Printable Scenery Country Low Walls

With our recent focus on 28mm skirmish wargaming, I wanted to add a set of low stone walls to my terrain collection. I wanted something that would work for both Northern Europe and Iberia, and preferably for both 28mm and 20mm.

I ended up getting a set of Country Low Walls from Printable Scenery. The seller I bought it from printed it at a resolution where you can see the print lines. To avoid emphasising the print lines, I dispensed with washing, and  highlighted by dabbing instead of drybrushing.

The walls are scaled for 28mm, but as my figures are based on slotta bases, the walls reached just to their waists.

I primed the pieces grey, picked out individual stones in red brown, yellow brown, dark green, and dark grey, then dabbed the whole thing with medium grey. This helps the walls blend with both the green mat I use for our Northern European games, and also the arid map we use for our Iberian games.

In terms of height the walls work well for 20mm, as shown by these Spanish Civil War figures from Minairons Miniatures. The individual stones do look a little big though.

As part of research for buying and painting the walls I read a few websites on dry stone walls in Europe. It's a rather fascinating subject and worth learning about if you have some free time.

Battletech Alpha Strike and Tacta

We had a total of five players for our August session, and we decided to play another multi-player game of Battletech Alpha Strike, which was always a crowd favourite since everyone loves to have a chance to field their mechs.

For my part I though it was a chance for me to field my ZOD force. I picked a few units from the Battletech Master Unit List that looked close to the models I have, and we just went head-to-head.

 

Afterwards, we played a game of Tacta, which I enjoyed so much that I think I will get a copy of.

Battlefleet Gothic

 

FG and I got together for a game of Battlefleet Gothic a couple of weeks back. I have always liked to try the game, but never got around to actually acquiring the stuff required for a game, so this was all FG's efforts.

He had printed an Imperial and a Chaos fleet at 50% scale, and painted them. I thought they looked very effective at this scale - they certainly are more in line with the sci-fi starships we already have in our collection.

The basic rules were easy to pick up, but no doubt there are depths to these rules that are beyond me now.

Perry Miniatures Elite Companies French Infantry 1807-14

Not a month before Perry Miniatures announced their "Skirmish in a Box" Peninsular War skirmish set, our group decided to get into the period. Never fails.

We knew we wanted a simple and fun set of skirmish rules that didn't require a lot of figures. After some searching, I settled on Fistful of Lead: Horse & Musket - the rules seemed easy, and the card-based activation gave players interesting decisions to make, and I liked that reloading takes a full turn under these rules. Each player needed only five figures, which is a big plus for us.

Dom had about a dozen 95th Rifles pained, so I decided to paint up some "French". I settled on the Legion du Midi, which I painted a base of in 15mm years ago. Their brown uniform makes the distinctions stand out, which I thought looked really good on the tabletop.

FG took the Hanoverian Legion, and since I liked how well these miniatures painted up, I decided to do the 26th Regiment of the Line (which was brigaded with the two regiments) too. Wahj bought some Spanish guerillas from Battle Honours' 3D range, to balance the two sides.

I also purchased some dry stone walls and prepainted buildings, so hopefully we will be able to have a game in October.

Ruckus: St Elmo's Friar (Men-at-arms in motion)

For July's game we played a game of Here's the Ruckus, featuring our newly-painted figures (with FG completing six sergeant figures just the night before!).

The scenario is centred around a walled church model that I got on a trade many years ago, and has the attackers trying to kill a "turbulent priest" residing in the church, while the defenders must try to hold the attackers off until reinforcements arrive.

I made up some rules for battering down the gate, and used the basic Ruckus rules otherwise.

The defenders barricade to the gate to the church, while crossbowmen stand on crates to shoot at the attackers

Attackers come with scaling ladders and a battering ram. Brace!

Baron Hugh de Sappointment fends off the would-be priest-killers

The gate is finally breached!

The game was pretty straight-foward once the attackers chose their sites of attack and the defenders decided not to launch a sortie. Still, we had fun pushing the figures around and rolling dice.

I plan to do a scenario with mounted troops next game, to try the mounted rules. Stay tuned!

Wargames Atlantic The Barons' War

The Barons' War rules have been around for a while, and while I have always fancied the idea of painting up some "Bretonnian" style medieval knights, I have resisted getting the figures. But when the pre-order date for the new second edition starter set came closer, I saw the "barricades" sprues with all the scatter terrain, and decided that they would be a useful addition to my collection. I did some quick maths, and realised that a deluxe starter set plus an extra box of foot sergeants split between three or four people will give each enough figures for a Ruckus retinue.

I sent a message to the group, and Adrian, FG, and wahj all agreed to take up a quarter of the figures, and I sent the order off. Looking at the sprues, I saw that there were four helms with animal crests: a lion, a leopard, a bull, and a boar. The crest for the house which I use for my Warhammer (The) Empire army has a lion's head, and so I thought I would use that helm, and maybe style the retinue as the predecessor for the same house. I floated the idea, and each of the other guys adopted an animal for their retinues. I then googled and found the appropriate heraldry decals for everyone.

The figures arrived seven weeks ago, and yesterday I put a second coat of spray varnish on the figures. Here they are now:

The Captain of my retinue and his spear - Hugh de Sappointment

A yet unnamed Squire

The third spear of the retinue

The three leaders come in mounted and dismounted versions

I am quite excited about this project, and while I still have a Rohan-themed game of Ruckus to play, I have already planned two scenarios for the project.

Talavera (North)

Dom was back for the weekend and we finally got a chance to play the Talavera (North) scenario I have been planning for for a long. Despite the scenario representing only part of the battle, the number of units required were so big that we had to use double scale, hence the dice you see in the photos (to represent half-bases).

The battle saw three French divisions engaging the British (Dom's figures painted more than 20 years ago) left flank, hoping to turn their position, as well as the Spanish (Nabil's newly-painted figures) to the British left.

Historically, the Spanish took little part in the battle, but in our game I wanted to prevent them from influencing the main battle, and so resolved to rush their position en masse to take them out of the battle, before turning to aid wahj roll up the British flank.

However, the Spanish responded proactively, and prevented the French from enveloping them. Nevertheless, French numbers told and the Spanish were contained on their ridge. Then I made the classic error of being too fixed on the immediate objective and losing sight of the bigger battle. Instead of leaving a small force to contain the Spanish and diverting the rest of the division to my left, I tried to push the Spanish off the table. The Spanish held on, and I lost two precious turns before realising that that the French left flank was not making headway.

By the time the game clock ran down the Allies had won convincingly.