Historical Wargaming Thread

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under_score

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I am new to this hobby. I remember my father trying to teach us Panzer Leader when I was a kid, but we never really got it. I did play Warhammer Fantasy for a few years, but never looked into historicals. Over the past few months though, I've been drifting into new territory. I think it's because my reading in general has leaned towards history over the past few years. But then I got Memoir 44 and it quickly became my favorite board game. Recently picked up Command & Colors: Napoleonics and Waterloo: Enemy Mistakes. Now I've been watching Little Wars TV and dreaming of fielding my own armies.
A historical wargaming club apparently started up in my city last year. They list 20+ members, but all events have been canceled and there's been zero chatter since March. I'm hoping they pick things up once it's prudent to do so, but in the meantime the Pub is my surrogate club. I'd love to hear what games people play, any particular battles foughts, recommendations for getting started - what war? what system? what scale? - any book or movie recommendations (I watched the 1970 Waterloo film last week and was depressed that something like that will never be made again).
 
Ran a wonderful War of the Roses campaign last year using Terry Gore's Medieval Warfare rules, my favourite system for historicals this side of Black Powder/Hail Caesar.
 
Ran a wonderful War of the Roses campaign last year using Terry Gore's Medieval Warfare rules, my favourite system for historicals this side of Black Powder/Hail Caesar.
Black Powder is high on my interest list. Warlord Games' Waterloo starter set seems like a very reasonable way to get into Napoleonics, and I like that they've got additional books for Civil War, American Independence, and others. On the other hand, I'm very tempted to try out 10mm or 6mm stuff, just to field larger armies. I've only every painted 28mm.
What miniatures did you use in your War of the Roses campaign?
 
I used the Perry plastics, I love them so much.

I will note, though, the Warlord games are scale agnostic (as is the Terry Gore rules, coincidentally). I've got a 1/72 samurai army for use with Black Powder and I've played Hail Caesar often in 10mm
 
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I actually quite like Warhammer Ancients run using 15mm figs. If you scale the fig to men ratio right it plays well, scales well, and looks pretty sexy.
 
I love the Commands and Colours games too. If you want to do them as miniatures games, a company called www.kallistra.co.uk makes plastic hex boards. You can buy them grass-flocked or bare plastic. The standard pack of 21 tiles measures 4ft x 3ft and the right number of hexes for C&C games.

If you do that, you'll have a couple of painted armies for miniatures games too!

The Warhammer Ancients rules are decent too - they may actually be better suited to historicals than fantasy armies.

One company that really is worth looking at is Too Fat Lardies. They take quite a different approach to game turn structure, and the games themselves have great attention to detail in terms of actual tactics used. Their three core design choices are:

1) Large skirmishes, 40-80 figures per side, organised in units.
2) It is the unit leaders who persuade the troops to fight and keep fighting. Good use of leaders is the key to victory.
3) Battlefield "friction" is important. Troops who can move and act freely before engaging the enemy find it harder and harder to do so once the fighting starts.

Their most recent rulesets are:

1) Infamy! Infamy! Romans vs Gauls vs Germans. Romans work best in well-ordered formations, barbarians are masters of the wild charge and ambush. The next in the series will be Rome vs Carthage.
2) Chain of Command. WWII platoon-level game (a platoon plus support assets). Tons of historical forces, scenarios and campaign supplements.
3) Sharp Practice. Horse and Musket era games - French Indian War/Seven Years' War, Napoleonics, American Civil War, Indian Mutiny, American War of Independence. Again, tons of supplementary information, and a ton of flavourful troops and settings.
4) Dux Britanniarum. Romano-British vs Saxons vs Welsh, Irish Picts. A very narrow focus for a game, but a very well done game if fighting for land, raiding, clawing your leader's way to power.
 
Miniature scale... How much experience do you have? In general, 28mm figures are relatively easy to paint "realistically", and there are lots of historical plastics now. That keeps the weight and cost down compared to metals, and it's much easier to glue and trim figures.

A big 28mm army is a thing to behold! Maybe £20-30 for each unit of 20-40 figures in plastic, more for metals.

15mm figures can be painted like 28s, or done more abstract - brighter colours, sharper highlights, fewer details. A unit or platoon of 20-25 minis can be painted in an evening or two, and will cost maybe £10. Generally metal, although the Plastic Soldier Company does historical 15s in plastic.

15mm figures broadly offer more manoeuvre room on the table compared to a similar number of 28s, and it can be fairly cheap to fill a table compared to 28mm figures too.

I've just started painting 15s, and I like them for modern/scifi games where vehicles kind of need space to do their thing.

Smaller figures in 6mm, 10mm scale are generally based en masse (although people do play individually based Warhammer Fantasy in these scales). They are painted for effect as a group - shields, face, helmet, weapons are what your enemy will see.

A platoon of 30 goes for about £5, and you'll paint those in an evening. I personally find 6mm to be a little delicate and easy to break, spears and tank barrels especially, but there's no denying the spectacle of literally hundreds of tiny figures battling it out.

Scenery at these scales is easy - hedgerows can simply be lines of model railway clump foliage (green foam clusters), roads and rivers can be tape, you'll paint a village in a weekend.

Pro tip - model railway trees that are around 10cm tall work for all scales. A mighty 30-metre ancient oak in 6mm is a young 5-metre tree in 28mm.
 
I'm a total newb and casual who loves Memoir 44', play it with my wife, she usually beats me.
 
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My recent favourite is Comanchería. It's a solo game where you run the Comanche nation during the late 19th century. It's like the author's previous games in that it's sort of a mix between a simulation and a history lesson where you really get a feel for the difficulty in keeping the place running trying to survive attacks from other tribes, Spanish settlers and the US military.

Good review here:
 
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Lots of good info there Atelerix Atelerix. I'd heard of Too Fat Lardies; LittleWarsTV did a video on their Chain of Command ruleset, which they rated favorably. I wouldn't have thought to look for a skirmishing ruleset for Napoleonics. Could be a good way to get playing sooner.
I am thinking I'll probably go with 28mm for now, just because it's what I'm used to and so any terrain I get for my Oathmark games can be used for that as well. I'm a slow painter, so if I try getting into too many things I'll never get any one thing finished.
 
I'm a total newb and casual who loves Memoir 44', play it with my wife, she usually beats me.
I actually bought Memoir 44 to play with my wife. We took a vacation to the Badlands and stayed in a homesteader cabin so wanted a 2 person board game to play to pass some time. She's not generally a gamer at all but loves WWII and picked the game up very quickly.
 
Napoleon's Triumph! A absolute masterpiece by Bowen Simmons. Also Guns of Gettysburg by Simmons. Frankly two of the best wargames ever made.

I also enjoy GMT's COIN series, Fire in the Lake and Colonial Twilight being my personal favorites.
 
I remember looking at this one for a long time on the shelf but deciding I couldn't afford it right then. Came back for it but it was gone and now it goes for silly prices online.

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My recent favourite is Comanchería. It's a solo game where you run the Comanche nation during the late 19th century. It's like the author's previous games in that it's sort of a mix between a simulation and a history lesson where you really get a feel for the difficulty in keeping the place running trying to survive attacks from other tribes, Spanish settlers and the US military.

Good review here:

I bought this game a few years ago, but all I did with it was play partway through the tutorial. Seemed neat, though. I plan to get back to it someday.
 
Im still looking for a reason to build a full Roman Legion at 15mm. Mostly I'd need people to play with.
 
Heh, I'd love to do a 15mm army of Celtic Gauls or Britons
 
last month a company was giving away a single free mini I liked, so of course I dropped $200 on a Dark Ages Arthurian era Briton army.


...I have a problem.
 
And holy effing cheap compared to, say, GW. Also a big draw for me.
 
For anyone new to historical miniature war gaming, I suggest perusing The Miniatures Page (TMP). The boards there have years of collected wisdom and ideas. The other bit of advice I'd give is to steer-clear of any rule system that suggests you buy "official" miniatures produced by the same company that wrote the rules.

Since the pandemic began, I haven't done any face-to-face gaming but just today the mailman delivered a new game I bought: Target for Today - Bombers Over the Reich 1942-1945. It's a solo board game and I can't wait to unwrap it.
 
TMP is a great resource, but it's a difficut community to penetrate. I've been posting the off and on for ten years, but don't really feel like I'm "part of the group"
 
With my skeleton painting frustrating me today, I decided to take a crack at some French infantry today. It was an enjoyable change of pace. Got these done in a few hours, while sitting in work meetings. I think if I focus at it I could probably finish a couple regiments a month.
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The great coats are a little dirtier than I'd like. I used Vallejo's dark brown wash over the whole model and I'm not sure that was the right choice. Maybe a lighter wash on the coat. I'll experiment a bit, but I think overall I'm happy with the general look. A regiment of 24 of these in formation might look pretty sharp.
 
under_score under_score I like your dudes, a regiment of them on the table will look good. Are you gonna flock the base to match your table or leave as is?
 
The little base there is just how the figures come. I'll be basing 4 figures together, then 6 bases per regiment. Haven't decided yet what to do then, if I'll use the same mix I've done on my Oathmark bases or try something new.
 
I was recently made aware of the D-Day series of Solo Wargames, absolutely excellent! I encourage any who are stuck indoors to check them out. Seriously! The first title in the series is D-Day at Omaha Beach.
 
It's a hex-and-chit system, but for ancients wargaming I love the PRESTAGS games by SPI in the 1970's. The games are designed to work together rules-wise (there are 5 different eras represented) with some special-case rules for each game but a core rules system which is the same for all. The earliest one goes back to biblical times and the latest one is early Renaissance with crude arquebus cannons.

When I really want to get wacky I combine PRESTAGS with another SPI game called Sorcerer, which adds in Demonic Infantry and Dragons and the like. While not intended to go together, the scale seems very similar to me.
 
Just a heads up. The designer of the world's best boardgame, Napoleon's Triumph, is making a WWII game.

Rachel Simmons is in the process of designing Stavka, a wargame about the Eastern Front during WWII. Check it out on BGG, and check out the design blogs on her website!

Seriously, check it out or Goblins will eat you in your sleep!!!
 
It's a hex-and-chit system, but for ancients wargaming I love the PRESTAGS games by SPI in the 1970's. The games are designed to work together rules-wise (there are 5 different eras represented) with some special-case rules for each game but a core rules system which is the same for all. The earliest one goes back to biblical times and the latest one is early Renaissance with crude arquebus cannons.

When I really want to get wacky I combine PRESTAGS with another SPI game called Sorcerer, which adds in Demonic Infantry and Dragons and the like. While not intended to go together, the scale seems very similar to me.

Dark Ages, one of the PRESTAGS series, was the first wargame I ever owned. It sucked me into subscribing to Strategy & Tactics and buying a lot of other S.P.I. games.
 
With my skeleton painting frustrating me today, I decided to take a crack at some French infantry today. It was an enjoyable change of pace. Got these done in a few hours, while sitting in work meetings. I think if I focus at it I could probably finish a couple regiments a month.
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The great coats are a little dirtier than I'd like. I used Vallejo's dark brown wash over the whole model and I'm not sure that was the right choice. Maybe a lighter wash on the coat. I'll experiment a bit, but I think overall I'm happy with the general look. A regiment of 24 of these in formation might look pretty sharp.
I like these. Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. These are done. You don't need a lighter wash on the coat. Just give them a sealant to protect them, and figure out what rules set you are going to use and then base them accordingly. My club would tend to say flock the bases, but there are different ways the members do that.
 
I like these. Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. These are done. You don't need a lighter wash on the coat. Just give them a sealant to protect them, and figure out what rules set you are going to use and then base them accordingly. My club would tend to say flock the bases, but there are different ways the members do that.
Thanks, I have no intention of messing with these guys any further. They are done, already varnished and sitting on the shelf waiting for reinforcements. I'm very happy with these actually. I especially like the blue of the trousers and the detail of the epaulettes. I only meant that I might try a slightly lighter wash on the coats of the next guys to give them a slightly less dirty look, but I'm not changing anything up so much that they won't fit into a regiment together.

As for rules and basing, I'm using Black Powder and will go with the recommended basing scheme - 40mm x 40mm bases with 2 wide, 2 deep blocks, and 6 bases per regiment on average.
My paint/flock scheme for my Oathmark army is to paint the bases brown and flock with a mix of grass and rock. It's quick and effective enough.
 
Black Powder gets some play in my neck of the woods too, so that's a good choice. One thing that we did for Napoleon's Battles, which operates with a brigade as the basic unit and the division or corps for higher units, was devise a system of colored dots to indicate unit formations; we applied these to the backs of the mounting bases (which had some thickness, whether they were made of very thick mapboard or actual wood.) Each of the colors represented a number. So, if we had the first brigade of a division, it would receive one dot. Second, 2 dots, Third, 3 dots and so on. (One could get 4 or 5 dots on the back of the base and one didn't usually need more.) If it was the First Division, these dots would all be red. Second Division, all the dots would be white, Third Division, all blue. That would appear on the left edge or center of the base. On the right edge, another, larger block of color, indicating the Corps formation, again, I Corps, red, II corps, white, III corps blue, and one could add colors to the list.

One might improvise something similar for other rules systems. It helps in sorting figures quickly after a battle, and in keeping them together on the table. Not everyone is going to know what uniform the Umplteenth Hussars are wearing and how it differs from the Eleventythird Dragoons, but the dots also helped folks who were new to the game keep the units organized.
 
Well, today is my birthday and a family member gifted me this:
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So now in addition to the couple hundred 28mm French troops for Black Powder I have in the queue, I need to learn to paint 15mm WWII tanks and troops. I need to stop acquiring new miniatures for a while.
 
many happy returns of the day! That is a very nice gift. The flames of war rule book in that box will undoubtedly have a very nice and detailed painting section on how to paint 15 mm. If you turn out the 15 mm like you turned out that French infantry they are going to look just swell.
 
Yeah, you will find painting WWII is easier than Napoleonics at any scale. Tanks are the easiest thing in the world. Most look fine with a base coat and dry-brushing for highlights. Happy Birthday.
 
I finished my first regiment of French infantry today. The 17th Regiment Infantry of the Line. It takes me about a week per square to get them in a table-ready state, so at that rate 2022 should be the year of Black Powder wargaming for me. I'm enjoying the process though and love researching the history of individual units like this.
The 17th were formed in 1791 and served in 36 engagements between Valmy and Waterloo. Received battle honors at Austerlitz, Auerstadt, and La Moskowa. At Waterloo, they were part of d'Erlon's I Corps that attacked the center of the British Line and suffered horrible casualties. Following the Bourbon Restoration, the 17th was renamed.
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Curiois, what size bases are those - 60 x 40?
 
I finished my first regiment of French infantry today. The 17th Regiment Infantry of the Line. It takes me about a week per square to get them in a table-ready state, so at that rate 2022 should be the year of Black Powder wargaming for me. I'm enjoying the process though and love researching the history of individual units like this.
The 17th were formed in 1791 and served in 36 engagements between Valmy and Waterloo. Received battle honors at Austerlitz, Auerstadt, and La Moskowa. At Waterloo, they were part of d'Erlon's I Corps that attacked the center of the British Line and suffered horrible casualties. Following the Bourbon Restoration, the 17th was renamed.
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Those look outstanding! Keep on keeping on doing that!

The only thing we would add at my wargame club is a dot on the back of each base to mark the unit with an identifier. We play Napoleon's Battles which uses the brigade as the basic unit, and divisions and corps. Each color denotes a number. So, one red dot is the first brigade of the first division (red being used for 1) The second brigade gets two red dots, and the third three. Then, one, two, or three white dots, and one two or three blue dots. At the corps level, there would be a bigger splash of color on the right back edge of the base.

Something like this lets new players sort out units quickly, and prevents bases from kind of wandering off with different units when they are lined up base to base.
 
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