Hammerhead 2019

Off down the M6 and across the A50 to Newark Showground, for the first show of the year (for me). Last year's show was cancelled because of a blizzard on the day, and I missed 2017 because of some clash of diaries, so this was the first time I have attended since the show has been split across two halls. This seemed to work well, with plenty of room for the games and traders but no gaping holes. As usual at this show every game was designated as a participation event (apart from those in the DBA tournament). I didn't try out any of these, so I can't comment on their quality, but there seemed to be a fair amount of activity around most of the tables.

I had some specific targets, mostly around the game Rangers of Shadow Deep, which I have recently picked up. This is by Joe McCullough, the creator of Frostgrave and Ghost Archipelago. I find those settings rather specific, whereas RoSD allows you to use much more generic fantasy characters - rangers obviously, and knights, conjurors, rogues and so on. It's main strength is the scenarios which are put out, each with interesting challenges and different mechanics.

My first purchase was a bunch of dungeon dressing - treasure piles, tables, rubble and so on. These came from a vendor called Miniature Vault, which means, according to the packaging, that they are bulk purchased from Reaper Bones and repackaged for sale at conventions.

After a turn around the first haul, and a bit of lunch (pie and chips) I walked over to the George Stephenson Hall, which is the hall where the show used to be held in total. I got some more dungeon stuff from Ainsty - more substantial items like walls, pillars and doors. From 4Ground I picked up a couple of Dark Ages Anglo-Danish houses/huts - they should fit into the generic fantasy background. I also got a couple of packs of clear plastic circular bases (25mm diameter) which I now use for all my 28mm figures.

The final purchase was the biggest, a board game. I had hoped to find Pavlov's House, a solo game of defending a building over many days during the Stalingrad battle. However the only vendor there, Magister Militum, didn't have it with them, and I was quite happy to pick up one of the COIN (Counterinsurgency) series. I dithered between A Distant Plain (Afghanistan modern) and Cuba Libre (Castro's revolution) - in the endI opted for the latter, and I am looking forward to seeing how it plays - like all the COIN series it is designed from the outset for full solitaire play (though you can have up to three other players).

Back to the North West, the trip only spoiled slightly by Blackpool's progressive collapse to a 4-0 defeat at Bristol Rovers. Quite a bit of painting to do now, but also some rules reading.

The booty

Gambassi's Warehouse

My biggest birthday present was a 4Ground building in their Chicago Way series - the Gambassi Warehouse. This is the biggest building in the range, and the most expensive - £90-00. It is a very complicated kit, with many layers of different kinds to make up the walls. In the most extreme case there were five layers - a central core layer, then red brick layers either side, and then on top of the bricks very thin layers representing crumbling plaster. You have the option to remove some of the plaster areas, to reveal the bricks underneath - you can remove more or less, depending on how dilapidated you want the building to be.

All the windows are glazed, with clear acetate sheets and mdf grids to which you stick the acetate and then trim it before gluing it into the window spaces in the walls. There are many doors and trapdoors which all open and close, with careful construction. The upper storey and the roof can both be removed for access to the interior, and it is also possible to construct it as a single storey building by leaving the upper layer out. The stairs can be removed in this case, and replaced with a trapdoor to a dummy basement level. So there is a lot of detail and a lot of thought has gone into the design of this building. Fully recommended.

Leven Old West buildings

At Fiasco in Leeds, back in late October, I bought one each of all the Leven Old West buildings - 18 in all. Actually a few more than 18 buildings, as a couple of the packs had multiple items. My overall intention is to build a town on a large base, maybe a couple of feet square, but I started out by painting them all up individually.

As usual the Leven buildings are a pleasure to paint, with nice details which show up well. On many of the buildings I was able to include signs (Saloon, Doctor etc) which I simply found on the web and downloaded to print. I think these really enhance the look of the whole thing, and help to establish scale and period. One of the "buildings" is the entrance to a mine, with rail tracks and general clutter - this is another nice model, but it may be a little tricky to include it in my townscape.

Fiasco 2017

Over to Leeds today for Fiasco at the Royal Armouries. This is my third or fourth year - it is not too far to drive, a bit over the hour, and it's also well timed as there's not a lot of other shows going on right now. I parked up and had a quick look around, then went looking for lunch. The docks area around the Armouries is very smart, all big new buildings or modern conversions of original warehouses - but it's a bit soulless. I walked over the Ayre and up into the older part of Leeds. I found a bar/club called Revolution - no doubt very trendy at night, but for a rack of ribs and apint on Sunday lunchtime, just perfect.

Back to the show along the Ayre - someday we might come over on the narrowboat and moor close by. But that is well in the future. For this year's show I had a few specific items on the list, and I got them all. The first target was some Old West buildings from Leven - I have an idea to create a western town as a sort of diorama. I'd like to try playing a gunfighter game at 6mm, but so far I am struggling to find suitable figures, and I had no more luck today. While I was at Leven's stand I als picked up an extra building, as I often do, just because I liked the look of it. In this case it was a big British pub, called The Push, apparently based on a real building in Beverley.

After that I wanted some more Chicago buildings in 28mm, having built a couple last week. I found some 4Ground kits at Colonel Bill's stall, and I got a garage and a shotgun shack. I was tempted by a large warehouse, but at £80 it was just a little too much.

My other targets were smaller. I got a pack of gangsters from Pulp Figures - Bugs Malarchy's Mob - who will obviously be fighting around the new buildings. And I went to Baccus and picked up the Fallschirmjager Nebelwerfers - they had sold out at Salute, and I didn't get to Joy of Six, so I wanted to get hold of it, though I am not currently painting WW2.

I got away after three, and home by about half four - it was a lovely day for the first day of winter, so the drive was no problem - a good day out all told.

A light shines

I painted a number of Leven buildings which I have bought from two or three shows. Mostly rural buildings suitable for the ACW theme I am working on, but also including a lighthouse which I bought for no better reason than I liked the look of it.

Leven buildings

I decided to paint up a number of Leven 6mm buildings I have had around for some time - I think most of them go back to Joy of Six in July. It was a mixed bag - three industrial buildings - a set of garages, a canal mill and an engineering works. Then there was a railway station building, a small garage with a petrol pump, and a group of garden sheds and a greenhouse. I also had a wizard's tower, despite the fact that I don't have any 6mm fantasy figures, just because it's such a lovely model.

These models are a joy to paint, especially the ones with brick texture, which really stands out well. I put a few of them on metal bases to do a bit of landscaping. Its a different sort of painting from doing models or troop, you have much more freedom in the choice of colours and a chance to be a bit inventive.

Hammerhead 2016

Down the M6 and across the A50 to Newark for Hammerhead 2016. A new show to me, but it has a bit of history and one of the bigger ones on the circuit, I think. The venue is a large exhibition hall on the Newark Showground, so vast amounts of parking all around. The building is suited to the event, not surprisingly as a purpose-built exhibition hall, so plenty of space and light, though you wouldn't say it has a lot of character. The food was supplied by the "Bistro" in the building, but "Caff" would have been a better name - chips with pasties, burgers and sausage rolls, and bacon baps. Fine by me, as it happens, but not a lot of choice if that's not to your taste.
As for the show itself, all the games were designated as participation-based, and as far as I could see they were mostly busy, though a few at the far ends seemed quiet. There was a good variety, from witch racing through WW1 to sci-fi with 3D printed models. There seemed to be quite a few aerial games - Wings of Glory, at least one jet combat game, and a nice looking one with Japanese planes attacking a US AA destroyer in 1943. The ship model in that one was quite large, but not as big as the one in another game using the third dimension. This featured an underwater frogman attack on a ship which only appeared in the form of the bottom of the hull, which formed the "roof" of the playing area. The divers moved up and down below this, presumably trying to attach limpet mines.
There was also a good selection of traders, all around the outside of the space. Personally I was slightly disappointed because there was no 6mm WW2 - Wargames Emporium and Magister Militum weren't there, and Baccus did not have any of their new WW2 infantry (I have a couple of these on order and due to arrive soon). I was also hoping to find one of the printed battle mats - Cigar Box or something like that, but there were none on show - just some plain coloured blankets. Still I managed to collect a fair amount of booty, on show in the picture below.

Centre rear is some stuff for the airbrush - a stand and some primers in various shades. To the right is some other paints - Basetex for the bases on my 6mm infantry, and a couple of metals for the bigger models. In front of those are two items from Ainsty for my Pulp games, and a Renedra Arab/Adobe house ditto. Then three terrain items in 6mm, fields and town bases, from The Baggagetrain. To their left are two packs of Pulp Figures, sailors for the ship I painted last month.
On the extreme left are the new rulesets which I always wind up buying at a show. I have finally cracked and bought General Quarters 3 (WW2 naval). For decades GQ1/2 has been pretty much the default ruleset for 20th century naval wargames, certainly for me. The new rules, which were a long time coming, are supposed to be much more detailed, which is not necessarily a good thing, in my view. Anyway, now I will get a chance to judge for myself.
The other rules are Lion Rampant from Osprey - Medieval skirmish/small battles. I've been thinking about these for some time, and I was persuaded by my other purchase, a box of Teutonic infantry from Deus Vult. - plastic and lots of mix and match heads and arms. I am looking forward to making and painting those, and they gave me an excuse to buy the rules, and vice versa. So there's 2-3 different genres there, plus the WW2 6mm, and I'm not sure which one will run away with me in the near future.

Tenement Roof

Another building for my Pulp urban setting. This is a terraced tenement, laser-cut mdf from Warbases. Unlike the previous flat-roofed version, this one has a pitched roof, and at this scale the roof is very prominent when viewed from the table-side. So I decided to do a bit more than just painting it or adding a simple paper image, and I also bought some of Warbases' Tiling Sheets. These give you horizontal strips of times which you need to glue down, from bottom to top, to give a nice irregular overlapping effect. The first two pictures show the unpainted tiles after fixing. After that I painted it with various grey shades, base and highlights, then a couple of washes - Sepia and the Antelope Brown (which is actually a deep green). At this point I discovered a small problem. The tiles have narrow cracks between them, which certainly looks effective, but I could not get the paint to flow effectively into the small spaces - surface tension. This means that the pale cream original colour can just be seen through many of the cracks. Next time I will spray the tiles overall dark grey before I glue them down. It is not much of a problem, but I can improve it next time.
Once the roof was done, I added the chimneys - they came with the kit, though I had to make the chimney pots out of dowel. I then added various moss, loose leaves and vegetation from the Lifecolor range, and a base of plastic card with printed paper stone flags.

Ancient Arch

At Fiasco I picked up a model by Renedra, an old stone arch, a plastic model and just £5 as I recall. It went together neatly and painted up well, good detail to take various shades of grey. But the reason I bought it and the fun part was adding all sorts of moss and lichen with the Lifecolor sets. All good stuff, and I added a couple of hanging creepers with thread soaked in glue.

Terrain

I thought I would say a bit about my take on terrain. The first thing to say is that I like well modelled, detailed terrain, and I have a large collection of model items, especially in 6mm - houses, trees, hedges etc. However over the years I have come to realise that there's a real tension between a good-looking landscaped board, and the practicalities of playing a wargame. The main problem is the clash of scales, figure scale vs ground scale. That these two are going to be different is pretty much inevitable, certainly in WW2 games, because of the distances over which battle were fought. At 1/300 a mile is nearly 18 feet, so the average table puts units no more than a few hundred yards apart. At larger scales it is worse - two 15mm tanks could engage each other from opposite ends of a tennis court, comfortably so for 20mm or 28mm models.

So, the ground scale is going to be much bigger than the model scale, except for very small scale skirmish games. That means that the beautifully painted house you put on the table is actually 100 yards long, and "represents a village". Half a dozen houses are a moderately sized town. Well that's fine, but now along comes a unit - some tanks or some infantry stands - and wants to occupy this town. In reality we have maybe a dozen vehicles or a hundred men who would filter down the alleys, hide in the gardens and entrench behind the walls. On our table we have some stands, and some buildings, and no way to put the two in the same place. In practice you can balance them on top of the roofs, put them behind the town and say "they are really inside" or put them off table and make a note. Whatever you do is unsatisfactory, makes it hard to handle the fighting as the models aren't where they should be, and doesn't even look authentic, which was the whole point in the first place.

In the end I decided that in order to get a good game with my nicely painted models I was going to have to let the third leg of the triangle go - the authentic-looking terrain. So now I use symbolic representations of areas of terrain. This may be felt - brown squares for towns, green ovals for woods and so on. I have also used paint - plain household emulsion, an overall green for the whole board, then woods, roads, towns etc in appropriate colours. That sounds laborious but it doesn't actually take much longer than setting a table up in the conventional way. Once I have the areas marked out I use models as well - one house in each built up area, a tree model in each wood. That allows me to indulge my modelling itch, and it's also a visual reminder that the flat green patch on the board is actually a wood blocking the LOS. Whatever, if a unit want to occupy the terrain then the symbolic house or tree is shifted out of the way, or removed altogether. That way the model units can be placed exactly where they want to be - on the edge of the terrain or in the middle, with no logistical issues at all.

I don't claim that this is in any way original, but it does annoy me when people pontificate about how plain terrain "let's down" the well-painted models or spoils the look of the battle. I always remember that, except for genuine skirmish games, everything on the table is just a token, representing something larger, and if having landscaped terrain makes it harder to play the game, then I'll take a different route. That's also the reason that I favour counters, beads or labels as play aids on the table - again, the "look's the thing" people will anathematise this. But if having, say, a pink bead to tell you a unit is suppressed makes it easier to see at a glance what's going on, then that makes me happy. Of course people have different motives for wargaming, and if a picture-postcard set makes you happy, then I am not going to say my way is better - it just works for me.

The pictures are the board I used for my recent Operation Epsom solo game - 6mm figures. The base is cork floor tiles, 1 foot square, painted green and then covered with mixed flock - a generic northern European look. On top are mostly felt terrain markers - woods, towns, roads, fields. The river I made from sheet polystyrene, cut into strips and painted blue with green flock "banks". It looks quite good but it is a lot of work and it's more vulnerable to accidental movement than the felt, which sticks slightly to the flocked tiles. (The red strip is a railway embankment, a particular item in that scenario). Overall I am quite happy with the look, somewhere between a real landscape and a coloured map. The battle involved a lot of crowded fighting around two of the towns, and this terrain meant that I could handle that without trees and houses getting in the way.