Showing posts with label central london wargames club. Show all posts
Showing posts with label central london wargames club. Show all posts

9 May 2020

10mm French Napoleonics - a Lockdown Painting Challenge

Can you believe that I've never owned any Napoleonic figures, played any Napoleonic games or even read any books about the Napoleonic Wars? I mean, I've not even watched a single episode of Sharpe! 

But, finally the inevitable has caught up with me, and with the help of a nudge from the arrival of a set of rules which more than one person at my club might potentially agree to play (in the form of Bataille Empire) I have finally taken the plunge and dipped my toe into Napoleon's wars.

Of course, being respectful of the principles of Napoleonic gaming in which every player must have their own individual approach to rules, scale, basing, terminology history, uniform and painting I had to find a means of doing something unique and (in some way at least partly) incompatible with my clubmates - so with everyone else already having 15-18mm troops based for Blucher, FoGN and various other sets I went my own way and built an army in 10mm with a large investment in Pendraken lead in the form of a French starter army picked up at Warfare 2019. 

I then topped this up with a few more orders from the nice chaps at Pendraken and added in a couple of extra purchases from Old Glory and The Wargaming Company (both made at Cold Wars 2020 just before Lockdown struck) to leave me with the daunting painting challenge of maybe 500+ foot and mounted figures to do under Lockdown conditions, hopefully to leave me with a viable Bataille Empire army that is still utterly different to the stuff owned by the people I'll be (eventually) playing.

I took a load of photos through the painting process, and learnt quite a lot about painting 10mm massed, uniformed figures as well - all of which is is now online on Madaxeman.com on a page with about 70 photos of the WiP and finished army, as well as my thoughts and learnings from the near-industrial process of getting them all done.










  

10 Sept 2017

Patras 2018 !!!!

Just heard some brilliant news - the Greek wargaming community have now taken up L'Art de la Guerre, and are planning on bringing back the near-legendary Patras tournament in 2018 !!!

It's now more than a dozen years since myself and a crew of Central Londoners made the trek across the Peloponnese to play in the Patras DBM tournament.... The epic report is still on this site and available here.

And here's the equally epic lunch!


The local clubs are looking at dates at the moment - as soon as it's firmed up we're on!

28 Mar 2017

Jock McTastic! It's the Medieval Scots at the CLWC Spring 1-Dayer!

The third Central London curry-tastic one-day ADLG event took place a few weeks ago on a rare major-sporting-event-free Sunday.

The theme was Late Medieval, and having been thoroughly schooled on the art of Medieval stuff at The Worlds last year, but also being rather short on practice time to get my head round an Indian-type army with game-changing elephants I was dithering as to what to take.


But then, inspired by a crushing defeat to an Italian teenager in Belgium, and realising that the half-painted army that I had bought up in Derby the previous year was actually within reach of completion, the idea of taking Medieval Scots floated up to the top of the pile.


Taking the army of Flodden to a competition where many of the opponents would be stuffed with English Longbows was perhaps not the most obvious approach, but it had the advantage of being simple to play in an event where I'd be doing the scoring as well.

See the results, and hear the critique from Wee Jimmy Hannibal McHannibal in these 3 L'Art de la Guerre Match Reports

3 Dec 2016

Aaah-oooh - it's the Dacians of London Again..!

Fresh from drinking a pina colada at Trader Vics, those barbarian scallywags from the land of Dracula, the Dacians, touch down in Central London for 3 games of Roman-period themed L'Art de la Guerre goodness.

Marvel at how this usually somewhat underpowered army performs against Mithradates, Rome and the Germanic Tribes in three punchy and to the point match reports, complete with the usual smattering of captions and other tosh.


Be warned though, it's not going to be subtle... !

13 Nov 2016

Results from the 2016 "Central London Invitational" ADLG Tournament

With 31 participating players what may well be the biggest single pool Ancients Singles event held anywhere in the UK this year took place today at Central London Wargames Club.

This was a 200 point 3-game 1-day Roman themed L'Art de la Guerre tournament, and congratulations are in order for Hubert Bretagne, Ian Mackay and Mike Bennett who came 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively.

A good time appeared to be had by all - here are the full results and some photos from the event.



6 Nov 2016

ADLG in Estella, Navarre - What's it to you !?!

Buono Estente!  An intrepid team of Central London ADLG players continue our pre-Brexit World Tour by taking ourselves off to Estella in Northern Spain, the gateway to La Rioja, and also home to the wines of Navarre (which are of course just as good if not even a little better than those of Rioja, especially if you are playing ADLG with the good gamers of Navarre, like we were).


In the resulting 5 ADLG match reports and gastronomic and touristic reviews, as well as the accompanying immediately-post-event episode of the Madaxeman.com Podcast (this episode entitled Dear Catastrophe Tapas Waitress) you can see how a classic DBx army, the Patrician Romans, fares in ADLG.


This was a deliberate attempt to create a wall of barbarians and overwhelm the enemy by sheer hairyness after this tactic, impossible to do well in most other rulesets, had caused me so much trouble when I had encountered it in several previous events.


The Patrician list that emerged was far from Reigate Standard in all senses of the word, but did they manage to "tapas" into a vein of success in these 5 L'Art de la Guerre battles in Spain, or was their "tinto" spilt and were then instead left like so many huevos rotos on the floor by the pride of Navarre?


Read on to find out more ....

22 Apr 2016

What's in the Bag? The Salute 2016 Podcast !

In this latest Podcast episode I'm joined by Ian, Gavin, Jeavon, John and Stan all from Central London Wargames Club in a "straight to live" recording made in the beer garden of the Fox pub at the ExCeL Centre, London.

The Fox may not be the most salubrious of locations, but the Audacity software I used has cleaned up almost all of the pub-background noise when recording the podcast so the sound quality is surprisingly good for what was the resting place for weary and thirsty gamers escaping from the mega-show that was Salute! 2016.

In this episode I ask the question "What's in the Bag?" of all of my guests, and with some added liquid lubrication the discussion then rambles onto subjects as diverse as the pricing of 15mm figures, packaging strategies (blister pack or baggie?), how much would you pay for a boardgame if you lived on a submarine, and just how many 1/3000th scale ships are "too many"?

To get the full experience it may be best to have at least 3-4 pints yourself before tuning in !

4 Dec 2015

ADLG in London - 3 Reports with Hannibal in command

The inaugural Central London ADLG 1-dayer saw Hannibal commanding the Carthaginians in 3 games of L'Art de la Guerre, against the forces of India, Rome and Macedonia.


See how Hannibal fared in three fully-photographed match reports, including the usual mix of rules hints and explanations, dubious captions and withering post-game analysis from Monty Hannibal, Pirate Hannibal and Viking Hannibal

8 Nov 2015

Results from Central London inaugural ADLG event now online

This was the first (of hopefully many) 1-day Central London L'Art de la Guerre competitions, covering the Classical period in 15mm, and the results are now online.



With a turnout of 26 players, split fairly evenly between Central London and the Rest of the World (i.e. mostly SELWG) a good time, and a good curry, was had by all. Many people had played less than half a dozen, or in some cases even less games of ADLG, but the rules flowed quickly, and there were very few umpire calls, all of which could be resolved by a quick (but polite) dose of RTFM !!

The range of armies in the competition was unsurprisingly weighted towards the Classical standards, of Alexandrian, Seleucid, Successor and a handful of Romans. All games were played at 200 points, with a 2 & 1/4 hour duration.



Round one featured 13 games and 6 decisive results, after which a fairly solid Swiss pairing (a few SELWG/SELWG and London/London pairings were manually adjusted out in mid table) saw 9 decisive results in the time allowed. Round 3, again pretty close to pure Swiss, saw 7 decisive results out of 13.



Everyone seemed to have a good time, with even people who had only played 1-2 games before (and at least a couple who hadn't entered a competition before either) of picking up the pace and the rules very quickly.



Scoring was done using a marginally simplified version of the French system, with the scoresheet being made available on the BHGS rankings page for download. It's a tad over-complicated, but it does mean that the basic "3 points for a win" mechanic inherent in the French system is maintained without having to add a "goal difference" secondary score, which would make running events through most competition-running software systems rather tricky.

Onwards and upwards for ADLG!

3 Aug 2014

Saga in London!

After far too long a gap, finally some new updated material for this website - Saga Vikings in 3 separate match reports against Jomsvikings, normal Vikings and Franks.


I've endeavoured to take photos of the Battle Boards and explain what choices I made and why throughout the reports - hopefully it makes sense as a concept, although as you will find out the actual choices themselves appear to leave a little to be desired....

29 Jan 2013

The wee Jocks come up a little short

Just finished the last game in the round-robin phase of our Club 650 points FoGR competition, and despite a heroic attempt my 1639 Scots Royalist army fell just short of qualifying for the knockout stages of the competition even after recording a rather tasty 67 points (in BHGS money) over 4 games, with a rather uneven mix of scores of the order of 19-25-1-22.

This chunky score placed me 3rd, behind two other players both tied on 70 (one of whom I lost to 1-24, and one of whom I beat 22-3 in the last game, when needing a 24-1 to overhaul him... shame about the 3 generals killed in combat or it could have been even closer!

The choice of army for each player was done on a sort of reverse seeding, so the more experienced players got "worse" armies - however what we seem to have proved so far is that in a tightly themed ECW period, a cool army is generally no match for experience !

The lists I used in this 5'x3' table 650 point competition are now on the FoGR Wiki

31 Jan 2012

FoG:AM after a 1-year break! Thoughts and observations..

I played a game of FoG:AM last night, for the first time in probably over a year (Warfare 2010 was my last competitive game of Ancients). Having been deeply submerged in the world of FoG Renaissance for the past 12 months it was a very interesting experience to get back on the Ancients horse again, and try and compare the two sets from the perspective of FoG:R.

Firstly, it wasn't a "standard" game - instead it was in our club competition which involves 2-hour 650 point games played out on a 4x3 playing surface. My pick for the competition was Han Chinese, selected as I own the army but I don't remember ever using them in FoG Ancients at all (well, certainly not as Chinese... I think some of them have pretended to be Koreans or similar!).


My opponent was a Classical Indian army, with rather a lot more units than me (13 to my 8) and who had (also) selected the "Regular" (or is it called "Drilled"?) option for the 9 units of foot bows and warriors in the army. Another interesting angle to the competition is that it is a league, with the same choice of army throughout but the opportunity to change the list each game - so you can pick an army to match up against your opponents choice each game. Knowing I was facing Indians I had therefore elected to take 6 units of armoured foot, 1 skirmishing foot and the compulsory 4 Cavalry - and an IC, giving my army a shield of invulnerability to shooting. I had also picked some portable obstacles, but then found out they had no effect against Elephants (doh!) so that was 27 points wasted straight away!

The 4x3 board (with 8"/12" deployment zones and only a 4" "zone of fear" near each edge) certainly reduced the amount of messing around before we got stuck in, although both armies had brought only one unit of skirmishers along anyway. It certainly added weight in my mind to the argument that 800 AP and 6'x4' is not the optimum mix of troop numbers and table size for 15mm FoG:AM games. 

As a comparison to FoG:R the biggest thing that struck me right from the off, and again and again throughout the game was  was just how incredibly maneuverable both sides units of infantry were. With all that drilled medium foot on table, the 1-base sidestep, forming columns, turning and moving sideways and expanding out either side. At times it seemed like we were playing a mega-sized DBA game in which we could just pick up and move the individual bases as we wished, as there seemed to be nothing that these highly trained circus performers could not do!

The upshot of this was that in the (rather limited) pre-combat manoeuvring phase of the game I was able to almost totally reorganise my army so the mix of units when the two lines clashed was almost entirely different to that when I deployed - again reminiscent of that bit in a DBx game where a good set of pips allows you to do a huge element-by-element matchup reshuffle just prior to combat. My opponent also did a fair amount of this too, and was only constrained from doing more by the physical logjam of 13 units on a 4' frontage and of course the futility of swapping one 8-strong Bw/Sw infantry unit for another !



Overlaps - counting both ranks - were also a bit of a nasty surprise, as I found myself assuming wrongly that my better quality troops would win out against wider formations of enemy bases. 

With my own shooting being almost useless (1 rank of crossbows at best...) my game plan relied on doing everything I could to survive the enemy shooting (placing my IC in the right place, working hard to ensure rear support and especially to narrow my units frontage as they charged home) and crossing my fingers, as the opposition rolled lots of dice and hoped for me to fail the Cohesion Tests. The IC played a huge part in surviving the enemy shooting (which is still odd really when you come to think of it) but ultimately this phase of the game was a lot more one-sided than FoG:R as it was all about my opponent rolling lots of dice and hoping I would fail a test - my role was kinda passive.  

Then, once I had committed my forces to combat it was all about the dice, winning by small margins and hoping to force the enemy to take lots of cohesion tests. This is what decided almost all the combats, as in a mutual destruction (yes!!) I can only remember one (or maybe two?) units breaking from base losses, which is again a massive difference to FoG:R where I suspect most of the broken units in the games I have played in break through base losses rather than three consecutive Cohesion test failures. 

What was the biggest difference to FoG:R? Out of all the things I've listed, the biggest one I keep coming back to is the extreme, nay, ridiculous ability of (drilled) units to hop,skip, jump and shimmy their way around the table. In FoG:R infantry simply don't do that - formations stay as fixed-width formations (by and large), infantry don't move as far anyway, and they certainly cannot turn and move. That to me makes FoG:R a far, far better game for recreating the look and feel of a historical battle. 

Having the ability to redeploy pretty much at will (Drilled MF + an IC means you can turn and move on a roll of 5 or more) was kinda fun, but it also meant the rules would have worked almost as well if the bases were representing squadrons of X-wing and Tie-fighters clashing around the gravity well of a rogue planet somewhere in deep space, rather than Han Chinese Close Combat infantry charging home against Indian Longbowmen on the edge of a forest on a battlefield somewhere presumably in the Himalayan foothills!

Playing AM at 650 AP on a 4x3 is a lot more fun than chasing LH around a 6x4 - but I think I'll still be sticking with FoG:R for any full-weekend competitions the foreseeable future ! 


3 Jun 2011

Central London Club News

Central London Wargames Club has a second night - we now meet on each and every Monday and now also Thursday at "Escape" which is just by Mornington Crescent Tube.

On the weekend of June 11th some of the club members will also be playing a big Fire & Fury game (Antietam) as part of an art project in an art gallery in Piccadilly. This is part of an installation by Swiss artist Christoph Buchel, and has been reviewed in both The Guardian and The London Evening Standard. Come along and meet us between 10am and 6pm. How wild is that!

(Or, just read Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam by Stephen W Sears)

21 Oct 2010

Central London News

It sounds very much as if the Perseverance pub has closed for refurbishment, and that the refurbed property will no longer accommodate wargamers. This means we are now officially back to only one night a week, which is Tuesday in The Cock.
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