Bryan Ansell

Through various wargaming forums, I heard that Bryan Ansell passed away yesterday.

Although I never met or talked to him, he had a large influence on me when I was starting out in wargaming during the 80s. As a Games Workshop afficionado during those days, his name was very familiar to me, most notably because he was mentioned as first author on my very first miniature ruleset I ever bought, Warhammer 1st edition.

He also was featured with his chaos army in Warhammer Armies for the 3rd edition, in a very iconic photograph.

Thank you for everything you did for the wargaming hobby!

Updating the magazine index ...

I'm updating the magazine index ... the Xmas break is a good opportunity to do that.

Not that I'm running behind that much. Mostly the latest issues of Wargames Soldiers & Strategy need to entered. Since I stopped my Miniature Wargames subscription some months ago, my influx of new issues is now manageable, although I did buy a stack of backcopies of Vae Victis in November.

I noticed that apparantly I never did receive WSS 125. Stuff to read (magazines, books, ...) is entering our house at such a pace that sometimes things remain unread for months, so it's sometimes not obvious if an issue of a particular magazine is missing. Anyway, a quick email to WSS was quickly answered, and a replacement copy is now in the mail. Thank you Karwansaray!

But what are my wargaming plans for 2024? Honestly, difficult to say. Games have been scarce in 2023, so at elast I should play more games. And my favourite convention CRISIS will be organized again in November (not in Antwerp, but in nearby Sint-Niklaas,). So something to look out for! Perhaps I might even set up a game there ... :-)

Horn of the Dragon (2)

After a first playtest of my homebrewn fantasy rules, I decided to set up a second battle. When testing new rules, I always like to go for what I would call "unusual situations". After all, most wargaming rules operate within a specific set of assumptions: density of troops, density of terrain, etc. But they also operate under scenario assumptions - whether the game is a straight battle or whether roleplaying and other story elements are part of the scenario.

So for a second playtest I decided to set up a classic scenario, based on Thistlewood, an article that appeared many decades ago in White Dwarf (issue 45) for Warhammer 1s edition, and written by Joe Dever. It is the type of fantasy battle that drew me into fantasy wargaming: a combination of battle and certain elements of roleplaying, which is also something I would like to see  in my own Horn of the Dragon rules.

(There is a whole series of blogposts on Thistlewood on the BroadSword and Beasts blog).

But first, the original article. I still have a complete run of White Dwarf 1-84, so it was easy for me to look it up.

 

Then, the setup. I do have a decent collection of late 80s fantasy figures and scenery, so to remain in the spirit of Thistlewood, these were drafted once again in service.

An overall view of the battlefield. I tried to recreate the original map as close as possible, but some interpretation is always necessary. It doesn't make much sense to recreate maps to the millimeter, but it's more important to capture the spirit of the scenario.

The Village of Thistlewood. The houses are cardboard houses from the old Warhammer Townscape set, and originally made available through the Warhammer 2nd edition scenario packs.

The Wizard's Tower. It's a resin model by Gedemco, and 80s Belgian wargaming company.

Since my rules are unit-based rather than figure-based, I had to translate the figures given in the text to a number of equivalent units. Nothing too complicated ...

Orc units and Pack Wolves.

More Orc units, the Wyvern, and Ugrash Ka, the hill giant leader of the Orcs.

The King's Army.

More units of the King's Army. I used some of my old chaos centaurs for the Royal Centaur unit.

More units of the evil forces. Trolls as well as undead.

Another view of the troll and undead units.

Now the only thing left to do is to play the game :-)

Horn of the Dragon (1)

Last night Eddy and I playtested my new set of fantasy wargaming rules. Originally, there would be 5 of us, but due to various personal circumstances, three of my friends had to cancel, so this left the both of us with plenty of time to test out some rule concepts.

It has become a running joke in our gaming group that one day I would design "the ultimate set of fantasy rules". That is of course a moving target. Rules ideas and fads in wargaming come and go, so any ruleset will only reflect the preferences of the wargamers at that point in time. But it is fun to tinker with one's own rules (at least I think so). So we had a first playtest of "Horn of the Dragon". The title is a playful reference to a fantasy roleplaying campaign I played many, many years ago, but I think it sounds cool. Wargaming is an industry of cool, after all.

But anyway, for this first game I dug out some old fantasy collections. One is a Barbarian army, mostly old Citadel and Grenadier figures, and the other a Lizardmen army, mostly Harlequin figures. I also wanted to add some fun elements, and hence I introduced the "Behemoths": elephants for the Barbarians, and giant reptiles/saurians for the Lizardmen. I set the game in an Egyptian desert. It's a fantasy game, after all!

The rules were inspired by well-tested mechanisms that I particularly like:

1. Roll for activation on a per-unit basis;
2. All combat is done by units (no individual figures);
3. No figure removal (keep as many figures on the table for as long as possible, that's the whole point of miniature wargaming), so that means keeping track of the status of each unit by markers;
4. Combat must be fast enough such that it doesn't become a slug, after all, movement and manoeuvre is the fun part in wargaming, not the endless rolling of dice.
5. Hex-based, so that movement is quick. No fiddling around with tape measures.

As I mentioned before, I also added "Behemoths", and the mechanisms for those were inspired by an article in Wargames Soldiers & Strategy issue 97, "Elephant Archos", written by Jeff Jonas. It describes a game featuring elephants, and based on the battle of Raphia, and apparently one of the few ancient battles in which there was actual elephant-elephant combat (didn't check that, though). Behemoths could be hesitant to move forward, or get into a rage  making them stronger, but also more prone to stampeding.

During and after the game, we had some good discussion about what worked and what didn't, and how we would tune the rules towards the next playtest.

I won't bother the reader with a detailed battle account, so here are some pictures (more pictures in Eddy's battlereport on BGG):