Imaginations in 42mm (17)

I finally painted one of the buildings I acquired some time ago.

Technically, they are a too small for the figures, but I think they go well visually with the 42mm toy soldiers.

Imaginations in 42mm (16)

I decided to add a few units to my 42mm imaginations armies for the Warcon conference, 4 weeks from now. My main forces are composed of Irregular Miniatures (Balkan range), but over the years I have amassed toy soldiers through 2nd hand sales, so those are a good source for putting together some additional units. The generals I painted up for both armies also came from this pool of figures.

I keep these figures in several drawers. You can see there is quite some variation in style, but 2 ranges seem to stuck out: SchildKröt and Schneider. Both were sold as homecast kits, so the quality of the actual soldiers is variable.

 

Since I seem to have quite a lot of Schildkröt figures, these seem like a good candidate to make some additional units from:

But also the Schneider figures can be formed in a nice unit:

Of course, I still will have to (re)paint them. Two cavalry units are already on my painting desk. We'll see whether I find the time to complete them all.

Imaginations in 42mm (15)

Within a few weeks we will run a game at Warcon, using the imaginations 42mm figures.

So far, my initial experiments were based on using the Kallistra hexgrid, but I don't feel like transporting all these hex tiles. So I took out an old battlemat which can serve the same purpose. The cells on this battlemat are larger than the Kallistra hexes, so I wanted to see whether it works "visually", and I think it does.

I want to aim for a more simplistic "toy-like" visual impression, so I have kept the battlefield relatively simple and clean. Currently, it's based on a "find the ford" scenario, with both sides trying to secure 2 or 3 unknown ford locations. It's a scenario we have played before and always produces a good encounter battle.

I still want to add some buildings and possibly some more units.

The rules also still need to be worked on. The wooden chips (both for indicating the hidden location of the ford, and next to one unit as status markers) are from a very old "Nain Jaune" game, and fit in with the visuals, rather than shiny plastic markers.

Wargaming plans for 2020

2019 wasn't much of a wargaming year. In my logbook of wargames played in my wargaming room, I recorded zero (yes, you read that right) games played during 2019. Going through the blog archive for 2019, we also didn't play a wargame at Bart's wargaming room. It seems both our wargaming mojo's have reached nadir. As usual, we can blame personal and professional circumstances, but still ... a sad state of affairs.

That doesn't mean I was void of any form of gaming.  I played a number of boardgames (16 games logged on boardgamegeek), and I got my wargaming fix at Crisis and Warcon.

So, what do we plan to do for 2020? First of all, we need to play more games. Since we can't hit rock-bottom any further, this should be easy to achieve.

What else? I would like to run some games using my Imaginations in 42mm toy soldiers, perhaps at a convention. Warcon is only a few weeks away, so maybe we could use that opportunity for a first playtest.

I'm not going to project anything else ... it's a bit too embarrassing given 2019's record ... ;-)

Oldest magazine so far entered

Thanks to Rich Clarke from Too Fat Lardies, I acquired a number of old Battle Magazines for the Wargaming Magazine indexing project.

I just entered the January 1977 issue of Battle, the oldest magazine issue currently in my magazine collection.

There's an interesting article in there by Charles Grant about setting up a wargames campaign. And even though it's 40 years old, it's still very much recognizable. Perhaps wargaming hasn't changed that much after all through the decades ... ;-)

Tournament!

The Christmas break is always a nice time to bring out some toys and play around with some different setups. I decided to bring out my medievals - many of which date back to the 90s. Plenty of old Citadels on display ;-)

Anyway, I still have a plan to stage a game focusing on the "melee" of a tournament rather than the "joust", so this is a bit of a dry-run of how it could look visually.

All pictures taken with smartphone(s), so focus could have been a bit better here and there ...

General overview of the table. The castle is a plastic toy castle.

Another general overview.

Fishman in the castle pond. He always features in many of my games where there is some body of water.

King and herald, both Citadel knights.

Another overview.

The Joust.

A knight putting on his armour. Foundry vignette.

Knights from the old Battlemasters game.

Old Bretonnia Warhammer knights.

Melee in action.

More melee ...

And even more ...

Another overview.

Piers the Ploughman - Wargames Foundry.

Flock of sheep ...

Another pair of knights fighting it out.

View from the ramparts.

More sheep.

Carnival parade. Eureka miniatures inspired by Breughel and Bosch.

Falconer.

Tax collector inspecting the market stalls.

Nobles (Harlequin figures).

A black-and-white view from the ramparts.

The melee field.

Mercator coming out for some scientific observations ...

The herald.

Rabbit hunt.

Sleeping shepherd.

War engine.

More melee.

Melee once again.

And in the mean time, someone running's off with the treasure ...

Recent additions to the magazine index

I finished adding my remaining copies of Practical Wargamer to the Magazine Index. Only 6 issues are missing in my collection now, which I am currently hunting down on 2nd hand sites.

The missing issues are: March-April 1994, September-October 1995, November-December 1995,  Vol 11/2, Vol 11/6, Vol 11/9, Vol 13/1 (Although I am not quite sure Vol 11/9 does exist. It's a bit hard to recreate since a number of issues didn't have a proper date on them).

So if you have one of those issues to donate, please let me know!

I also have added the first issue of Battle For Wargamers, dated October 1977, and will add more issues in the coming days.

Imaginations in 42 mm (14)

After a hiatus, I decided to start painting a new unit for the Imaginations in 42mm project.

Over the years, I have bought up quite a lot of old toy soldiers through 2nd hand sites. Sometimes this is a ragtag collection of all sorts of strange figures, sometimes they fit together with figures from another lot, etc. Since my units are only 4 strong for cavalry, and 8 for infantry, it is not too difficult to compose coherent units.

One unit on the painting table now is this group of 4 flat cavalry figures. I prefer not to clean them up too throughly, since I want some of the characteristics of the old figure - including imperfections and the original colour scheme - to show through. I already painted the helmets in a new bronze, and their tunics in blue (they were blue, only a shiny blue with a white sash), when I realized I had to take a picture of their original condition. So here they are, although already handled a bit ;-) I also prefer to keep the original colour scheme as much as possible, since I feel you have to "respect" the toy soldier, and leave him in his intended state as much as possible. But that doesn't mean they will not get repainted completely, it simply means I respect the original colours as much as possible.

I have no idea of the original manufacturer, but I suspect they are not too old. They might even have been promotional figures. Judging by the glossy paints, they were probably repainted at some time during the last decades, but I am not entirely sure.

Wet Paint: Thirty Years' War musketeers

These are 6 Warlord Games Thirty Years' War musketeers, just off the painting table:



They are going to be part of the Yellow Brigade of Gustavus Adolphus' army, whose other figures have been languishing in the 'painted but awaiting completion' box for a very long time now. I brought them out for a group shot just for fun:



The new musketeers will be joined by another 6 in firing poses so I can make up two more stands of shot. I can then use the full brigade as two units (of 2 pike / 2 shot) or make one big pike block with two wide shot sleeves.

I am using new paint recipes for the new paint jobs, as I switched from Foundry to Vallejo paints again. As a result the new figures look a bit brighter than the ones painted earlier, probably because the Foundry highlight paints might be the base colour with white added, so their saturation goes down. I'm not going to be bothered about this, though - let's assume these are new recruits with less campaign weather beaten clothes :)