on a Minifigs Mythical Earth project.

ME33 Ithilien Spearmen and ME34 Ithilien Archers

View from the other side

My first selection this month was Faramir’s Ithilien Rangers.  There are only six official Gondorians in the range, and the Ithilien archer is the only one armed with a bow.  As my brother will tell you, I like my wargames armies to be able to reach out and touch you (as AT&T used to say) before they get stuck into hand-to-hand combat, so it seemed like a good time to paint these.  Like the Wood Elves I did a few years ago, I did them in a semi-random assortment of browns and greens.  Having their faces hidden behind masks, they were relatively simple to paint. I still have a unit of Citadel Guards, another unit of spearmen, and a unit of Gondorian knights on foot to go, plus some extra figures not neatly divided into twelves. 

I am going to try to alternate the Free Peoples with the forces of Sauron and Saruman, so I chose to build a unit of “man orcs” next.  While these are presumably intended to represent Saruman’s troops, I have no qualms about using them as larger orcs in the service of Mordor, or as Bolg’s bodyguards and similar in the Battle of the Five Armies.  There are three poses of these figures, varying mostly (entirely?) by the weapons with which they are armed.  I picked a packet of a dozen spear-armed orcs from my painting reserve, and then added one axe-armed orc to serve as an officer.  While I have dozens of the spears and swords, I have only a handful of the axes, so I’m mixing them in as officers.  While I am pretty sure that all three poses are currently available in the Minifigs current production revival, I don’t intend to order any more orcs unless I finish all of the ones that I have and find that I still need more.

The man-orcs are not the most detailed and attractive figures out there, and I have painted a few already in this project, so I knew that like most fantasy/ancients/medieval figures, what you see is mostly the shield when you look at them on the table.  They do have large generally flat shields, so I decided that I would concentrate my painting effort on the shields.  As every Tolkien fan knows, the main iconography associated with Saruman is the white hand, and the main iconography associated with Mordor is the red eye.  While I have seven units’ worth of these figures, and will eventually do a unit with white hands and a unit with red eyes, I thought it best to avoid both of those to start with, so that these troops will comfortably fit into any of the three possible armies I might deploy.  Since I had thirteen figures pulled out and cleaned up, I painted one as a quick test of the shield design, and based him individually.

I didn’t really think that I could reproduce that design faithfully 13 times, so I decided to embrace that, and make each one of them an individual variant on the “gaping maw” theme. The spears are quite long (and will present a bending hazard in play) so added a flag to the command stand.  Don’t think too hard about the wind conditions that would cause it to display like that…

I am thinking that it is time to add some mounted troops to the mix, and I have had a dozen Rohirrim primed and ready to paint for quite a while, so, in keeping with my plan to alternate, I think that will be what I try to do next.  I have also pulled out a batch of ME28 Southron mounted swordsmen, several of whom will become lancers as they need weapons replaced.

While it’s not quite the end of the month, it looks like I am probably not getting another game played, so I’ll be at three.  The first of those was some Saga, and I needed a couple of figures to replace proxies used for a Norman warband.  In addition to the Tolkien work, I did also get these two finished up:

My sons and I are planning to meet for another games day next weekend, so I am hoping there will be a few more games in June than there were in May …

Scrum Con IV

 Yesterday was Scrum Con IV at the Silver Spring Civic Cetner in the suburbs of Washington.  Scrum Con is a small one-day local convention which aims to be split about evenly between miniatures and role-playing events.

As noted before, I ended up deciding that the best course of action was to modify (and hopefully simply, for convention purposes) a recent version of Rough Wooing/Gathering of Hosts by Ross Macfarlane.  The original is generally intended for two players and goes by a unit by unit card activation.  I divided each of the sides in this game into three sections and let them activate three units per side with each turn of the card (one per player).  This still wasn’t quite as fast as I’d like, but we got through six full turns.  Some of the unit activations could take a while.

It was fun to see Chris Palmer’s war machines on the table after an absence from conventions of over 20 years, and I hope to use the inspiration to get some project expansion painting done.  

Landship “Celia” tussles with the Duke’s gendarmes

The “Romeo” advances in the center…watch out for the solar ray projector!

The players were all engaged, and not all my age…

Away from the landships, conventional troops had a place

I had a lot of interest in the Nuernberger Meisterzinn home cast figures in the game.  I suppose that not many players are casting their own pewter anymore…

March Madness

  To some extent, I am feeling like we are in middle of the long decline of the personal blog, but that might be just because I am having trouble getting anything posted lately …

March has actually been a good month for some gaming.  I met with my brother at Cincy Con the first weekend of the month, and had the opportunity to play in several historical miniatures games as well as a big game of Ral Partha’s Chaos Wars.

Chaos Wars on Sunday morning

Philistines against Israelites

Scrum Con in Silver Spring, Maryland, is coming up on the 8th of April.  I volunteered to run a 40mm Renaissance game with Leonardo da Vinci-style war machines, from my collection of stuff that hasn’t been on the table at a convention too recently.  However, I had been uncertain about the rules I was going to us, so I arranged to meet with my sons on the 11th for another game day.  

 Landships and Landsknechts for the first time in over 20 years

The DBA tournament continues

We continued the ongoing DBA preliminary elimination tournament with a few games, then set up the 40mm Renaissance (enhanced) using Nic Wright’s Fantastic Battles rules.  Unfortunately, despite having provisions for Renaissance troop types, and customizable war machines, as well as being designed for troops on 60mm square bases, the rules were not going to work for the convention game that I need to run.  I would like to try them again with something closer to their intended purpose before I say too much more about them.  However, vis-a-vis Scrum Con, it was back to the drawing board …

I missed a HAWKs meeting on the 3rd while I was at Cincy Con, but I made it out to the meeting on the 17th.  Duncan Adams was running one of the legendary “Space Station Accipiter” games, using the HAWKs collection of 54mm semi-flat Buck Rogers figures cast from vintage molds sold for home use in the 1930s.

That send me down a nostalgia trail, and I spent some time the next day reorganizing my Buck Rogers figures.

Possibly there will be more about that, too …

My brother and I have volunteered to run several games of Burrows and Badgers for Gen Con in August, so we decided to take a little time on the 19th to set up a remote game (using his table and figures) to remind ourselves of the rules.

Screen shot from the game in progress

Finally, I rounded out the month by meeting with Chris Palmer on the 25th for another try at the Renaissance game.  Chris had built all of the amazing war machines back in the late 1990s.  We ran at least one game at a Cold Wars using home rules, after which that project went off (for me) in a different direction.  

For this game, I decided to use the usual Rough Wooing, Ross Macfarlane’s home rules, with some war machine rules improvised from what I remembered of what we had done in 1997.  We also set it up on a full 6x10 table to see how things fit.

It worked well enough, so I just need to type up the Rough Wooing modifications into something neat enough to use with players on the 8th.

I was amazed, though, to find that Chris still had a folder of rules and handouts from 1997 through the convention game we did in 1999.  

That included a copy of the page from my notebooks of record with the basics of the rules, so I was able to pull the appropriate notebook off my shelf and see what else was occupying my mind in late 1997.

Not much painting has been getting done, but I have no complaints about the gaming this month …

Dean Con 2023

 Perhaps it wasn’t an “official” convention with a proper name, a program, and all of that, but I had the opportunity to get together with my sons for a two-day game gathering this weekend.  All three of us are employed by organizations that observe all federal holidays, so this was a three day weekend for all of us. That allowed us to seize the day(s).  We had been awaiting an opportunity to do so since younger son William arrived back in this general area in October.  Elder son Norman’s house was the obvious location, as he has been able to take over a finished basement room as his gaming and hobby space, with an adequate 5x6 foot table. 

Norman’s space, with the inevitable Really Useful Boxes neatly organized on shlves

As it worked out, we didn’t need the whole table, since the main program was a series of DBA games using various historical armies from our joint 1/72 scale plastic collection.  Norman had noted that we have at least 20 armies available to us at the moment, so he has decided to pit them against each other in an effort to determine which is the most powerful/successful.  He has divided them into four divisions of five armies each.  Each division will see each army play the others in a round robin format, with the two most successful armies in each division advancing to an elimination bracket tournament.  Some quick math will show that the divisional tournaments will consist of ten games each, and the final elimination will have three rounds of four, two, and one game respectively, for a grand total of 47 games.  This will not be a one-weekend effort.  Perhaps he will write something up about this eventually on his blog…

Between Saturday and Sunday, we completed the ten games of the first division.  Since William doesn’t own any of these armies, and Norman owns most of them, we tend to play somewhat objectively, and do not generally treat this as though it were a map campaign, with a strong personal identification with the fortunes of a particular army.  

Bronze Age Libyans face off against early Arameans

Once we had enough of DBA and needed a break, Norman set up a 19th century imagi-nations scenario.  We used (again) the rules in Neil Thomas’s book Wargaming Nineteenth Century Europe.  As with our Thanksgiving weekend, Norman chose one of the included historical scenarios, the battle of Oeversee from the Austrian/Danish War of 1864:

Neil Thomas is a proponent of fast, compact games.  This scenario is intended for a 2’ x 2’ space:

We had set it up on the 3’ by 3’ ground cloth we had been using for the DBA games before we looked closely at the scenario and concluded that the table was even smaller.  That’s how we ended up pulling a second ground cloth out of our ready supply of ground cloths and resetting. The town and bridge were provided by the usual toy soldier-appropriate Castle Blocks and the trees are from Norman’s old collection of 6mm scenery.  Wooden trees seen in some earlier battle reports are part of my collection of childhood toys, and weren’t part of what I was requested to bring.

As can be seen from the set-up above, there was little room to maneuver.  The “Danish” forces, at the bottom of the picture and represented by Norman’s white-coated Elabruners were a rearguard.  Their orders were to hold the “Austrians” (represented by Norman’s Occiterrans) for ten turns to allow the remainder of their army, off-board, to retreat.  The Occiterrans were restricted by a doctrinal preference for the bayonet over firepower, but also started with their artillery deployed on a hill safely beyond a stream, and with the range to bombard the Elabrun infantry from the beginning.  William commanded the Occiterrans, and pushed aggressively forward, clearing the road in just six turns, so the game did not take long.

We had some supper, and spent the evening with some board games.  We played several rounds of 

Kingdomino, which I received as a gift from my parents at Christmas.  It’s a fast and engaging Eurogame, and I’m not surprised to find that it received the Game of the Year (Spiel des Jahres) award in 2017.  We also played a round of Azul.  We’ve been playing quite a bit of Azul on Board Games Arena, one of our favorite online hangouts since the plague, but this was the first time I actually played with a physical copy.

I will have a separate post soon about my recent revisitation of some 6mm projects.  I took my 6mm Hordes of the Things/DBA collection, handily contained in a large tackle box, with me this weekend.  On Sunday morning, Norman and I continued with the DBA 3.0 theme, but switched over to 6mm and pitted some early Franks against 3rd century Romans.

Both games were routs, one for the Romans, and then one for the Franks.  I have had the Roman fortress for many years (a TCS Model, now sadly no longer in business, but once a mainstay of the Historicon/Cold Wars dealers’ room), but I believe this may be the first time it has actually featured on the table as an active fort.  In any case, I enjoyed seeing the “little guys” out on the table.  They were most recently on the table as fantasy forces in an experimental playtest game we had at Huzzah in 2015, and, according to my records, were most recently deployed as actual ancients in May 2012, also at a Huzzah.  As I recall, that was also a test, of the Basic Impetus rules.  These figures used to be my usual portable set, and were therefore along at conventions as a contingency game.

Huzzah 2015 6mm fantasy playtest

I asked Norman this weekend whether he recalled how it was that we got away from this well-used project, a staple of my kids’ childhoods.  He noted that, to the best of his recollection, we started down the path of recreating a Hordes of the Things set up in 1/72 scale after he realized, while fiddling with the wargaming impedimenta around the house, that an Italeri Saracen was just the right size and shape to ride a plastic dinosaur from a Jurassic Park board game.  On such chances do the fortunes of our lives depend …

We closed out the weekend with a game of the popular board game Terraforming Mars, which took a little longer than we had estimated.  I look forward to a rematch, now that I have some slight idea of what I am trying to do. 

It was a good start to the gaming year, and I hope that we will be able to gather again soon, even if not for a two day extravaganza.

Reflections on 2022

 My brother and I had a chance to play a couple of games during our family Christmas visit.  We had agreed that the game this year would be Dragon Rampant, and that the theme would be “No Ral Partha”.  I certainly have nothing against Ral Partha, but we have been playing a lot of Ral Partha Chaos Wars in a demo game context, and we usually feel obliged to stick to Ral Partha figures when we do. We thought it would be nice to allow some of the other figures a chance to shine on the table.

My 1977 Minifig NS spearmen fend off my brother’s Archive wolfriders

1974 vintage Minfig ME Gondorian spearmen face some Adina hobgoblins

As you can see, we were restricted to a small space

We had intended to set up on a larger table at the local games store, but they have not yet re-opened their gaming tables post pandemic, so we made do with a space of about 4’ by 3’ at our parents’ house.  It was good to see all the very vintage figures on the table.  We had each brought two warbands, and, apparently inspired by the same thought, each had a warband of orcs and a warband of humans.  It was a bad day for orcs all around; my humans defeated his orcs, and my orcs were defeated by his humans.

While there are a few days left in the year, and while I do have a Five Leagues from the Borderlands solo skirmish game pending, it is likely that this will have been the final game for the year. (In my counting, I generally count multiple sessions of a single rules set played back to back as a single log entry.) If so, it was number 40 for the year. While short of the 52 games that are my notional goal each year, it is still a respectable total, and one that I am pretty happy with. Similarly, I might get another miniature or two painted, but if I don’t, I finished about 173 figures of 1/72 scale or larger this year, plus a handful of 6mm ancients which can’t be counted in the same way as larger figures.  It’s a few more than I completed in 2021, but it is a number which should prompt me to a bit of caution when it comes to taking on new projects.  

There was a thread on the Lead Adventure Forum recently, and someone was musing about whether the new projects that we are all prone to take on would ever see the table, and, if so, how many times.  I realized that I had some actual data on that.  Being a very Old School gamer, my logs are hand written, and contained in a series of notebooks.  I dug them all out, and was interested to note that I have been doing this for longer that I remembered, with the first year logged being 1999.  So I have 24 years of data (less the balance of December after the 5th when I did the counting) covering 805 games.  With an average of 33+ games per year, this year’s 40 is solidly above average.

Attempting to answer the question of which of my collections of figures had been on the table more frequently, I might be off by a few games here or there.  The results were tallied by hand, and the data was spread across about 15 different notebooks.  Sometimes it’s hard to decide whether a 25mm fantasy game played in 2003, say, had any of my own figures in it.  These counts are divided by the miniatures, and most of them represent the same collection being used with multiple sets of rules.

As you can see, the 25mm fantasy collection takes the top prize with about 96 appearances on the table, followed by the Not Quite Seven Years War collection with 74 appearances.  By the time you get down to a tie for 6th place by 25mm Dark Ages and 40mm Renaissance at about 21 games each, one might note that those projects have been on the table less than once a year on the average, and with a frequency less than a quarter of that of first place. I should note that both of those projects have been in a playable state since before 1999, when the records start.  Two of the most frequently played projects, 1/72 scale fantasy/medieval/ancients and 54mm medieval, are younger than the records, both having been started around 2003.  I was also interested to note that the French and Indian War project is still solidly in 4th place, despite not having been on the table since 2016.  There were a lot of F&IW games early on in the records.

When you put all those numbers together, I think that I am coming to the conclusion that it would make sense to try to concentrate on doing more with the top projects.  I would like to work on one side project which isn’t yet playable, with the main candidates being 54mm medieval/fantasy flats and 40mm 19th century/Franco-Prussian War from Schneider and other vintage German molds.  This is where this year’s painting numbers are a caution flag; even a simple One Hour Wargames pair of armies would amount to 10 units of 2 stands each per side (well, not the artillery), with 4-6 figures per unit, or something like 88 foot, 16 horse, and 4 guns with crew total, which would represent somewhat more than two thirds of the total I painted last year.  That’s not unthinkable, but would be a major commitment.  I suppose it’s time to paint a few of them and see what I really think about working with them.