Playtest of The Men Who Would Be Kings

Yesterday we gathered at JP's house and played a short Indian Mutiny game, using The Men Who Would Be Kings colonial rules. It was the first time we used these rules, and a few glitches came up. These have not so much to do with the rules themselves, but more with the scenario we used and the specific setup of terrain. After all, any ruleset implicitly assumes (often unwritten) some aspects about the scenarios: troop and terrain density, quality of opposing forces, etc. We felt that we still have to tune our scenario setups a bit to accommodate for these rules. Or to put it differently: troops that shoot the farthest prefer more open terrain, troops that rely on close combat prefer dense terrain ...

Phil (left) commanding the mutineers (Indians and Pathans) vs David (right) commanding the British regulars.

The battle in full swing. The ruined building in the middle left had to be held by the mutineers as long as possible.

More action! A bunch of Pathans suddenly popped out from behind the rocks at the bottom middle.

The mutineers held the village for 9 turns, but then got swiped away by the advancing British forces. Let's call it a draw! :-)

Xmas table setup

During the Christmas season, it's almost a certainty relatives are coming over for the traditional turkey Christmas dinner. Invariably, after a few glasses of wine, there's always a request to see my man cave.

Instead of having to explain that "normally, we play with toy soldiers here, but now, it's full of junk as you can see ... ", I always try to clean up and set out a visual attractive battlefield. It doesn't have to conform to any plausible plausible game setup. After all, they don't have a notion of rules, so better go for visual appeal rather than game appeal.

So, this year, I decided on an ACW setup. And yes, it got the "oohs" and "aahs" going, especially amongst the younger male crowd.

Old minis still in bag

As part of a bunch of vintage figures, I also got a few minis still in their original packing. Always nice, but also always a dilemma. Should we remove them from the bag, or keep them in the original packaging as is?

Anyway, here they are:

First , a Citadel Samurai SAM2 from their old historical Samurai range.

Next, a Ral Partha Galactic Grenadier - goes well with the figures I reported on before.

And last but not least, two bags simple labeled Citadel, but which contain a cart with two horses. It took a while before I realized these might be historicals instead of fantasy, and I identified them as part of the Romans range (ARE2 - Cart with two Horses).

Heirosaurs

At Crisis last November I picked up a painted set of Heirosaurs from the Battlezone booth. They were used as display models, so I removed them from their bases and rebased them to match my own fantasy armies.

Nice critters to flesh out the Reptilian/Lizardmen armies.

Vintage fantasy figures

A wargaming friend of a wargaming friend was lucky enough to pick up a large number of vintage wargaming figures from the late seventies at a flea market. Since I'm always interested in acquiring "old stuff", I bought a number of fantasy and science fiction figures in bulk from him for a friendly price. I wasn't really aware of what was in the boxes, but that's part of the fun: trying to identity all those old figures, browsing through old catalogues and collector's websites.

A batch of SF figures was already identified in a previous post, so now it's time to take a closer look at some of the fantasy figures. Below are the (easier) ones I could identify so far.

Here's a batch of "Lesser Orcs of the Red Eye" from Custom Cast, dated 1975. The base actually says Custom Cast 1975 - so they are probably not later recasts by Heritage.

Next, there's a group of pre-slotta Citadel Goblins. More precisely, from the Fiend Factory range, and these are models FF20, FF22 and FF23. Various variants were made of these figures, but the Collecting Citadel Miniatures site was a great help in identifying these. These were later also part of the C13 Night Goblins range.

Last but not least, there's a group of Minifigs. These are:

• First 3 figures are Goblins from the Minifigs D&D range (GOB1, GOB2, GOB5).
• 4 "True Orc Archers" (Mythical Earth range, ME23)
• Hobgoblin marching with banner (HBG 11)
• 2 Hobgoblin Sergeatnt with military fork (damaged, HBG 1)
• Gnoll Chieftain w Broadaxe (GNL1)
• Knight of the Silver Rose (w Halberd, but damaged)
• Dark Ages (marking on base DA 44) - Viking Bondi

Some Belgian wargaming history ...

Recently, I acquired a nice piece of Belgian wargaming history.

Two hobbit houses in 20/25mm scale, originally made by Gedemco (late seventies?). The history of Gedemco can be read here, on the pages of veteran wargamer Rudi Geudens.

An original image from the above site:

A nice addition for my fantasy collection!

More vintage science fiction figures (2)

I managed to identify most of the figures mentioned in the last post. As suspected, most are Star Trek Citadel figures from the 70s, and a few Galactic Grenadiers from Ral Partha, also from the 70s.

All figure codes (ST for Star Trek, GG for Galactic Grenadiers) are shown in the image above.

One figure remains unidentified (bottom row), but he could as well be a modern soldier, not a science fiction figure.
Update: identified as Citadel Spacefarers S4 figure (see comments).

More vintage science fiction figures

I recently acquired a batch of old SF miniatures, shown below.

I haven't managed to identify them all, but I've tracked some of them down to the Ral Partha Galactic Grenadier range, and some others to Citadel's Star Trek range. So that makes these late 70s figures.

In any case an interesting addition to my growing collection of vintage scifi figures (see here and here and here).

Quick photo report: GNW reinforcements game

Last night we played a GNW Black Powder game. I'll post a more detailed report later, but here's the photos from that game:

The evening ended after five turns of the game, with lots of action in each one. The result was not quite clear enough to call the game, but the Russians had a slight advantage which might still be overturned.

Wet Paint: Thirty Years War musketeers

These are a stand of Thirty Years War musketeers:

They are Warlord Games plastic figures and have been painted up as belonging to Gustavus' Yellow Regiment. I know these probably did not, in fact, look remotely yellow in real life, but I'm calling wargamer's license on this. The Yellow Regiment needs to be painted yellow. 

This brings by painted figures for TYW to 5 stands - one of musketeers and four of pikemen. The idea is to have two small playable forces by next summer. To start with, I'm doing the Yellow Regiment for the Swedes and a Bavarian regiment for the Imperialists / Catholic League. A regiment in this collection will consist of a number of pike and musketeer units, with about 1 pike unit to two musketeer units for both sides.