Our Crisis 2015 game in MWBG 400

Issue 400 of Miniature Wargames with Battlegames will feature our Marche ou Crève game we ran during Crisis 2015. I haven't seen the issue yet, but should contain all info to replicate gameplay (apart from the scenery and figures, of course!).

Imaginations in 42mm

Ever since I read a copy of Little Wars I wanted to do a proper toy soldier game. The closest I came was a game of Shambattle (1929), using my Woodens figures.

My Shambattle game.

For a long time I've had my eye on some 42mm toy soldier style figures, produced by Irregular Miniatures for the Balkan Wars. The main reason was the picture below, which appeared in Wargames Illustrated 158 (November 2000). It was a convention game based on Little Wars.

Wargames Illustrated, issue 158, November 2000

However, I never ordered some of the figures (too busy with other wargaming projects), but a few months ago, I finally placed an order for 2 armies. Each army has 24 infantry, 4 cavalry, and a cannon.

I want to use these figures in an Imaginations setting, so I am not too worried about the correct painting schemes, but I do want each army to evoke a specific character. This process hasn't fully converged yet - I still have to come up with names etc. for my countries. My approach (which I also use for my scifi and fantasy settings) is usually bottom-up (invent things as you need them in your games), so things will fall in place.

This hasn't stopped me from starting to paint some of the figures:

Work in progress ...

Work in progress ...

As you can see, I am using different colours for the fez for various groups of figures, instead of painting them all red. Since I will use these figures for an Imagination campaign, I was looking for some ways of giving various units a different visual look, and their hat colour was an obvious candidate.

I opted for block painting - a simple painting technique without too much shading or highlighting. This suits me fine (I've never been a great painter ... ). I hope the gloss varnish will emphasize the colours, because now they still look a bit dull. The figures in the back are not green army men, but 42mm Russians/Bulgarians, the other army I ordered from Irregular. I have the habit of using an undercoat of the dominant colour, and since I want to give them green uniforms, I spray-painted them all green. It's the same reason why the Ottomans all have blue bases ;-)

As for developing the future look of my units, I am still not sure what path I will take. But I've always been a fan of the "Operette" style of military uniforms. One source of inspiration ever since I  was a kid, were the uniforms depicted in the Tintin album Ottokar's Sceptre, of which you can see a colour plate below.

Military uniforms, Ottokar's Sceptre

Video of Crisis 2015

A very nice video overview of Crisis 2015 was posted on Youtube by HansVGinkel.
It gives an excellent overview of the show, and as always, I now get to see all the games I didn't see during the show itself.

Our game - Marche ou Crève - has a few seconds at 6:52.

Marche ou crève

Our Crisis 2015 game featured the famous Fench Foreign Legion against the Arab tribes in the North African desert, using our flat Woodens figures.

I will make a full post later on about our game and its mechanics, but here are some of the raw photographs, taken with my smartphone (so quality is not that high).

Making Mountains (4)

I managed to finish the mountains today for our Crisis 2015 game featuring Woodens figures.

As explained in my previous posts, the mountains are in the style of the Major Tremorden Rederring mountains: plywood, crumbled brown packing paper, steps to place figures on (a wooden corner profile strip). Green flock was added to break the monotony of the brown color. Some lichen are added to break the ground line.

Making Mountains (3)

With Crisis a little more over 2 weeks away, time to get serious.

Over the weekend, I glued crumpled brown packing paper to the mountains, such that they have a "textured" look. I also added some clumps of green flock to break the monotony of the colour.

Below you see some photographs, with some of the Woodens ready to ambush the poor French legionnaires.

Still to do: the mountains on the other side of the "divide", since below in the photographs you only see half the intended gaming table.

Making Mountains (2)

As mentioned before, this year at Crisis we will run a game set in the North-African desert, using our Woodens figures. The game will involve a convoy travelling along a road through the desert and trying to reach a fort. Along the way, Arab warriors will try to ambush the convoy.

I wanted to have a very long road, but that was abit impractical since it would result in a very long table. So we opted for a table that would loop upon itself, divided by a mountain range. Since mountains are very hard to represent visually on the wargames table, we took the excellent example from the colonial wargaming site by Major Tremorden Rederring, using mountain profiles. By putting various profiles behind each other, and by making little platforms, it can be made to look as if figures are really occupying the mountain passes.

My mountains are nowhere near ready yet, but in the photographs you see a little test setup of what the game will look like. Lots of scenery elements still need to be added, but more importantly, the mountains still need to be painted and textured.

Making Mountains

For our upcoming Crisis 2015 game, and as previously announced, we will use our collection of Woodens. The game will be a convoy game, with FFL soldiers protecting a wagon traveling through the desert, while at the same time being ambushed by Arab warriors.

Since visuals are important, the game will be run on desert Kallistra terrain tiles. As part of the scenery, there will be some mountain ranges as well. I started to make the mountains alst weekend out of plywood, inspired by the mountains as seen on the Major Tremorden Rederring website.

Some photographs will folllow shortly...

Crisis 2015

With only 2 months away, it's about time to start making some decisions for our CRISIS 2015 game.

After much brainstorming, making business plans, testing of target groups in various age brackets, taking into account the current socio-economic-political climate, and having a general sense for trends, hypes, and preferences in the wargaming scene; we finally have decided to use our collection of Woodens for another outing.

Ok, that was the easy part that took about 5 minutes. Now the only thing we have left to do is to design a game ...

Wooden Legionnaires in the Desert

One of the most distinctive set of wargaming miniatures in my collection are the "Woodens" - lasercut wooden flat figures. Once produced by Windcatcher Graphics (no longer in existence), they provide a nice alternative to the "round metal" figures most wargamers use these days.

I have used these figures before, most notably for our Crisis 2003 game, and for a try-out game using the 1929 wargaming rules called Shambattle (both of these links point to the old Tiny Tin Men website).

I first got to know about Woodens through some adverts in Wargames Illustrated in 1999. Although figures were made for various periods (Colonial FFL, AWI, ACW), most  of the figures I own are from the French Foreign Legion and Arab range.

This weekend, I decided to take them out for another photoshoot. Enjoy.