Building Norchester

For my Salute '24 game, part of the table will feature part of the besieged Cittie of Norchester. I've made a start with the modelling for this. I already have around 20 of the 30 required buildings (a mix of Hovels and ex-Gallia townhouses) and I've bought the city walls from Caliver Books. Next I need to buy/finish the remaining buildings, assemble and paint the walls, buy and paint the remaining defensive works, buy and assemble the siege lines, and populate all of the above with soldiery and civilians.  So not much to do. :-/

Prince Maurice's forming

I recently bought some figures from a friend, George, and have been repainting them as a new regiment, Prince Maurice's, which was conveniently at many of the major battles of the English Civil War. All of the minis are from Bicorne. I will give them red standards.

It took a surprising amount of time (retouching minis always does) but I am now just four minis short of a regiment, and hopefully will be able to field them in the next For King and Parliament Roundway Down game, which will hopefully be at Colours (assuming the table is confirmed, which is very likely).

Unfortunately I don't have a great deal of time for ECW modelling, just now, but I would love to finish these, some extra troopers to complete a "Dutch" regiment, some combined shotte, base some firelocks and some paint baggage before I move on to other pressing projects.

Roundway Down at Partizan

This weekend Andrew Brentnall and I enjoyed a very jolly weekend at Partizan with the Roundway Down game based on the For King and Parliament scenario that we wrote together, a few years ago. The game is perhaps best viewed in this 90-second video.

Above is the game as set up.  I had been apprehensive about a hill-failure, but mercifully it held together. The hill was perhaps 15" tall at the top.

Below is a shot from the first game- Andy Green (left) as the Royalists got off to a shocking start with some terrible cards, but pulled it around and came close to beating Matthew Hotston (with Andrew). All the photos are clickable.

Here are a couple of shots of the protagonists- Parliamentarians above and Royalists below.

Alas I got not photos of the second game, which was even closer than the first, ending, this time, in a narrow Royalist victory. 

Above, Andrew brought his alternative version of the scenario, in 6mm, which generated quite a bit of interest.

I was very pleased with the general balance of the scenario, which you can find here.  We might take the game to a couple of other events in the South, later this year. I have an idea to extend the board so that I can depict the Bloody Ditch and the Parliamentarian baggage train at Oliver's Castle.

Huge thanks to Andrew who worked very hard on the running the games whilst I nattered with bystanders. 

As ever, Partizan was a great event- very well run, a credit to the organisers. It's always fantastic to catch up with so many friends.  There are always a ton of lovely looking historical games, and no time at all for me to see them! 

Roundway Down Preview

This afternoon Andrew Brentnall and I built the terrain for tomorrow’s big Roundway Down game at Partizan in Newark-on-Trent.

It was a complex process- the gigantic 12’ long hill is supported on ubiquitous Really Useful Boxes, anchored in place (hopefully!) by Rug Grippers. I didn’t bring quite enough boxes, and it became something of a faff to make it work.

On top of the boxes go MDF boards in various sizes.

Next there is a black cloth, to hide the workings, more rug gripper and the hand-gridded Geek Villain mats from a previous post, joined together at the edges with double-sided tape.

Finally we added the miniatures and some trees, then I shot a brief video of the finished article. I’ll shoot some more video of the forces in the morning.  Hope to see some of you at Partizan tomorrow!

All the ECW horse

Today chum Ian came around and helped me to sort out all of my ECW cavalry. I say sort- many of the regiments had become mixed up after their last outing (at the Wargames Holiday Centre- three or even four years ago!), and we had to work out what fitted with what. I've recently added three or four new regiments bringing the total to eighteen. You can click on the above image for a closeup. 

Better still, I've recorded a brief YouTube video, below, describing them- I think it is the first I've ever posted. I hope you enjoy it.

On Sunday I'll have the majority of these cavalry and a few infantry, too, at Partizan in Newark. I hope to see some of you there!

More Empty Horses

Here are the final markers for Roundway, these are FK&P pursuit markers, and depict rider-less horses and horses carrying injured riders; photo is clickable. They are used to show when a cavalry unit is in an uncontrolled advance. They are a mix of odd horses I had spare, with a couple of Redoubt riders and a whole lot of tufts! I am using so many tufts this year.

In case you missed the post on BigRedBatCave, here are the earlier markers I finished. This is the most markers I've ever completed for a game,. I'm really pleased with them. I'm looking at the battlefield itself, today, marking up cloths and testing the build of the big hill.

Roundway Down chez Andrew Brentnall

Yesterday I travelled to the deepest wilds of Suffolk for a chat and game with FK&P stealth co-author Andrew Brentnall. He has a lovely dedicated gaming area and set up Roundway Down in a corner of it. I volunteered to play Sir William Waller's Parliamentarians at the top of the hill, and Andrew led Wilmot's plucky, outnumbered (but well-hard) Royalists at the bottom. All the minis are 10/12mm from his collection, and we used Andrew's variant of the scenario for the deployment, as opposed to my variant which has the Parliamentarian horse a little further forward. The unit cards were designed by chum Ian Notter. 

Here's a shot early in the game. Wilmot's own command piled into Heselrig and the other two commands are inclining towards the Parliamentarian left.

Above, brave Sir Arthur led his London Lobsters into one of Wilmot's units. I played a nine for the first activation, attempted a general's replay to get a lower chit and pulled a ten! Don't you just hate it when that happens? Still, I got to watch Andrew's jaw drop as I pulled two further tens to activate it twice more (3 tens in a row, the odds of that are rather to the north of 100 to 1, as there are only 8 in the bag), and managed to ride down a unit of cavalier horse before being slaughtered by a flurry of flank attacks. Those are some of the new yellow and white activation chits, by the way, very classy.

Here's the situation late in the game- the roundheads had closed on the left of my line, which I had held back so that I could support it with my foot. In the ensuing melees the leftmost "Dutch" unit broke through the Royalist line, and pursued the survivors down the hill, pursued in turn by Crawford's two units of reserve Royalist cavalry. Luckily for me my Dutch outran their Royalist pursuers, because I only had three medals left! But Andrew, by this stage, only had two himself.

And here was the last decisive melee. Requiring two medals to win, I managed to activate this disordered and exhausted unit of horse no fewer than four times. On the final activation I hit and the cavaliers failed their final save, giving me the last two medals that I needed.  It was a very narrow victory, indeed!

It was a great day out and a great delight to see Andrew again. Glorious weather, to boot. We had a sensible chat about the Thirty Years War in general and Lutzen in particular, and I feel a new scenario is coming along.