When Little Wars TV announced they were releasing an episode on Brandywine, and using their new home-brew rules for the AWI, I was interested, but not thinking much of it. The episode was great, but I really found the visual appeal of the 10mm game very compelling. Six or seven years ago I purchased a mostly painted 10mm AWI collection – RIDICULOUS – as I already had 15mm AWI done and have rarely played an AWI game with them! As it happens, other than painting up a couple of units and basing some of them, these fellows sat in their patient ranks in the storage cabinet with many other armies ..read more

When we went on Spring Break a few weeks ago, Son #2 showed his real aptitude in war-games design at 14 years of age. He often develops ideas into sets of miniature rules and also into travel games to allow us to spend time rolling dice in the evenings after hard days at Disney or on the beach. This year he developed a custom campaign set around the events of the Two Towers and the struggle between the Kingdom or Rohan and Isengard. A view of the game in progress – the Green counters in the lower left represent the Rohirim and Fellowship members who retreated to Helms Deep. He developed event ..read more

A couple months ago Son #2 surprised me by staying up after his homework and setting up a Black Powder Game to inaugurate our 28mm collection for Marlburian Wars. Our figures so far are largely plastics from the former Wargames Factory range, now developed and produced by Warlord Games. To my shame, I also have a fairly large collection of 25mm Foundry miniatures painted for the period which have never seen the tabletop. I have a problem, I realize…. So we’ve managed six painted foot regiments and two units of cavalry and guns for both French and British. It covers a lot of ground on a 6x 4 t ..read more

Like many gamers, I saw many inspiring movies in my youth which impacted my gaming ideas. One such movie was The Wild Geese, 1978, starring Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Roger Moore. I’m willing to bet 95% of you reading this have already seen the movie many times – with its iconic ending with the C47 on the airstrip… In the movie, officers wore red berets to distinguish themselves from the other ranks…. So for me, collecting figures for years and putting them into a sorting bin has been the extent of my effort. I am deeply inspired by the Daddy’s Little Men blog on this topic – culminati ..read more

20mm Napoleonics – who needs to paint another scale for Napoleonics. With more than 8K of 15mm Napoleonics, a largish 28mm Penninsulare collection, 6mm and 10mm starters, who would need more. Then Conrad Kinch writes a really slick campaign idea in two successive issues of Miniature Wargames entitled A Jaunt Ashore… – June and July 2020 if I’m not off by a month. Find them – they are worth a read. In those issues, he reveals a very clever solo campaign for the marines and sailors from a Napoleonic frigate – think Master and Commander. The frigate has been dismasted in a winning fight with som ..read more

In February, before all the lockdown stuff started, I set up the small gaming table to run Mission 2 from Rangers of  Shadowdeep.  If you play the games, you’ve already seen this one in many versions – I just wanted to share my pics and show a little bit of how I brought it to life…. Rangers Shadowdeep Characters I’m also posting my Rangers/ Companions sheets here – you can see how early in the campaign this is – very few skills or possessions beyond initial creation ..read more

While we’ve each been finding our own paths through this lockdown period, one of the things I have been grateful for have been the tremendous effort by some of our fellow hobbyists to generate content and share ideas about enjoying solo-wargaming. I hate to act like a fanboy, but check out Storm of Steel Wargaming on Youtube.  He is in the UK, and his content is really well done in my opinion.  He mixes historical summaries of campaigns, battle reports, how-to videos on some popular rules sets etc. Here’s a link to one of his most recent weekly solo wargaming reports: Playing I Ain ..read more

Just a quick self-motivational post.  As I prepared for the Fortress Isle game, I began to get a War of Austrian Succession game ready for running at Little Wars 20  – one of three games since cancelled. In a sad revelation, I actually have built/ gathered two broad 15mm SYW collections  – ones based on single rank basing – as for Warfare in the Age of Reason.  A few years ago I began buying and painting a new re-collection of Prussian, Austrian, French, and British armies for Black Powder games.  I didn’t need to, I just wanted to – these were on two rank stands (as f ..read more

One of the things which I have really enjoyed since the fall has been the content on Little Wars TV – those guys in Pennsylvania are clever and their content quality is a model for others to follow. One of the by-products of their work was a quick video segment inside their Bull Run battle report in which they show off their 15mm ACW collections used in the game.  Tucked into that segment were several passing shots of a colorful regiment of Zouaves that I didn’t have.  These fellows were wearing straw hats and red shirts/ coats. I recognized the figures as being 15mm Stone Mountain ..read more

During our time inside, I’ve fallen into a desire to get back to some games that I haven’t had time for in the past decade because of work and time on the road. This game has been under construction for six weeks and we finally played it the other night. Across a fire-swept hell recreates the first battles at the airfield outside Derna as the Australians follow up on withdrawing Italians in the Benghazi Handicap. Those of you who know me that much of my gaming history my favorite period was WW2 and I have built massive collections for many nations in 20mm to run convention games over the past ..read more